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Strongly nonoutsourceable scratch-off puzzles in blockchain

  • Foundation, algebraic, and analytical methods in soft computing
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Abstract

Blockchain and its most selling point decentralization have attracted lots of attentions. However, the problem of centralized mining pools (also called outsourcing problem) is a serious threat to the fundamental security of Bitcoin and other blockchains that also use a scratch-off puzzle (Miller et al. in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security, 2015). Although there are some solutions proposing “nonoutsourceable puzzles” to stop the pool operators in the centralized mining pools from outsourcing their mining work to others, we find that none of them can be adopted in real world to support strong nonoutsourceability. In other words, through some special means, e.g., legal prosecution or a tainted public reputation, the pool operator still can outsource his mining work. In this paper, we study the formal definition of strong nonoutsourceability and present constructions that support strong nonoutsourceability. The experimental results also show that our concrete construction is practical.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/647374/worldwide-blockchain-wallet-users.

  2. https://www.blockchain.com/pools accessed on November 1, 2021.

  3. Bitcoin Network Shaken by Blockchain Fork. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-network-shaken-by-blockchain-fork-1363144448 accessed on October 20, 2021.

  4. Decentralized Bitcoin Mining Pool, P2Pool. http://p2pool.org/.

  5. Litecoin Project. https://litecoin.org/.

  6. Bitcoin Developer Reference. https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference#block-headers.

  7. Block Size Limit Controversy. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy.

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Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62106114).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Peng Cheng Laboratory, Xingke 1st Street, Shenzhen, China

    Gongxian Zeng, Zhengan Huang, Yu Wang, Xin Mu & Cheng Zhang

  2. Zhongguancun Laboratory, Beijing, China

    Cheng Zhang

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  1. Gongxian Zeng
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  2. Zhengan Huang
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  3. Yu Wang
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  4. Xin Mu
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  5. Cheng Zhang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by GZ, ZH, YW. The first draft of the manuscript was written by GZ, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhengan Huang.

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Zeng, G., Huang, Z., Wang, Y. et al. Strongly nonoutsourceable scratch-off puzzles in blockchain. Soft Comput 27, 11941–11960 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-023-08753-1

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