Cluster-based Trust Evaluation of Blockchain Miners in Pool Mining

Blockchain mining has gained popularity since modern technologies started to benefit from its properties such as immutability, secure access, etc. To publish new blocks in Blockchain, miners have to use their resources and participate in the mining process. The majority of miners choose to join a mining pool because they believe that solo mining may be challenging. Due to the existence of many mining pools and the adoption of various incentive mechanisms, they create a lot of confusion for the miners for pool selection. To add a block, miners in the mining pool dedicate their processing power to the consensus process. The pool will get rewards if their efforts are effective. It might be challenging to keep a miner’s assurance throughout the consensus and mining procedures in pool mining. This study, proposed a Trust Model to ensure that the consensus protocol in pool mining will be carried out with trusted miners only. As a result, an innovative approach for trust assessment among the miners is formulated using the ML approach. Instead of allowing all miners, our approach allows only trusted miners into the mining pool for efficient mining. The conceptual framework was implemented using the Hyper ledger tool, and an in-depth evaluation of the performance in terms of transaction per second(tps), transaction validation and commit time was conducted.