Robust Proof of Stake: A New Consensus Protocol for Sustainable Blockchain Systems

Aiya Li, Xianhua Wei and Zhou He
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Aiya Li: School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Xianhua Wei: School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Zhou He: School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-15

Abstract: In the digital economy era, the development of a distributed robust economy system has become increasingly important. The blockchain technology can be used to build such a system, but current mainstream consensus protocols are vulnerable to attack, making blockchain systems unsustainable. In this paper, we propose a new Robust Proof of Stake (RPoS) consensus protocol, which uses the amount of coins to select miners and limits the maximum value of the coin age to effectively avoid coin age accumulation attack and Nothing-at-Stake (N@S) attack. Under a comparison framework, we show that the RPoS equals or outperforms Proof of Work (PoW) protocol and Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol in three dimensions: energy consumption, robustness, and transaction processing speed. To compare the three consensus protocols in terms of trade efficiency, we built an agent-based model and find that RPoS protocol has greater or similar trade request-satisfied ratio than PoW and PoS. Hence, we suggest that RPoS is very suitable for building a robust digital economy distributed system.

Keywords: distributed digital economy system; blockchain; robust; consensus protocol; agent-based model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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