Blockchain Adapted to IoT via Green Mining and Fractal Proof of Work
Philippe Jacquet · 2023
Blockchain applications continue to grow in popularity, but their energy costs are clearly becoming unsustainable. In most cases, the primary cost comes from the amount of energy required for proof-of-work (PoW). Here we study the application of blockchains to the IoT, where most devices are underpowered and would not support the energy cost of proof of work. PoW was originally intended for two main uses: block moderation and protecting the blockchain from tampering. For IoT we propose to replace the expensive moderation of PoW with the proposed energy-efficient green mining [6]. The blockchain will be protected by a fractal difficulty PoW. One of the results of this paper is the proof that the average mining time in fractal PoW actually depends only on the average difficulty. This crucial property will allow low-difficulty PoWs to be reserved for devices with low computational capacity, while higher difficulties will be reserved for devices with the highest computational power. The consequence is to give equal opportunity to objects with low computational power compared to objects with high computational power.