Proof-of-Contribution consensus mechanism for blockchain and its application in intellectual property protection

Abstract

Blockchain has received a lot of attention recently for its characteristics of decentralization, immutability, traceability, etc., making it a promising technology for the development of various applications, especially the management of various digital information. However, most current blockchain systems exhibit problems such as high computational overhead and centralization of power. Reliance on cryptocurrency in many public blockchain-based applications is another factor that has hindered the application of blockchain technology in areas other than the financial sectors. This paper proposes a new blockchain consensus mechanism based on the contributions of participants. The proposed consensus mechanism, which is called proof-of-contribution (PoC), quantifies user behaviors and actions in a blockchain-based application as contribution values calculated through an algorithm. The node that has the highest contribution value in each round of consensus gets the right to generate the next new block. PoC preserves the properties of decentralization and resistance to hard fork and does not rely on cryptocurrency, making it attractive over cryptocurrency-based consensus mechanisms like proof-of-work (PoW) for a wide variety of applications that do not have to involve cryptocurrency. Contribution values can be abstracted from applications and used in the underlying blockchain consensus process to improve the security and trustworthiness of the applications. Intellectual property (IP) protection is one such application to apply the blockchain technology and the PoC consensus mechanism. However, existing blockchain-based IP protection systems are mostly developed based on public blockchain platforms such as the Ethereum while some others are developed as consortium blockchains, thus exhibiting inherent defects such as high system requirements, long consensus delay, and low user participation. In this paper, we will use IP protection as the application scenario to illustrate the development of our PoC consensus mechanism and will compare PoC to some existing consensus mechanisms. Experimental results will show that the proposed PoC consensus mechanism preserves most of the main security characteristics of blockchain and is superior to existing consensus mechanisms, making it more secure and efficient to use blockchain technology for digital information management.