FPoW: An ASIC-resistant Proof-of-Work for Blockchain Applications

Abstract

Blockchain is a public ledger which is distributed in nature and has become highly popular. Bitcoin is the most successful application of it. The reason behind Bitcoin's success lies in its Consensus mechanism which ensures the security from any kind of attack. Because of this, no dishonest miner can affect the chain to manipulate it according to their wish. Also, the double spending problem does not occur and there is no need to trust a third party in this network. The most common consensus protocol in bitcoin technology is Proof-of-Work (PoW) which entirely depends on the computation power of miners. Because of this dependency, Application-specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) is designed for bitcoin mining. Thereafter, it has become a threat to its decentralized nature and has been monopolizing the validation of new blocks. It is not possible to halt the production of ASIC-based devices even if it threatens the decentralized applications. So, different types of consensus protocols are proposed to nullify this threat whereas all of them have failed to fully nullify it. ASIC devices are costly, so only a few miners can afford it and monopolize over blockchain network. In our work, Filtered Proof-of-Work (FPoW) is proposed and its ASIC-resistivity has been evaluated to make it a future-proof ASIC-resistant consensus protocol.