An Optimized Parallel Hybrid Architecture for Cryptocurrency Mining

Abstract

One of the requirements for mining cryptocurrency (Crypto) is that the secured ledger of the blockchain must be updated. However, updating the secured ledger requires that the miner develop and solve complex mathematical equations in higher orders hexadecimal 64-digit solution called a hash. In addition to this challenge, the mining processes of cryptocurrency are both resource and cost-intensive. The resources required include, but not limited to mining software, hardware, power (energy usage), CPU or compute cycles, and NP-hard problem. Apart from these numerous challenges that are associated with mining cryptocurrency, the amount of speed that is required to mine a single block is core. Cryptocurrency mining speed requirement is significantly important because only miners that can have the fastest mining device are most likely to get the reward (profit) from competing for a block. In this paper, we designed and implemented a model to speed up mining process which is capable of giving miners an advantage to arrive at a block earlier. The novelty of our architecture is that our design is based on high performance computing paradigm where we achieve processor speed up by parallelizing the number of processors p. We experimented by varying p = 4, 8, 16. Our experimental results where we used the MC6800 simulated on Easy68k emulator demonstrate feasibility of our proposed model and prove that speed was an essential key to cryptocurrency mining. Keywords: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Architecture, Mining, Speedup, Bitcoin. CISDI Journal Reference Format Allenotor, D. & Oyemade, D. A. (2021): An Optimized Parallel Hybrid Architecture for Cryptocurrency Mining. Computing, Information Systems, Development Informatics & Allied Research Journal. Vol 12 No 1, Pp 95-104 DOI - https://doi.org/ 10.22624/AIMS/CISDI/V12N1P10. Available online at www.isteams.net/cisdijournal