Crowdsourcing Work as Mining: A Decentralized Computation and Storage Paradigm

TL;DR

CrowdMine introduces a decentralized blockchain system that leverages crowdsourcing computation for energy-efficient consensus, enabling useful work and secure storage in a trustless environment.

Contribution

It presents the first system enabling decentralized Proof of Useful Work with user-proposed tasks in a permissionless blockchain.

Findings

System defends against common blockchain attacks.

Demonstrated robustness with 40 distributed nodes.

Achieves energy-efficient decentralized consensus.

Abstract

Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism is popular among current blockchain systems, which leads to an increasing concern about the tremendous waste of energy due to massive meaningless computation. To address this issue, we propose a novel and energy-efficient blockchain system, CrowdMine, which exploits useful crowdsourcing computation to achieve decentralized consensus. CrowdMine solves user-proposed computing tasks and utilizes the computation committed to the task solving process to secure decentralized on-chain storage. With our designed ``Proof of Crowdsourcing Work'' (PoCW) protocol, our system provides an efficient paradigm for computation and storage in a trustless and decentralized environment. We further show that the system can defend against potential attacks on blockchain, including the short-term 51\% attack, the problem-constructing attack, and the solution-stealing attack. We also implement the system with 40 distributed nodes to demonstrate its performance and robustness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that enables decentralized Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) with general user-proposed tasks posted in a permissionless and trustless network.