Cryptocurrency: Photonic Optical Proof of Work

[grarpamp]

https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05193



    Most cryptocurrencies rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) "mining" for
resistance to Sybil and double-spending attacks, as well as a
mechanism for currency issuance. Hashcash PoW has successfully secured
the Bitcoin network since its inception, however, as the network has
expanded to take on additional value storage and transaction volume,
Bitcoin PoW's heavy reliance on electricity has created scalability
issues, environmental concerns, and systemic risks. Mining efforts
have concentrated in areas with low electricity costs, creating single
points of failure. Although PoW security properties rely on imposing a
trivially verifiable economic cost on miners, there is no fundamental
reason for it to consist primarily of electricity cost. The authors
propose a novel PoW algorithm, Optical Proof of Work (oPoW), to
eliminate energy as the primary cost of mining. Proposed algorithm
imposes economic difficulty on the miners, however, the cost is
concentrated in hardware (capital expense-CAPEX) rather than
electricity (operating expenses-OPEX). The oPoW scheme involves
minimal modifications to Hashcash-like PoW schemes, inheriting
safety/security properties from such schemes.
    Rapid growth and improvement in silicon photonics over the last
two decades has led to the commercialization of silicon photonic
co-processors (integrated circuits that use photons instead of
electrons to perform specialized computing tasks) for low-energy deep
learning. oPoW is optimized for this technology such that miners are
incentivized to use specialized, energy-efficient photonics for
computation. Beyond providing energy savings, oPoW has the potential
to improve network scalability, enable decentralized mining outside of
low electricity cost areas, and democratize issuance. Due to the CAPEX
dominance of mining costs, oPoW hashrate will be significantly less
sensitive to underlying coin price declines.