A Low-Storage Blockchain Framework Based on Incentive Pricing Strategies

Po-Han Ko, Yu-Ling Hsueh () and Chih-Wen Hsueh
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Po-Han Ko: Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi 621301, Taiwan
Yu-Ling Hsueh: Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi 621301, Taiwan
Chih-Wen Hsueh: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan

FinTech, 2022, vol. 1, issue 3, 1-26

Abstract: Nowadays, blockchain bloat is an endangering issue caused by inefficient transaction storage mechanisms. Based on the Distributed File System (DFS), the blockchain network can reduce the local storage to solve the blockchain bloat problem. However, storing all blocks on DFS is not durable or scalable. Hence, classifying blocks into hot and cold was adopted in previous works. The blockchain nodes can reduce the time consumption and storage consumption by storing hot blocks locally. However, the previous works are not able to periodically check block integrity and do not provide a reward mechanism to encourage DFS system nodes to store blocks. We extend previous works based on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and design an innovative scheme to incentivize IPFS nodes. The IPFS nodes are regulated with smart contracts and behave under the pricing strategy controls to increase profit. By adopting proof of retrievability, we guarantee the integrity of the blocks. Further, the redundant scheme extends our pricing strategy to improve the durability of our proposed framework. A load-balancing pricing strategy and a general pricing strategy are provided in the framework to reward the DFS nodes. Extensive experiments are presented to demonstrate that the latency and throughputs of our model are competitive, while still maintaining data integrity in the system. The additional increased throughput takes only 0.167% of that produced by the original Bitcoin and the upload latency takes only 6.67% of the mining time of the Bitcoin Mainnet. Furthermore, our load-balancing pricing strategy achieves the effectiveness to ensure the redundancy of blocks and reduces the overall storage consumption up to 97% using the load-balancing pricing strategy, compared to the non-load-balancing pricing strategy.

Keywords: blockchain; blockchain bloat; smart contract; load balancing; proof of retrievability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C6 F3 G O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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