POEM: Proof of Entropy Minima. (arXiv:2303.04305v2 [cs.CR] UPDATED)

Nakamoto consensus has been incredibly influential in enabling robust
blockchain systems, and one of its components is the so-called heaviest chain
rule (HCR). Within this rule, the calculation of the weight of the chain tip is
performed by adding the difficulty threshold value to the previous total
difficulty. Current difficulty based weighting systems do not take the
intrinsic block weight into account. This paper studies a new mechanism based
on entropy differences, named proof of entropy minima (POEM), which
incorporates the intrinsic block weight in a manner that significantly reduces
the orphan rate of the blockchain while simultaneously accelerating
finalization. Finally, POEM helps to understand blockchain as a static
time-independent sequence of committed events.