Proof of Commitment: A Human-Centric Resource for Permissionless Consensus

TL;DR

This paper introduces Proof of Commitment, a novel permissionless consensus mechanism based on real-time human engagement, providing a linear Sybil resistance model grounded in sustained human effort rather than computational or capital resources.

Contribution

It proposes a new consensus primitive using non-parallelizable human effort, establishing a cost-theoretic separation from traditional resource-based protocols and demonstrating its safety and fairness properties.

Findings

PoCmt enforces linear Sybil cost through human effort.

Simulations validate commitment and fairness properties.

PoCmt offers a new security paradigm grounded in human engagement.

Abstract

Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources like computation or capital. Once acquired, these resources can be subdivided across many identities at negligible marginal cost, making linear Sybil cost fundamentally unattainable. We introduce Proof of Commitment (PoCmt), a consensus primitive grounded in a non-parallelizable resource: real-time human engagement. Validators maintain a commitment state capturing cumulative human effort, protocol participation, and online availability. Engagement is enforced through a Human Challenge Oracle that issues identity-bound, time-sensitive challenges, limiting the number of challenges solvable within each human window. Under this model, sustaining multiple active identities requires proportional human-time effort. We establish a cost-theoretic separation showing that protocols based on parallelizable resources admit zero marginal Sybil cost, whereas PoCmt enforces a strictly linear cost profile. Using a weighted-backbone analysis, we show that PoCmt achieves safety, liveness, and commitment-proportional fairness under partial synchrony. Simulations complement the analysis by isolating human-time capacity as the sole adversarial bottleneck and validating the predicted commitment drift and fairness properties. These results position PoCmt as a new point in the consensus design space, grounding permissionless security in sustained human effort rather than computation or capital.