Resource Burning for Permissionless Systems

Proof-of-work puzzles and CAPTCHAS consume enormous amounts of energy and time. These techniques are examples of resource burning: verifiable consumption of resources solely to convey information. Can these costs be eliminated? It seems unlikely since resource burning shares similarities with “money burning” and “costly signaling”, which are foundational to game theory, biology, and economics. Can these costs be reduced? Yes, research shows we can significantly lower the asymptotic costs of resource burning in many different settings. In this paper, we survey the literature on resource burning; take positions based on predictions of how the tool is likely to evolve; and propose several open problems targeted at the theoretical distributed-computing research community.