Governed Proof Of Work – SimplyVital Health
There is currently no decentralized infrastructure that can fulfill the long term needs of Healthcare. Most existing systems are either too centralized or have large security, scaling and regulatory concerns. This is an issue we at SimplyVital Health identified very early and sought to rectify. The first version of this solution is here and it is called Governed Proof of Work (GPoW)
GPoW is a hybrid Proof of Work(POW) consensus mechanism. It functions at a high level by having a typical POW system, but then only allowing validated nodes to participate. Nodes are validated by being voted in, or out, by other registrars, which are users approved to certify another nodes. Nodes have the same incentives as normal miners would in a POW system, with the exception
Registrars can approve and disapprove of nodes at will to ensure the network remains secure. Registrars themselves are approved by a consortium of users who help govern the network. They are incentivized to approve nodes correctly as they are able to charge a fee for their service, and should they do poorly they can be voted out and unable to charge said fee. There are potential changes that are being looked into on this. Research is specifically being done to see if the incentives work and if Registrars should be allowed to approve or disapprove at will or if there should be some minimum number of registrars to approve of any action.
And Finally consortium members can vote in new members and Registrars by simple minority vote. Consortium members are a group of users of the network who help guide its development and vote in registrars.
Additionally, by having more secure nodes we are able to lower the difficulty of the POW protocol significantly increasing the efficiency of the network. This gives the network an efficiency boost when compared to other PoW networks. This will work well with the work being done with the NSF on Graphene.
We came to this solution after researching different ways to deal with the regulatory issues of decentralized systems. We specifically looked into Ethash(Ethereum’s Proof of Work) and Clique(Ethereum’s Proof of Authority). Upon finishing our research we took our fork of Ethereum and created the Gov consensus protocol which is a hybrid of Ethash and Clique.
At a lower level Gov works similar to Ethash with a few modifications. The block structure has been modified to include special fields for keeping track of validated nodes, registrars, members and the necessary fields for voting. Every set number of cycles a vote takes place, with validated members being able to propose and vote on new members and registrars, who can in turn approve new nodes. Should the particular vote pass they are added onto the validated member or registrar list. In turn the registrars can go about approving nodes to run the network. While any node can create and submit a block, only validated nodes will be able to submit blocks, effectively giving us a Governed Proof of Work system.
The consortium of independent members have voted on a set of security standards that every node on the network must follow to join. We designed these standards with a input from a specialized HIPAA auditing firm.
This system is currently running as a test network with 23 members and nodes. We are continuing to test it and are working on cleaning it currently. We will be continuing to improve the protocol!
The Team at SimplyVital Health hopes you enjoyed this update! To learn more about SimplyVital Health, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and peruse our career openings on AngelList.
Published at Tue, 11 Feb 2020 14:16:47 +0000
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