Abstract
Centralized pools and renting of mining power are considered as sources of possible censorship threats and even 51% attacks for decentralized cryptocurrencies. Non-outsourceable Proof-of-Work (PoW) schemes have been proposed to tackle these issues. However, tenets in the folklore say that such schemes could potentially be bypassed by using escrow mechanisms. In this work, we propose a concrete example of such a mechanism which is using collateralized smart contracts. Our approach allows miners to bypass non-outsourceable PoW schemes if the underlying blockchain platform supports smart contracts in a sufficiently advanced language. In particular, the language should allow access to the PoW solution. At a high level, our approach requires the miner to lock some collateral covering the reward amount and protected by a smart contract acting as an escrow. The smart contract allows the pool to collect the collateral as soon as the miner collects any block rewards. We propose two variants of the approach depending on when the collateral is bound to the block solution. Using this, we show how to bypass previously proposed non-outsourceable Proof-of-Work schemes (with the notable exception for strong non-outsourceable schemes) and show how to build mining pools for such schemes.
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Notes
- 1.
A box is just a fancy name for a UTXO. We will use these two terms interchangeably.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Mohammad Hasan Samadani and the ergopool.io team for building a pool based on this paper and highlighting real-world issues in regards with high-level scheme descriptions.
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Chepurnoy, A., Saxena, A. (2020). Bypassing Non-Outsourceable Proof-of-Work Schemes Using Collateralized Smart Contracts. In: Bernhard, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12063. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_30
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