ProofBook: An Online Social Network Based on Proof-of-Work and Friend-Propagation

Online Social Networks (OSNs) enjoy high popularity, but their centralized architectures lead to intransparency and mistrust in the providers who can be the single point of failure. A solution is to adapt the OSN functionality to an underlying and fully distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) substrate. Several approaches in the field of OSNs based on P2P architectures have been proposed, but they share substantial P2P weaknesses and they suffer from low availability and privacy problems. In this work, we propose a distributed OSN which combines an underlying P2P architecture with friend-based data propagation and a Proof-of-Work (PoW) concept. ProofBook provides availability of user data, stability of the underlying network architecture and privacy improvements while it does not limit simple data sharing based on social relations.

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