Proof-of-work consensus by quantum sampling
arXiv:2305.19865 · doi:10.1088/2058-9565/adae2b
Abstract
Since its advent in 2011, boson sampling has been a preferred candidate for demonstrating quantum advantage because of its simplicity and near-term requirements compared to other quantum algorithms. We propose to use a variant, called coarse-grained boson-sampling (CGBS), as a quantum Proof-of-Work (PoW) scheme for blockchain consensus. The users perform boson sampling using input states that depend on the current block information and commit their samples to the network. Afterwards, CGBS strategies are determined which can be used to both validate samples and reward successful miners. By combining rewards for miners committing honest samples together with penalties for miners committing dishonest samples, a Nash equilibrium is found that incentivizes honest nodes. We provide numerical evidence that these validation tests are hard to spoof classically without knowing the binning scheme ahead of time and show the robustness of our protocol to small partial distinguishability of photons. The scheme works for both Fock state boson sampling and Gaussian boson sampling and provides dramatic speedup and energy savings relative to computation by classical hardware.
24 pages, 7 figures, 1 table (v3 Add more numerical simulation results)
References in corpus (8)
- Boson sampling with 20 input photons in 60-mode interferometers at state spaces
- Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors for Quantum Information
- Gaussian Boson Sampling with Pseudo-Photon-Number Resolving Detectors and Quantum Computational Advantage
- Scalable boson-sampling with time-bin encoding using a loop-based architecture
- Sampling arbitrary photon-added or photon-subtracted squeezed states is in the same complexity class as boson sampling
- Simulating complex networks in phase space: Gaussian boson sampling
- Cryptographic One-way Function Based on Boson Sampling
- BosonSampling.jl: A Julia package for quantum multi-photon interferometry