Title
Proofs Of Space
Abstract
Proofs of work (PoW) have been suggested by Dwork and Naor (Crypto'92) as protection to a shared resource. The basic idea is to ask the service requestor to dedicate some non-trivial amount of computational work to every request. The original applications included prevention of spam and protection against denial of service attacks. More recently, PoWs have been used to prevent double spending in the Bitcoin digital currency system.In this work, we put forward an alternative concept for PoWs - so-called proofs of space (PoS), where a service requestor must dedicate a significant amount of disk space as opposed to computation. We construct secure PoS schemes in the random oracle model (with one additional mild assumption required for the proof to go through), using graphs with high "pebbling complexity" and Merkle hash-trees. We discuss some applications, including follow-up work where a decentralized digital currency scheme called Spacecoin is constructed that uses PoS (instead of wasteful PoW like in Bitcoin) to prevent double spending.The main technical contribution of this work is the construction of (directed, loop-free) graphs on N vertices with in-degree O(log log N) such that even if one places Theta(N) pebbles on the nodes of the graph, there's a constant fraction of nodes that needs Theta(N) steps to be pebbled (where in every step one can put a pebble on a node if all its parents have a pebble).
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/978-3-662-48000-7_29
ADVANCES IN CRYPTOLOGY, PT II
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
9216
0302-9743
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
9
0.57
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stefan Dziembowski189552.00
Sebastian Faust226015.96
Vladimir Kolmogorov310067611.11
Krzysztof Pietrzak4151372.60