Difficulty control for blockchain-based consensus systems

• Published in: Peer-to-peer networking and applications Vol. 9; no. 2; pp. 397 - 413
• Main Author: Kraft, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.03.2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Blocking; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Control systems; Currencies; Digital currencies; Engineering; Information Systems and Communication Service; Mathematical models; Mining; Names; Networks; Peer to peer computing; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Simulation; Namecoin; Bitcoin mining; Poisson process; Crypto-currency; Nakamoto blockchain

Crypto-currencies like Bitcoin have recently attracted a lot of interest. A crucial ingredient into such systems is the “mining” of a Nakamoto blockchain. We model mining as a Poisson process with time-dependent intensity and use this model to derive predictions about block times for various hash-ra...