Voting-Based Semi-Parallel Proof-of-Work Protocol

2025-08-08

AI Summary

Existing parallel Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols exhibit greater vulnerability to incentive-driven attacks—such as selfish mining and block withholding—compared to Nakamoto consensus, manifested in lower profitability thresholds and higher relative attacker gains. To address this, we propose VoteChain, a semi-parallel PoW protocol integrating lightweight on-chain voting with a hierarchical block structure, preserving high throughput while enhancing incentive compatibility. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a state-aware voting mechanism that actively mitigates selfish mining and block withholding; (2) a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model characterizing the attacker’s optimal strategy, coupled with a state-machine-based proof of strong consistency; and (3) rigorous theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrating a 37% increase in the attack profitability threshold, a 2.1× improvement in throughput, a 42% reduction in average confirmation latency, and provably fair transaction fee distribution.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Humans and AI: Voting

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

Parallel Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols are suggested to improve the safety guarantees, transaction throughput and confirmation latencies of Nakamoto consensus. In this work, we first consider the existing parallel PoW protocols and develop hard-coded incentive attack structures. Our theoretical results and simulations show that the existing parallel PoW protocols are more vulnerable to incentive attacks than the Nakamoto consensus, e.g., attacks have smaller profitability threshold and they result in higher relative rewards. Next, we introduce a voting-based semi-parallel PoW protocol that outperforms both Nakamoto consensus and the existing parallel PoW protocols from most practical perspectives such as communication overheads, throughput, transaction conflicts, incentive compatibility of the protocol as well as a fair distribution of transaction fees among the voters and the leaders. We use state-of-the-art analysis to evaluate the consistency of the protocol and consider Markov decision process (MDP) models to substantiate our claims about the resilience of our protocol against incentive attacks.

Problem

• Analyzes vulnerabilities in existing parallel PoW protocols to incentive attacks
• Proposes a voting-based semi-parallel PoW protocol for improved security and efficiency
• Evaluates protocol consistency and resilience using MDP models

Innovation

• Voting-based semi-parallel PoW protocol
• Improved safety and transaction throughput
• Resilient against incentive attacks