Proof of humanity: A tax-aware society-centric consensus algorithm for Blockchains

• Published in: Peer-to-peer networking and applications Vol. 14; no. 6; pp. 3634 - 3646
• Main Authors: Arjomandi-Nezhad, Ali, Fotuhi-Firuzabad, Mahmud, Dorri, Ali, Dehghanian, Payman
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-11-2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Blockchain; Charities; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Cryptography; Digital currencies; Engineering; Incentives; Information Systems and Communication Service; Miners; Networks; Nodes; Power consumption; Power management; Random variables; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Taxes; Power consumption reduction; Society-related tax; Proof of Humanity; Consensus; Blockchain
• ISSN: 1936-6442; 1936-6450
• DOI: 10.1007/s12083-021-01204-4

Blockchain technology brings about an opportunity to maintain decentralization in several applications, such as cryptocurrency. With the agents of a decentralized system operating independently, it calls for a consensus protocol that helps all nodes to agree on the state of the ledger. Most of the existing blockchains rely on Proof of Work (PoW) as the underlying consensus algorithm, resulting in a significant amount of electricity power consumption. Furthermore, it demands the miner to buy specific computation devices. Besides, a protocol to gather the society-related taxes such as public education funding and charities is lacking in existing consensus algorithms. In response, this paper proposes a new consensus algorithm, namely Proof of Humanity (PoH) aiming at gathering society-related taxes. According to PoH, the probability that an agent becomes a leader depends on its donations to non-profit accounts. Therefore, PoH encourages miners to donate money and gain mining power, its incentives, and transaction fees. The associated bureaucracy model is introduced briefly to address the required ecosystem for real case implementation of PoH. A distributed random variable generation algorithm is presented in this paper which ensures that the randomly selected leader is neither predictable nor adjustable. It is demonstrated that the proposed blockchain is totally robust against forking and possesses a high level of propagation speed, which ensures the scalability. Simulations show that the proposed blockchain network does not fail even in adverse scenarios where the majority of nodes refuse to propagate valid blocks. Besides, simulations reveal a suitable average block creation duration.