An Industry-4.0-Complaint Sustainable Bitcoin Model Through Optimized Transaction Selection and Sustainable Block Integration

Cryptocurrencies are the new form of trade that has revolutionized how we look into our financial institutions. Bitcoin dominates the industry with the highest market share among the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies. However, high energy consumption leading to increasing carbon emission, prioritizing high-value transactions, and long waiting times are some of the flaws preventing it from reaching its full potential. Owing to the block rewards getting halved every four years, miners and researchers are fearful that this would be the breaking point of Bitcoin’s success. This article proposes an Industry-4.0-compliant next-generation Bitcoin architecture by introducing a dynamic and sustainable block concept. Along with our modified knapsack algorithms, i.e., priority-based 0/1 knapsack and advanced-priority-based 0/1 knapsack, we can ensure a balanced transaction selection, quicker verification, higher transaction throughput, reduced carbon emission, and increased earnings for the miners. Moreover, with the addition of only one of our proposed sustainable blocks, we can cut down verification times by 50% and increase throughput by 39%. We can also reduce carbon emissions per transaction by 61.3%, which would help reduce Bitcoins’ large carbon footprint, enabling us to approach greener digital transactions.