A game-theoretic approach to storage offloading in PoC-based mobile blockchain mining

Abstract

Proof of Capacity (PoC) is an eco-friendly alternative to Proof of Work for consensus in blockchains since it determines mining rights based on miners' storage rather than computation. In PoC, for every block, a miner executes hashing on part of his dedicated storage. The miner that comes up with the smallest hash value among all miners will win the block. PoC has yet to be applied to mobile applications, due to the storage limitation of mobile devices. Storage offloading can be a viable solution that allows miners to offload mining all files to a cloud storage. In each mining round, a miner can decide whether to mine on his local device or by a cloud virtual machine (VM). Self-mining requires no extra cost but it incurs download delay, which will reduce the chance of winning. Cloud-mining experiences no delay but it brings cost on VMs. This delay-cost tradeoff challenges each miner to determine a ratio between self-mining and cloud-mining to maximize his utility. We model interactions among miners as a non-cooperative game and formulate a Nash equilibrium problem to investigate the effects of offloading on miners' utilities. We analyze the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium and propose a distributed algorithm to achieve the equilibrium in a uniform-delay setting. Further, we extend our results to non-uniform delays since miners may choose different network settings, e.g. 5G, 4G, or 3G. Both numerical evaluation and testbed experiments on Burstcoin are conducted to show the feasibility of storage offloading and to validate the proposed models and theoretical results.