  In Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, the average waiting time to generate a
block is inversely proportional to the computing power of the miner. To reduce
the average block generation time, a group of individual miners can form a
mining pool to aggregate their computing power to solve the puzzle together and
share the reward contained in the block. However, if the aggregated computing
power of the pool forms a substantial portion of the total computing power in
the network, the pooled mining undermines the core spirit of blockchain, i.e.,
the decentralization, and harms its security. To discourage the pooled mining,
we develop a new consensus protocol called Proof-of-Age (PoA) that builds upon
the native PoW protocol. The core idea of PoA lies in using Age-of-Work (AoW)
to measure the effective mining period that the miner has devoted to
maintaining the security of blockchain. Unlike in the native PoW protocol, in
our PoA protocol, miners benefit from its effective mining period even if they
have not successfully mined a block. We first employ a continuous time Markov
chain (CTMC) to model the block generation process of the PoA based blockchain.
Based on this CTMC model, we then analyze the block generation rates of the
mining pool and solo miner respectively. Our analytical results verify that
under PoA, the block generation rates of miners in the mining pool are reduced
compared to that of solo miners, thereby disincentivizing the pooled mining.
Finally, we simulate the mining process in the PoA blockchain to demonstrate
the consistency of the analytical results.
