TY - GEN
T1 - Proof-of-Work Difficulty Readjustment with Genetic Algorithm
AU - Chin, Zi Hau
AU - Yap, Timothy Tzen Vun
AU - Tan, Ian K. T.
N1 - Funding Information:
Financial support from the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia, under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme with grant number FRGS/1/2018/ICT02 /MMU/03/6, as well as the Multimedia University Mini Fund with Project ID MMUI/180239, are gratefully acknowledged.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed and public digital ledger technology. It can be visualized as a gradually increasing list of “blocks” which contains data that are linked together using cryptographic hash. Each transaction is verified by several participating nodes to compute a complex mathematical problem. The complexity of this computation, also known as Proof-of-Work (PoW), is governed by the difficulty set on a periodic basis. If the hash rate of the blockchain’s PoW grows or declines exponentially, the blockchain will be unable to maintain the block creation interval. The utilization of genetic algorithm (GA) in addition with the existing difficulty adjustment algorithm is proposed as a response to this by optimizing the blockchain parameters. A simulation of 3 scenarios as well as the default, were performed and the results were recorded. Based on the results, we are able to observe that the blockchain is able to reach the expected block time 74.4% faster than the blockchain without GA. Moreover, the standard deviations of the average block time and difficulty decreased by 99.4% and 99.5% respectively when block and difficulty intervals were considered for optimization, when compared to the default blockchain without GA.
AB - Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed and public digital ledger technology. It can be visualized as a gradually increasing list of “blocks” which contains data that are linked together using cryptographic hash. Each transaction is verified by several participating nodes to compute a complex mathematical problem. The complexity of this computation, also known as Proof-of-Work (PoW), is governed by the difficulty set on a periodic basis. If the hash rate of the blockchain’s PoW grows or declines exponentially, the blockchain will be unable to maintain the block creation interval. The utilization of genetic algorithm (GA) in addition with the existing difficulty adjustment algorithm is proposed as a response to this by optimizing the blockchain parameters. A simulation of 3 scenarios as well as the default, were performed and the results were recorded. Based on the results, we are able to observe that the blockchain is able to reach the expected block time 74.4% faster than the blockchain without GA. Moreover, the standard deviations of the average block time and difficulty decreased by 99.4% and 99.5% respectively when block and difficulty intervals were considered for optimization, when compared to the default blockchain without GA.
KW - Bitcoin
KW - Blockchain
KW - Difficulty
KW - Genetic algorithm
KW - Proof-of-Work
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101515669&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-981-33-6835-4_2
DO - 10.1007/978-981-33-6835-4_2
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85101515669
SN - 9789813368347
T3 - Communications in Computer and Information Science
SP - 11
EP - 26
BT - Advances in Cyber Security
A2 - Anbar, Mohammed
A2 - Abdullah, Nibras
A2 - Manickam, Selvakumar
T2 - 2nd International Conference on Advances in Cyber Security 2020
Y2 - 8 December 2020 through 9 December 2020
ER -