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Inflation Propensity of Collatz Orbits: A New Proof-of-Work for Blockchain Applications

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Submitted:

20 September 2018

Posted:

25 September 2018

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Abstract
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin rely on a proof-of-work system to validate transactions and prevent attacks or double-spending. Reliance on a few standard proofs-of-work such as hashcash, Ethash or Scrypt increases systemic risk of the whole crypto-economy. Diversification of proofs-of-work is a strategy to counter potential threats to the stability of electronic payment systems. To this end, another proof-of-work is introduced: it is based on a new metric associated to the algorithmically undecidable Collatz algorithm: the inflation propensity is defined as the cardinality of new maxima in a developing Collatz orbit. It is numerically verified that the distribution of inflation propensity slowly converges to a geometric distribution of parameter $0.714 \approx \frac{(\pi - 1)}{3}$ as the sample size increases. This pseudo-randomness opens the door to a new class of proofs-of-work based on congruential graphs.
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Subject: Computer Science and Mathematics  -   Computational Mathematics
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
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