Domain: Finance
Problem identification:
To reduce the energy depletion due to exhaustive hash queries.
Why Blockchain:
To avoid the necessity of trusting a centralized banking system.
Functional Description
The miner’s stake is measured as the product between the held tokens and the holding time for them (“coin age”), allowing a miner to consume its “coin ages” to reduce the difficulty of the puzzle to solve.
Consensus mechanism used
- Proof of Stake (PoS)
Current status
- Market cap above $5 million.
Focus point commentary indicating the value of the case study in relation with learning modules
Learning Modules Focus Points
Consensus Presents a use case of the PoS consensus mechanism
Limitations:
- Vulnerability to “nothing-at-stake” attacks.
- Vulnerability to “grinding” attacks
Alternative Approaches:
- Ouroboros
References
- S. King and S. Nadal, “Ppcoin: Peer-to-peer crypto-currency with proof-of-stake. Peercoin whitepaper” Aug. 2012.
- Larimer, D. (2013). Transactions as proof-of-stake. Nov-2013.
- Anderson, L., Holz, R., Ponomarev, A., Rimba, P., & Weber, I. (2016). New kids on the block: an analysis of modern blockchains. arXiv:1606.06530.https://www.peercoin.net/