A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed the rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which has attracted tremendous interests from both the research communities and industries. The blockchain network was originated from the Internet financial sector as a decentralized, immutable ledger system for transactional data ordering. Nowadays, it is envisioned as a powerful backbone/framework for decentralized data processing and datadriven self-organization in flat, open-access networks. In particular, the plausible characteristics of decentralization, immutability and self-organization are primarily owing to the unique decentralized consensus mechanisms introduced by blockchain networks. This survey is motivated by the lack of a comprehensive literature review on the development of decentralized consensus mechanisms in blockchain networks. In this survey, we provide a systematic vision of the organization of blockchain networks. By emphasizing the unique characteristics of incentivized consensus in blockchain networks, our in-depth review of the state-ofthe-art consensus protocols is focused on both the perspective of distributed consensus system design and the perspective of incentive mechanism design. From a game-theoretic point of view, we also provide a thorough review on the strategy adoption for self-organization by the individual nodes in the blockchain backbone networks. Consequently, we provide a comprehensive survey on the emerging applications of the blockchain networks in a wide range of areas. We highlight our special interest in how the consensus mechanisms impact these applications. Finally, we discuss several open issues in the protocol design for blockchain consensus and the related potential research directions.

SoK of Used Cryptography in Blockchain

“…Many literature studies on consensus mechanisms, for instance, the survey by Wang et al [16] and "SoK: Consensus in the age of blockchains" [32], have been carried out in the past few years. Since consensus mechanisms have already been thoroughly studied in the literature, in this paper, we present the basic idea about how consensus mechanisms work and their classification.…”

Scaling Blockchains to Support Electronic Health Records for Hospital Systems

“…PoW and Proof of Stake (PoS) are two well known consensus mechanisms used by Bitcoin and Ethereum respectively [20], [21]. PoW has been described as a "cryptographic block-discovery racing game" [20]. In the case of Bitcoin, miners compete for bitcoin currency by solving hard hash puzzles that allow them to publish a block to the blockchain.…”

Blockchain-based Personal Data Management: From Fiction to Solution

“…A consensus protocol, as a core of BC technology, ensures all peers in a trustless environment agree on which transactions are legitimate to be added to a BC; thus, synchronises the network to maintain a consistent and unique BC among peers [9], [10]. Proof of Work (PoW) is the most popular consensus protocol currently used in Bitcoin and Ethereum in which dedicated nodes (i.e., miners) race to produce hashcash as an entitlement to add a new block to the chain for some incentives [11].…”

“…The computation-intensive for solving the hashcash puzzle appears as a critical bottleneck of PoW; therefore, alternatives have been proposed to mitigate this deficiency including Proof of Stake (PoS) [12], Proof of Authority, and Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) variants [13]. Still, these consensus protocols impose severe drawbacks resulting in limited usage compared to the PoW [10].…”