PoW-BC: A PoW consensus protocol based on block compression

Abstract

Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the first and still most common consensus protocol in blockchain. But it is costly and energy intensive, aiming at addressing these problems, we propose a consensus algorithm named Proof-of-Work-and-Block-Compression (PoW-BC). PoW-BC is an improvement of PoW to compress blocks and adjust consensus parameters. The algorithm is designed to encourage the reduction of block size, which improves transmission efficiency and reduces disk space for storing blocks. The transaction optimization model and block compression model are proposed to compress block data with a smaller compression ratio and less compression/ decompression duration. Block compression ratio is used to adjust mining difficulty and transaction count of PoW-BC consensus protocol according to the consensus parameters adjustment model. Through experiment and analysis, it shows that PoW-BC improves transaction throughput, and reduces block interval and energy consumption.