SimBlock-PoS: Enhancing SimBlock to Evaluate Stake-Based and Work-Based Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms
摘要
Consensus protocols are the foundational pieces to blockchain systems, enabling agreement across distributed nodes without central authority as they ensure consistency, fault tolerance, and decentralization. Among these, Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) remain the most prominent paradigms, each influencing system performance, energy efficiency, and security differently. However, simulation tools that allow side-by-side evaluation of these mechanisms are limited in both availability and extensibility. In this paper, we extend the SimBlock blockchain simulator by implementing a runnable PoS simulation environment alongside its native PoW setup. This includes stake-weighted validator selection, coinage-based difficulty logic, and per-block runtime logging. Our implementation allows researchers to compare PoS and PoW under consistent structural conditions. The contribution not only enables direct benchmarking between energy-intensive and lightweight consensus models, but also lays the groundwork for future research on scalable and efficient consensus protocols.