Towards Fairness and Decentralisation in Modern Cryptocurrencies

Abstract

he ideas contained within the thesis build towards the goal of improving both fairness and decentralisation in modern cryptocurrcncics. The thesis has four main contributions. The first contribution is towards client puzzles, and how blockchains can be used to improve their design for the sake of user fairness. The second is a way of constructing proof-of-work puzzles that have intrinsic value, as a way of capturing the computational expenditure for some useful purpose, and thus mitigating the energy wastage problems. The third, more minor, contribution is a way of using puzzles of this nature in applications of blockchain technology. The fourth and final contribution describes a way of designing a consensus mechanism from a directed acyclic graph structure, to regain the decentralised aspect that is missing in blockchain proposals. It is demonstrated that by constructing a system in this way, one can gain both scalability and decentralisation at the same time.