Experimentation for Decentralized Resource-based Multi-pool Mining in Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

The potential of having multiple distributed applications across multiple domains such as healthcare, finance, supply chain management and many more have made blockchain very popular among both academia and industries. Blockchain provides the much-needed mechanism for decentralization of systems, where the need of trusted central authority is eliminated. Proof of Work (PoW) is heavily adopted in both Bitcoin and Ethereum based blockchain, where many miners (or mining pools) compete to mine each block generated by solving a cryptographic puzzle that uses all of the previous information of the blockchain, before tying the block to the blockchain with the nonce. Recently there is a shift in having two or more mining pools for the PoW consensus in Ethereum-based blockchain. Majority of the studies conducted for multiple mining pool techniques in the literature are verified with simulation experiments. Therefore, in this paper, we implement a testbed for Ethereum blockchain with multiple nodes that simulate two mining pools using PoW consensus in a centralized and decentralized fashion. Two miner-nodes were deployed with different computational power (in term of CPU threads) and transactions executed. We evaluate the contribution of each miner node in the blockchain system and the assignment of transactions with respect to the computational resources available.