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As the core technology of blockchain, various consensus mechanisms have emerged to satisfy the demands of different application scenarios. Since determining the security, scalability and other related performance of the blockchain, how to reach consensus efficiently of consensus mechanism is a critical issue in the blockchain.

The paper opted for a research overview on the blockchain consensus mechanism, including the consensus mechanisms' consensus progress, classification and comparison, which are complemented by documentary analysis.

This survey analyzes solutions for the improvement of consensus mechanisms in blockchain that have been proposed during the last few years and suggests future research directions around consensus mechanisms. First, the authors outline the consensus processes, the advantages and disadvantages of the mainstream consensus mechanisms. Additionally, the consensus mechanisms are subdivided into four types according to their characteristics. Then, the consensus mechanisms are compared and analyzed based on four evaluation criteria. Finally, the authors summarize the representative progress of consensus mechanisms and provide some suggestions on the design of consensus mechanisms to make further advances in this field.

This paper summarizes the future research development of the consensus mechanisms.

While Blockchain can serve us, Bitcoin threatens our survival. If Bitcoin is assumed to be a country, it will rank 38th globally for energy consumption. With 90.2 metric million tonnes of carbon dioxide, Bitcoin mining and trading has emerged as an environmental threat. The current study investigates how the trading-specific variables, the prices of Crypto Index and Ethereum, affect bitcoin-based energy consumption. Also, the role of mining-specific variables is analyzed.

The study uses monthly data from various sources collected from December 2018 to January 2023. The authors used the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Model to determine the short- and long-term relationships between variables. This study uses the Theory of Green Marketing and the Theory of Cross Elasticity of Demand as a theoretical lens.

The findings show that escalating crypto market index and Ethereum prices with a one-month lag increases bitcoin-specific electricity consumption and carbon emissions. Green investors may shift to cryptocurrencies based on consensus other than of Proof-of-Work. Ethereum behaves like a substitute for Bitcoin, reflected by the long-term positive relationship between Bitcoin's energy consumption and Ethereum prices.

The study analyses how the crypto market index and Ethereum price affect bitcoin-based energy use. The relationships identified are substantiated by the literature to provide suggestions to green investors and policymakers to mitigate the harmful impact of Bitcoin's colossal energy consumption on the natural environment.

This chapter reviews the underlying technologies of cryptoassets, including fundamental cryptographic primitives used in distributed ledger technologies and permissionless blockchain technologies and their consensus protocols such as proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. It discusses the pros and cons of existing approaches to improve blockchain scalability and considers the requirements for security and decentralization. The chapter also examines the following techniques: layer 1 tuning, layer 1 sharding, and layer 2 solutions. It concludes with an overview of technologies to swap cryptoassets off-chain, technical requirements for cross-chain transactions, and reviews cross-chain atomic swap implementation using hashed time lock contracts.

Nowadays, Bitcoin is facing many environmental problems arising from the proof of work based on blockchain. For this reason, Bitcoin Green (BITG) has been created and would solve these issues. The purpose of this paper is to visualize the users’ perception toward BITG through Twitter text analysis.

The big data used in this study includes two sources. The first data were extracted from the “Google Trends” engine during the period between 20 September 2015 and 15 September 2020. The second data were extracted from the Twitter application. This research explores the perceived ease of use, the perceived usefulness, the social influence, the perceived control and the user attitudes toward BITG. Therefore, lexicon-based sentiment analysis techniques combined with different dictionaries are built to visualize the drivers of investor attitudes toward the BITG using Twitter text messages. Besides, this study has checked the validity of two main assumptions using the normality (Jarque-Bera) and Kruskal-Wallis rank sum tests capable to conclude whether users mostly perceive BITG as a sustainable technology.

This empirical work affords insights into users’ intentions by exploring the drivers of BITG perception. The results show that users positively perceive the use of BITG as a sustainable blockchain. Besides, its usefulness is more appreciated from its ethical and technological characteristics, and its perceived application is mainly based on investment and coin offering use. Similarly, users are mostly showing positive emotions toward BITG.

Tweets related to “BITG” are not as voluminous as the other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which make it difficult to extract all the characteristics and use cases.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first one that uses the theory of planned behavior and the theory of acceptance model to explore cognitive factors in understanding investor intentions in adopting BITG.