- The concept is based on boson sampling
- In theory, the new approach will reduce environmental damage, speed up block processing and maintain consistent mining times
On Wednesday, May 31, an article titled “Proof-of-work consensus by quantum sampling” was published on the Cornell University portal.. It presents a new PoW blockchain concept based on quantum technology. And in theory, this could be the next step for the industry.
“Our new paper on the use of NISQ-era quantum sampling in blockchain proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithms,” theoretical physicist and one of the study authors Peter Rohde.
The article was written by a team of scientists from the United States and Australia in collaboration with BTQ Technology. The material describes a system that, in theory, offers significant speedup and energy savings compared to computation on conventional hardware.
The concept is based on using boson sampling. It involves using photons in optical chips to increase computational speed.
The difficulty is that the principle of boson sampling is not standardized. As Rohde notes, there are several variants developed on the basis of polar engineering approaches, which significantly complicates the calculation of energy costs for given parameters.. Its use in PoW consensus networks has several advantages. Among other things, it is the ability to maintain constant block mining time while the number of participants increases. According to the authors of the study, the proposed concept will also significantly reduce the amount of potential malicious emissions from the operation of mining equipment. However, this is still only a theory, which requires further refinement.