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Distributed Consensus for Permissionless Environment

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Abstract

Day-by-day, both data and network size are growing at a rapid rate. It is essential to keep private data secure and also prevent malicious activities. In a permissionless blockchain, nodes do not take permission for participation. One can directly mine a block by performing an open task. Security can be a significant issue here. Also, there is no third-party involvement in blockchain, so keeping trust among peers is an essential feature. The distributed public ledger stores history of old transactions to maintain trust between peers. To prevent malicious activities, consensus algorithms are used, which are defined as a complex task that a miner must perform to mine new blocks into the blockchain. In this chapter, various consensus mechanisms are mentioned with merits and demerits. With high computation power and digital currencies, nodes can quickly get into the blockchain and perform malicious activities. For that, various consensus algorithms are used like Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Proof of Burn (PoB), Proof of Capacity (PoC), etc. Every consensus is developed to solve issues of previously developed consensus and provide more efficiency concerning resource allocation, scalability, security against attacks, power consumption, etc. Bitcoin is one of the use cases of blockchain, which is developed upon the PoW consensus method. Various companies have developed cryptocurrencies that are based on consensus algorithms. Consensus can be implemented on smart contracts to govern specific rules in the blockchain. While working with extensive transactions and a large chain of blocks, scalability, efficiency, and malicious attacks are significant issues. We have done a comparative analysis of all the consensus algorithms based on such issues.

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Institute of Technology, Nirma University, Ahmedabad, India

    Sudeep Tanwar

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Correspondence to Sudeep Tanwar .

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Tanwar, S. (2022). Distributed Consensus for Permissionless Environment. In: Blockchain Technology. Studies in Autonomic, Data-driven and Industrial Computing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1488-1_6

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