Author: Gareth Williams 2014-04-27 02:01:44
Published on: 2014-04-27T02:01:44+00:00
In this context, Mark Friedenbach is discussing a potential issue with proof-of-stake mining, namely that it does not offer any stake and thus participants are free to sign as many different forks as they wish. This can lead to double-spends at will, which is undesirable. Gareth Williams suggests using fraud proofs as a way to mitigate this issue, so that a participant's coinbase only matures if nobody publishes proof that they signed a competing block. However, Friedenbach argues that this still reduces to proof-of-work mining because miners will grind blocks until they find one that names them or one of their sock puppets as the signer of the next block. The discussion takes place on April 27, 2014, on the bitcoin-development mailing list. Friedenbach is responding to a suggestion by Troy Benjegerdes to create a Bitcoin branch that provides a sandboxed testbed for researching the best PoS implementations. Stephen Reed also chimes in, noting that he understands that Proof-of-Stake as a replacement for Proof-of-Work is a prohibited yet disputed change to Bitcoin Core. He wants to develop, test and document PoS, while exploring its vulnerabilities and fixing them in a transparent fashion. Reed conducted a poll on bitcointalk.org, which suggests some minority support for Bitcoin Proof-of-Stake. Of the 31 total voters, 16.1% did not care or did not know enough, while 45.2% would download and run the existing Proof-of-Work program to fight the change, and 38.7% would download and run the new Proof-of-Stake program to favor the change. The conversation touches on different topics related to the implementation and viability of PoS, but the main concern remains the security and reliability of the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T21:17:46.205708+00:00