See Also
Opinion: Decentralized blockchains can only survive having a valuable token, like Bitcoin, attached to them [Feb 2018]
We’ve heard this time and again, especially from folks in the financial sector: “blockchain is here to stay, Bitcoin not so much”. Is this really so? We disagree, and in this article we discuss the origins of Bitcoin and how the problem it solved only makes sense when there’s a reward for participants to join […]
Proof of Space (PoSpace) Summary [Cryptocurrency consensus mechanisms]
Proof of Space uses hard disk space as the value used to guarantee a participant’s stake in mining. By allocating disk space, the network participant provides value to the network, which uses this space to solve computational problems. Given low network bandwidth for a lot of regions, making it difficult to transfer large amounts of […]
Proof of Burn (PoB) Summary [Cryptocurrency consensus mechanisms]
In the Proof of Burn (PoB) consensus mechanism, miners earn the right to mint the next block by burning some value in the blockchain. All proof systems are based on the principle that minting a block must incurr in some cost, otherwise fraudsters could inject invalid transactions into the blockchain. Bitcoin achieves this by making […]
Proof of Elapsed Time (POET) Summary [Cryptocurrency consensus mechanisms]
In this poetically named consensus mechanism, network participants prove that they have slept for a random amount of time before being able to mint a block. POET was released by Intel in 2016 and was originally aimed at trusted computing using Intel CPU’s. A special instruction set called Software Guard Extensions (SGX) allows programs to […]