Published on: 2014-04-28T12:03:54+00:00
Vitalik Buterin discussed the concept of a "punitive proof-of-stake algorithm" in an article on the Ethereum blog. This idea has been previously mentioned in discussions about PPCoin and Etlase2's Decrit design. Mark Friedenbach raised concerns about the lack of stake in proof-of-stake mining, which could lead to double-spends. Gareth Williams suggested using fraud proofs to mitigate this issue, while Friedenbach argued that it would still reduce to proof-of-work mining. The discussion took place on the bitcoin-development mailing list in April 2014.Stephen Reed proposed creating a Bitcoin branch to research the best proof-of-stake implementations. He conducted a poll on bitcointalk.org, showing minority support for Bitcoin proof-of-stake. Reed aims to develop, test, and document proof-of-stake while addressing its vulnerabilities transparently. Some members of the community, including Mark Friedenbach, have proposed protocols involving proof of stake mechanisms. However, replacing proof-of-work with proof-of-stake encounters problems due to the lack of stakes involved.There was also a discussion about the compatibility of proof-of-stake blockchains with the sidechain/two-way peg system invented by Greg Maxwell. The author plans to explore this concept and merge-mining support, examining ideas from PPC, NXT, and whitepapers to create a Bitcoin implementation without wasteful proof-of-work. The author suggests that coin age is a good starting point and proposes a reference peer-to-peer pool for fair distribution of mining rewards. A Proof-of-Stake Bitcoin project thread will be established on Bitcointalk for technical discussion and the creation of a list of principles.In addition, Stephen Reed proposed the creation of a Bitcoin branch as a sandboxed testbed for researching the best proof-of-stake implementations. He conducted a poll on Bitcointalk, which showed some minority support for Bitcoin proof-of-stake. Reed's goal is to develop, test, and document proof-of-stake while exploring vulnerabilities and fixing them transparently. He suggests calling the project 'bitstake' to differentiate it from Bitcoin.Lastly, Gmail has been spamfoldering emails from Yahoo due to DMARC enforcement, making it incompatible with Sourceforge mailing lists. Two solutions are suggested: not using Yahoo or stopping the use of Sourceforge mailing list software. There is also a discussion about the compatibility of alternate decentralized consensus algorithms with the sidechain/two-way peg system in Bitcoin. The author suggests that if alternate consensus algorithms cannot retain compatibility, altcoin experiments with different proof models may have limited interoperability as sidechains.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T08:59:18.763306+00:00