With all the media attention on cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects over the past couple of years, it’s easy to forget that blockchains are not a brand-new technology. In fact, the ten-year anniversary of Bitcoin is just around the corner, in January of next year.
As a ten-year-old technology, most of the blockchains in operation today — and especially the ones using the original Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism — are slow, inefficient, and use a lot of resources. The electricity consumption used for mining on the Bitcoin network alone, for example, has been compared to that of entire countries, like Denmark.
How can future blockchains be designed so as to reduce their energy wastage? One project, Quoinblock, intends to solve this problem with a novel consensus mechanism that they refer to as Work your Stake (WyS).
Proof of Work is an elegant consensus mechanism that, among other features, ensures the fairness of the blockchain mining process and also regulates the rate of block formation. Miners consume electricity in a fair, global competition to be the first to complete the computations necessary to verify outstanding transactions and create the next block on the blockchain.
Quoinblock’s Work your Stake, on the other hand, attempts to retain all of these essential features while making one very important change: miners no longer “pay” for their mining activities in electricity but instead pay with tokens directly on the network. Excessive electricity consumption is removed entirely from the equation.
Technically, this is no easy switch-up. The team behind Quoinblock, however, has already laid out a detailed plan for their vision in their whitepaper, which can be requested on their website. By eliminating the need to use electricity in mining, Quoinblock promises a “green blockchain.” Taking things a step further, they argue that the proceeds from WyS mining payments could be used for a variety of “green” endeavors, from actual environmental protection to price stabilization on their blockchain network.
The advantages of a green blockchain go beyond the obvious — all of that energy no longer wasted in mining can be turned into real value on the network. Yet Quoinblock envisions the blockchains of the future to have other useful features as well, like post-quantum security and built-in regulatory compliance.
For more information, head on over to the Quoinblock website: https://quoinblock.io.
