GitHub - kotagit75/btfy: A Blockchain Secured by Weather Observations. 🦋

Btfy is an experimental blockchain that explores whether weather observations can be used as a consensus beacon. By combining weather-derived beacons with Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs), btfy investigates an alternative approach to blockchain consensus.

Bitcoin creates unpredictability through computation.

Btfy explores whether naturally occurring unpredictability already exists in the real world.

Weather is one candidate.

A Japanese article explaining Btfy can be found here.

🌟 Features

• ⛅ Proof of Weather consensus
• ⚡ Energy-efficient block production using VDFs
• 🌍 Real-world entropy source from weather observations
• 🔗 Hash-chain protection against replaying historical weather data

🌱 Contribution to Environment and Society

• Environment: By eliminating the energy-intensive computational race, we achieve low-power consensus building using weather data and VDF.
• Society: Miners pay for weather APIs, creating a cycle that indirectly contributes to improving the accuracy of weather observation infrastructure and aiding in disaster prevention and mitigation.

⛅ Why Weather?

Traditional Proof-of-Work systems consume large amounts of electricity to create a source of unpredictability that secures consensus.

Btfy takes a different approach.

Instead of spending energy on computational puzzles, Btfy derives unpredictability from real-world weather observations. Future weather conditions cannot be predicted perfectly, making weather data a naturally occurring source of entropy.

This allows Btfy to build consensus without requiring energy-intensive mining.

🎯 How does it work?

A weather observation is used as a beacon.

A beacon is an externally observed value that is difficult to predict before it becomes publicly available.

In Btfy, weather measurements collected from multiple locations serve as the beacon.

The consensus process can be summarized as follows:

flowchart TD
    A[Weather Data] --> B[Beacon]
    B --> C[VDF]
    C --> D[Block Generation]
    D --> E[Blockchain]

1. Weather observations are collected.
2. The observations are transformed into a beacon value.
3. A Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) is evaluated using the beacon.
4. The VDF output is included in a new block.
5. The block is appended to the hash chain.
6. Future blocks depend on previous blocks, preventing reuse of historical weather data.

Because future weather conditions are difficult to predict, generating future blocks ahead of time becomes difficult.

The hash chain further prevents attackers from generating alternative histories using previously observed weather values.

🔒 Security Considerations

Btfy is an experimental consensus mechanism and its security properties are still being evaluated.

The current design assumes:

• Weather observations are collected from multiple geographically distributed locations.
• No single observation point can fully determine the beacon.
• Future weather observations cannot be predicted with perfect accuracy.
• Historical weather observations cannot be reused because each block depends on the previous block hash.

The security of Proof of Weather relies primarily on the unpredictability of future observations and the cryptographic guarantees provided by VDFs and hash chaining.

This project should currently be considered experimental and not production-ready.

🚀 Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/kotagit75/btfy.git
cd btfy
cargo run -- --mining --beacon-cmd example/open-meteo.sh

Detailed Installation Instructions

Run in Docker

git clone https://github.com/kotagit75/btfy.git
cd btfy
docker build ./ -t btfy
docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 62697:62697 --network=host -t btfy:latest

Usage

# run
cargo run

# run and mine blocks with beacon provider
cargo run -- --mining --beacon-cmd example/dummy.sh
cargo run -- --mining --beacon-cmd example/open-meteo.sh

# display help
cargo run -- --help

# check health
./commands/btfy-cli health

# get address
./commands/btfy-cli getaddress

# get balance
./commands/btfy-cli getbalance
./commands/btfy-cli getbalancebyaddress [address]

# get chain
./commands/btfy-cli getchain

# send transaction
./commands/btfy-cli sendtransaction [address] [amount] [fee]

# add peer
./commands/btfy-cli addpeer [IP Addr]:[port]
./commands/btfy-cli addpeer 192.0.2.0:62697

📚 Documents

• docs/installation.md
• docs/temperature_script_example.md
• FAQs

📍 Locations which is collected temperature data

Btfy gets temperature data from multiple locations. They are currently placed in Japan. The locations are as follows: View geojson