Bernard Mans

Geoffrey Deperle, Christine Fricker, Philippe Jacquet et al.

We study the asymptotic behaviour of the distance to the first available parking slot in a recursive Manhattan street network endowed with a hyperfractal intensity structure, where slot-release events occur according to Poisson processes along the streets. We establish, by analysing the associated self-similar harmonic sums via Mellin-transform asymptotics, a power-law decay of the expected distance as the total intensity grows, with exponent equal to the inverse of the hyperfractal dimension. In particular, the scaling exponent depends only on the large-scale geometry of the network. We further prove that this exponent is robust under random multiplicative modulations of the street intensities: mild stochastic heterogeneity affects only the multiplicative constant. Similar scaling behaviour holds for the variance, the number of turns before parking, and for a jump-over variant of the search strategy.

Philippe Jacquet, Bernard Mans

While cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications continue to gain popularity, their energy cost is evidently becoming unsustainable. In most instances, the main cost comes from the required amount of energy for the Proof-of-Work, and this cost is inherent to the design. In addition, useless costs from discarded work (e.g., the so-called Forks) and lack of scalability (in number of users and in rapid transactions) limit their practical effectiveness. In this paper, we present an innovative scheme which eliminates the nonce and thus the burden of the Proof-of-Work which is the main cause of the energy waste in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We prove that our scheme guarantees a tunable and bounded average number of simultaneous mining whatever the size of the population in competition, thus by making the use of nonce-based techniques unnecessary, achieves scalability without the cost of consuming a large volume of energy. The technique used in the proof of our scheme is based on the analogy of the analysis of a green leader election. The additional difference with Proof-of-Work schemes (beyond the suppression of the nonce field that is triggering most of the waste), is the introduction of (what we denote as) "empty blocks" which aim are to call regular blocks following a staircase set of values. Our scheme reduces the risk of Forks and provides tunable scalability for the number of users and the speed of block generation. We also prove using game theoretical analysis that our scheme is resilient to unfair competitive investments (e.g., "51 percent" attack) and block nursing.