Empirical Evaluation and Scalability Analysis of Proof of Team Sprint (PoTS): Reward Fairness, Energy Efficiency, and System Stability

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the Proof of Team Sprint (PoTS) consensus algorithm, focusing on its impact on reward fairness, energy efficiency, system stability, and scalability. To assess these factors, we conducted large-scale simulations comparing PoTS with conventional Proof of Work (PoW) under various computational environments and team configurations. Our results demonstrate that PoTS significantly mitigates reward disparities caused by heterogeneous computational capabilities. In PoW, the highest-performing node secured the top ranking in 100 out of 100 trials, leading to extreme centralization. In contrast, under PoTS, the dominance of high-performance nodes was reduced, with the strongest node ranking first only 55 times out of 100, ensuring a fairer distribution of rewards among participants. The skewness and kurtosis of the reward distribution decreased as team size increased, confirming that PoTS fosters a more equitable allocation of mining rewards. Energy efficiency analysis revealed that PoTS exhibits a near 1/<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> scaling trend in computational workload, where <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> is the team size. Total active computation time in PoTS (team size 64) was reduced by a factor of 64 compared to PoW, demonstrating a drastic reduction in energy consumption while maintaining the same level of security and consensus reliability. Furthermore, system stability and scalability evaluations confirmed that PoTS maintains statistical consistency across multiple simulation runs, ensuring robust performance regardless of network size. The correlation between participant performance and reward allocation increased with team size, peaking at 0.898 when <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> = 16, before stabilizing, highlighting the controlled balance between computational power and fairness. These findings suggest that PoTS is a viable alternative to traditional PoW, offering a more decentralized, fair, and energy-efficient approach to achieving blockchain consensus. This study provides empirical validation for PoTS's ability to improve the sustainability and fairness of decentralized networks, positioning it as a promising consensus mechanism for future blockchain applications.