Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work Can Be Made More Efficient, IBM Research Claims

• Scientists from IBM Research claim to have found a way to reshape and combine blockchain architectures including PoW (proof of work), arriving at what they call in a paper a "sweet spot" for energy efficiency, scalability and security, reports Coindesk.

• The IBM discovery arises from their application of blockchain technology to the IoT use case. IoT devices vary widely in their computational power and energy resources meaning that all, or some of the devices in an IoT network might not be capable of solving the computationally intensive PoW mining tasks performed by bitcoin network miners.

• The IBM approach divides an IoT network into nodes that are capable of PoW processing, and those that are not. IBM found that grouping IoT nodes into clusters of 250, with 7% of those sub-nodes doing PoW, achieved the optimal balance of scaling and security.

• Furthermore, IBM speculates that such an approach could be combined with an AI capable of figuring out the processing resource available in the IoT blockchain, and optimally balancing that against the security required in a dynamic manner.

IBM Blockchain Video (Commercial)

Comments

• Bitcoin consumed almost as much energy as Ireland.

• In order to succeed blockchain technology needs to overcome the wasteful energy consumption incurred by ‘proof of work’ mining, which in turn could improve the technology’s ability to scale and therefore compete more effectively with traditional mass market transaction platforms such as Visa.

• IBM’s work in IoT blockchains is one avenue of exploration, alongside others such as payment channels (eg Bitcoin’s Lightning network and Ethereum’s Raiden network), proof-of-stake (such as Ethereum’s project Caspar), sharding, side chains, and multichains.

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