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Proof of humanity: A tax-aware society-centric consensus algorithm for Blockchains

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Abstract

Blockchain technology brings about an opportunity to maintain decentralization in several applications, such as cryptocurrency. With the agents of a decentralized system operating independently, it calls for a consensus protocol that helps all nodes to agree on the state of the ledger. Most of the existing blockchains rely on Proof of Work (PoW) as the underlying consensus algorithm, resulting in a significant amount of electricity power consumption. Furthermore, it demands the miner to buy specific computation devices. Besides, a protocol to gather the society-related taxes such as public education funding and charities is lacking in existing consensus algorithms. In response, this paper proposes a new consensus algorithm, namely Proof of Humanity (PoH) aiming at gathering society-related taxes. According to PoH, the probability that an agent becomes a leader depends on its donations to non-profit accounts. Therefore, PoH encourages miners to donate money and gain mining power, its incentives, and transaction fees. The associated bureaucracy model is introduced briefly to address the required ecosystem for real case implementation of PoH. A distributed random variable generation algorithm is presented in this paper which ensures that the randomly selected leader is neither predictable nor adjustable. It is demonstrated that the proposed blockchain is totally robust against forking and possesses a high level of propagation speed, which ensures the scalability. Simulations show that the proposed blockchain network does not fail even in adverse scenarios where the majority of nodes refuse to propagate valid blocks. Besides, simulations reveal a suitable average block creation duration.

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Abbreviations

a :

Index of candidate leader account

c :

Index of organization account

n :

Index of blocks

V(c):

Set of all votes to organization c

v :

Index of votes

B :

Blockchain

CDF a :

Cumulative distribution function that the account a is selected as a leader, i.e. the probability that the selected leader has the address equal or less than a in value

Donation a,c :

Donation of account a to organization account c

DS a :

Donations share of candidate leader account a

H n :

Header of block n

Hash(.):

Hash function

L n :

Leader of block n

PDF a :

Probability distribution function that the account a is selected as a leader

\( Pub\_{key}_{L_n} \) :

The public key of the leader of nth block

R n :

Random number used for selecting a leader for nth block

Trust c :

The variable which indicates the trust of people to organization account c

Vote v :

The vote v (1 if positive vote and −1 if negative vote)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sharif University of Technology, Azadi Ave., P.O.Box 11155-4363, Tehran, Iran

    Ali Arjomandi-Nezhad & Mahmud Fotuhi-Firuzabad

  2. Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, QLD, 4000, Australia

    Ali Dorri

  3. George Washington University, 800 22nd St. NW, Washington, DC, 20052, USA

    Payman Dehghanian

Authors
  1. Ali Arjomandi-Nezhad
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  2. Mahmud Fotuhi-Firuzabad
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  3. Ali Dorri
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  4. Payman Dehghanian
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Correspondence to Mahmud Fotuhi-Firuzabad.

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Arjomandi-Nezhad, A., Fotuhi-Firuzabad, M., Dorri, A. et al. Proof of humanity: A tax-aware society-centric consensus algorithm for Blockchains. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 14, 3634–3646 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-021-01204-4

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