Nowadays, many countries are aggressively racing to industrial revolution 4.0 for socio-economic development. With a vision beyond the world, Japan proposes a new revolution named Super Smart Society 5.0 to create comprehensive and sustainable socio-economic systems. The state-of-the-art technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robots, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain, etc., play important roles in developing Society 5.0.
In Society 5.0, big data are gathered from various sources such as IoT, robots in physical space, and then accumulated in cyberspace. In cyberspace, big data need to be shared for many subjects. Thus, cyberspace requires high security and privacy preserver to protect important data from malicious subjects. However, cyberspace in the current systems often is a centralized cloud server, which concerns data threat, server crash attack, and data loss due to disaster. The promising solution to solve these concerns for cyberspace is to apply blockchain technology. Blockchain is a decentralized network with data stored in blocks and blocks linked together to a chain. The characteristics of the chain of blocks are transparency, indelibility, integrity, availability, and immutability. The most challenge of blockchain is the synchronization of adding new blocks to the chain. Current blockchain networks often use a consensus to synchronize added new blocks. Currently, the most popular and successful consensus is Proof-of-Work (PoW). In the PoW, to add a new block, the miner must repeat the computation of the hash function to find a valid nonce, as called mining. For the acceleration of performance, the computation of the hash function is often designed on hardware. Since the hardware must repeatedly compute the hash function, the blockchain networks using PoW are often massive energy consumption from mining hardware.
In this thesis, we focus on the two aspects of blockchain: application and hardware. In the aspect of the application, we apply blockchain technology to solve some problems of current remote monitoring and drug management systems. For example, current centralized cloud-based remote monitoring systems concern medical data loss and change caused by hacker attacks or disasters. Thus, we apply blockchain technology to remote monitoring systems to bring security, availability, and immutability to medical data. In the second application, current centralized cloud-based drug management systems often have non-transparency, unreliable traceability, and high costs. Therefore, we apply blockchain technology to the drug management system to bring drug information transparency, reliable traceability, and labor costs reduction. In the aspect of the circuit, we study the energy optimization for mining hardware in the blockchain networks. Concretely, we chose the mining hardware in Bitcoin, the most popular blockchain network using the PoW consensus. Technically, the Bitcoin mining hardware is mainly composed of Double-SHA-256 computation. In the Bitcoin network, computing double SHA-256 values consume most of the network energy. For efficient energy, we propose a Double-SHA-256 architecture with compact message expanders that reduce hardware costs. Experimental results show that the power consumption in the proposed architecture is smaller as compared to previous works. Moreover, the hardware efficiency in the proposed architecture is higher than the previous research. The Double-SHA-256 circuit is also proven to work correctly in a real hardware platform (ZCU102), achieving a processing rate of 340.992 Gbps.
Keywords: Ethereum,Blockchain, IPFS, Bitcoin mining, SHA-256