🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the unfair revenue distribution and erosion of trust in mining pools caused by Block Withholding Attacks (BWAs) by proposing an auditable Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism. The approach enables miners to retrospectively verify each other’s historical mining efforts through accountable nonce-space rescan, detecting BWAs without reliance on trusted hardware or third parties. As the first scheme to introduce an orthogonal auditability layer into PoW, it achieves verifiable mining attribution in decentralized pools, substantially diminishing the economic incentives for BWAs. Built upon Hashcash-style nonce search, the design integrates probabilistic claims with verifiable work, supports difficulty adjustment and public verification, preserves compatibility with existing PoW properties, and can be deployed at the pool level as a “pay-per-audit” mechanism to enhance both security and fairness.
📝 Abstract
We introduce Auditable Proof-of-Work (APoW), a novel proof-of-work (PoW) construction inspired by Hashcash-style nonce searching, which enables the auditing of other miners'work through accountable re-scanning of the nonce space. The proposed scheme allows a miner to probabilistically attest to having searched specified regions of the nonce space in earlier mining rounds, while concurrently earning rewards for performing productive work for a new block or pool share. This capability enables miners belonging to a mining pools to audit another miner's claimed effort retroactively, thereby allowing the probabilistic detection of block withholding attacks (BWAs) without requiring trusted hardware or trusted third parties. As a consequence, the construction supports the design of decentralized mining pools in which work attribution is verifiable and withholding incentives are substantially reduced. The scheme preserves the fundamental properties of conventional PoW, including public verifiability and difficulty adjustment, while adding an orthogonal auditability layer tailored to pool-based mining. Finally, while a full deployment of APoW in Bitcoin would require a consensus rule change and minor modifications to mining ASICs, the construction remains practically useful even without consensus changes, for instance, as a pool-level auditing mechanism that enables verifiable pay-for-auditing using existing pool reserves.