I've got an idea, and I would like to share it with you here to discussed/ripped it apart:
Two-Round Proof Of Work:
We devised a process with two rounds we called Two-Round PoW: In the first round, we run a similar Bitcoin PoW with a small hash complexity for all the miners. And in the second round we run another Bitcoin PoW only among the winners of the first round.
Let's N1 be the number of all miners. The goal of the first round is to select the first N2 miners that succeed to resolve the first round PoW puzzle. In the first round, each miner will solve for its own ounce1. The second round competition is only among the winners of the first round, the N2 miners. i.e each one of the N2 miners will solve for its ounce2. The complexity of the second round can be made adjustable like in Bitcoin to maintain the block time.
For example: if we have N1 = 100000 miners in the network, we can decide to chose to only work with N2=100 miners for the second round of TRPoW. We can set the complexity of the first round in such a way that it can be with minor electricity consumption. And then adjust the complexity of the second round. In addition, we can also adjust $N_2$ to maintain the block time. Like this we can reduce the electricity consumption by as much as we want. So here we have two rounds with two parametrable complexities. We can view Bitcoin PoW as a Tow-Round PoW where N2 = 1 and no complexity in the second round.
In short, In a Two-Round PoW system, all the miners compete in a first round where each miner solves for its ounce1 and the fastest N2 miners that solved the first round puzzle, i.e the winners of the first round advance to a second round where they get to choose between them the fastest miner to solve its ounce2.
For more details please read here. It is a very short algorithm:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356188255_A_Two-Round_Proof_of_Workor Here on google drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XVwMuDHIEBYX2GbAI_rFzx8eEsM7Z5ps/view?usp=sharingAnyway, I just wanted to throw the idea out here to see if there are any obvious reasons why it couldn't be implemented, and to hopefully spark a discussion amongst those better qualified than me.
Thank you very much in advance for your thoughts / suggestions / ideas / critics