Proof of Honesty POH: Realizable Probabilistic Solution for Verifiable Computation

With the rapid development of the Internet and blockchain technology, the prosperity of the industrial chain, and the rapid development of the platform economy, related large-scale enterprises are constantly emerging, and entrepreneurs are pouring in frequently; the sharing economy is also developing very hotly in the current global market, and attracts a large amount of capital. Enter. According to data from Roland Berger, the total scale of the global sharing economy reached US$186.9 billion in 2015, and increased to US$520 billion in 2018; it is expected to exceed US$1 trillion in 2021, and it is expected to maintain sustained rapid growth in the future. However, with the development of the sharing economy for many years, few people care about the field of computer resource sharing due to the difficulty of technical requirements. The Pekka team seized the market opportunity. After years of research, it filled the gap in the shared computing power market in the computer field. In 2019, it released the Pekka distributed shared computing power platform, aiming to realize the sharing of global computing resources and increase the global idle computing power. Utilization rate, through the use of cryptocurrency as a means of computing power payment, in order to meet the needs of multiple parties.

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Nansen added that the statistics of the above data are based on the publicly disclosed wallets of Binance, involving multiple chains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Tron. [2022/12/17 21:50:24]

In the process of Pekka sharing the computing power research and development platform, outsourcing computing tasks to the other party faces many challenges, one of which is the problem of verifiable computing. The verifiable computing problem refers to Verifiable Computing ("VC" for short), which means that computing tasks can be outsourced to third-party computing power providers; (untrusted) third-party computing power providers need to submit A proof of the correctness of the calculation. A long-standing problem is how users can effectively verify calculation results without re-executing tasks. This problem has plagued computer scientists for many years. It was not until the emergence of the honest proof mechanism POH that this problem had a realizable solution.

Data: A total of 90 million XRP was transferred from an unknown address to Bitso, worth $42.03 million: On October 27, Whale Alert monitoring data showed that a total of 90 million XRP (approximately $42.03 million) was transferred from an unknown address to the encryption platform Bitso. Another 68,713,032 XRP were transferred from Bitso to an unknown address. [2022/10/27 11:47:31]

What is POH?

The full name of POH is "Proof of Honesty", which was proposed by the Pekka research team on March 29, 2019. It aims to solve the problem of verifiable computing and realize the trustworthiness of the distributed computing power sharing platform.

Until now, computer scientists have had two solutions to the trusted computing problem.

Data: 121 million USDT transferred from unknown wallets to Binance: Jinse Finance reported that Whale Alert monitoring data showed that 121,000,000 USDT (worth about 121 million U.S. dollars) was transferred from unknown wallets to Binance. [2022/10/5 18:40:06]

1. Repeated verification calculations on multiple computing devices. This solution is not only costly, but also requires the assumption that the computing equipment itself will not cause errors in the calculation results due to failure. Obviously, this kind of verification method is not always effective. For example, the hardware and software of all devices in the cloud service are usually exactly the same. If the calculation error is caused by the device, the consistency of the repeated calculation results cannot guarantee the final correctness, which will eventually cost a high cost, and it is indeed impossible to obtain accurate results. verification results, resulting in the loss of manpower and material resources.

Director of ANZ Bank: The encryption industry has grown to a scale that cannot be ignored by traditional finance: On November 5th, Nigel Dobson, head of service portfolio at ANZ Bank (ANZ), said at the Australian Blockchain Forum: "The encryption industry has already It has grown to a scale that cannot be ignored by traditional finance. We have been paying attention to the DeFi field and cryptocurrencies for some time. It is the weight of these funds and the quality of funds flowing into these fields that have caused us to think. What happened here? (Cointelegraph )[2021/11/5 6:33:31]

2. Run a small set of sample calculations, and then review the results of those calculations. However, the insufficient sample size makes this solution less effective. There are some other solutions, such as trusted hardware, but the premise is that there needs to be a complete chain of trust for the hardware.

The above solutions obviously cannot effectively solve the verifiable computing problem. After years of research by the Pekka R&D team, "Proof of Honesty (POH)" is based on blockchain technology and was born inspired by "police trapping lawbreakers". Let renter users play the role of "policeman", and at the same time assign entrapment tasks to computing power providers whose results are known in advance, and verify the task results through smart contracts, so as to detect and capture malicious computing power providers in the network and prevent cheating severe economic penalties. This method has been verified by many parties and can effectively solve the problem of computer verification.

PoH consists of two stages:

Phase 1 - Preparation: Aspiring "cop" users will build a library of sting missions. The database contains one or more computing tasks that are verified by network nodes and stored on the chain. Every user can become a "cop" for entrapment rewards. At the same time, computing power providers must submit a deposit before sharing computing power, and the amount of the deposit will be much higher than their task rewards. For cheating computing power providers, their rewards and deposits will be confiscated. This will effectively guarantee the platform’s computing power. trustworthiness.

Phase 2 - Execution: In this phase, the network randomly assigns tasks from the repository to computing power providers. After the provider feeds back the result to the "police", the "police" can compare the result with the correct result in its bait task database, so as to easily determine the correctness of the provider's calculation result. This "cop" will post these two results on the blockchain by verifying the smart contract. The "judge", that is, some or all of the nodes running this verification smart contract, will decide whether the "policeman"'s judgment is correct. If it proves to be correct, the reward in the reward pool will be distributed to the "police" as an incentive, and the deposit of the provider will be confiscated and entered into the reward pool.

This POH verification mechanism, on the one hand, can effectively promote users to become "policemen" to independently check and verify calculation problems through the incentive mechanism, and on the other hand, punish perpetrators through the pledge bond penalty mechanism. The emergence of perpetrators. Obviously, so far PoH has become the lowest cost and most efficient solution to verifiable computing problems, and it is a very effective technical means to establish a global trusted shared computing power network. Today, with the rapid development of the sharing economy, a good technical foundation has been laid for the realization of global computing resource sharing. The era of shared computing power, the future has come.

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