OCEAN: A Built-In Replacement for Mining Pools

Raymond Chee; Kartik Chitturi; Edouard Dufour-Sans; Kyle Soska

Paper 2019/1081 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2019/1081 ↗

OCEAN: A Built-In Replacement for Mining Pools

Raymond Chee

Kartik Chitturi

Edouard Dufour-Sans

Kyle Soska

Abstract

We propose OCEAN, an alternative miner reward system for blockchains that seeks to discourage pooling by providing a pool's variance mitigation functionality as a blockchain built-in. Our proposal relies on Succinct, Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (SNARKs), an advanced modern cryptographic tool that enables anyone to prove complex statements with the proof not growing in size with the complexity of the statement. We expect that blockchains that implement our proposal would see less pooling centralization than what is currently observable in deployed cryptocurrencies.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Preprint.
History: 2019-09-24: last updated; 2019-09-24: published
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2019/1081
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/1081,
      author = {Raymond Chee and Kartik Chitturi and Edouard Dufour-Sans and Kyle Soska},
      title = {OCEAN: A Built-In Replacement for Mining Pools},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/1081},
      year = {2019},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1081}
}