Cryptocurrencies without Proof of Work
This addresses the need for more sustainable and efficient cryptocurrencies for users and developers, but appears incremental as it builds on existing Proof of Stake concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of designing decentralized cryptocurrency protocols that avoid energy-intensive Proof of Work by analyzing existing Proof of Stake methods and proposing novel pure Proof of Stake protocols to mitigate their issues, though no concrete numerical results are provided.
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the system. We offer analysis of existing protocols that have a substantial amount of popularity. We then present our novel pure Proof of Stake protocols, and argue that they help in mitigating problems that the existing protocols exhibit.