Cooperative Mining System to Improve Bitcoin Scalability

Blockchain is a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that allows users to exchange values directly without a need for trusted third parties. Bitcoin is one of the most popular digital cryptocurrencies that is based on blockchain technology. However, it faces scalability problems including transaction throughput, latency, and starvation. Bitcoin transaction throughput is very low compared to traditional payment methods. Additionally, many Bitcoin transactions suffer from delays and starvation as miners prefer transactions with higher fees. More of the current research focuses on how to enhance Bitcoin scalability by improving the performance of consensus techniques, dividing the network into smaller ones with different parts of the blockchain, or completely changing the blockchain data structure. Unfortunately, engaging in this problem usually affects either decentralization or security; this is called the blockchain trilemma. This paper proposes the Cooperative Mining System (CMS), which depends on enhanced proof of work consensus algorithm. This proposed system increases transaction throughput and eliminates transaction latency and starvation without affecting decentralization and security. In CMS for each epoch, miners cooperated to create one super-block that contains more transactions than the traditional Bitcoin block. Whereas miners create their traditional blocks simultaneously, broadcast them, wait to receive other miners’ blocks, and lastly create a super-block that contains all the transactions of the gathered blocks. The Simulation results of the CMS and Bitcoin system using different case scenarios show a significant improvement in CMS compared to the current Bitcoin system. The CMS greatly increases the transaction throughput and eliminates transaction latency and starvation.