Malice Reactive Proof of Work Additions (MR POWA): Protecting Bitcoin from malicious miners

Summary:

A proposal has been made to implement Malicious miner Reactive Proof of Work Additions (MR POWA) in Bitcoin. This would be a hard fork activated in response to a malicious attempt by a hashpower majority to introduce a contentious hard fork. The activation would occur once a fork was detected violating protocol with a majority of hashpower. The threshold and duration for activation would need to be carefully considered. Instead of eliminating SHA256 as a hashing method and changing POW entirely, the proposal is to introduce multiple new proofs of work that are already established and proven within existing altcoin implementations. As an example, Scrypt, Ethash and Equihash could be added. Much of the code and mining infrastructure already exists. Diversification of hardware, a mix of CPU and memory intensive methods, would also be positive for decentralisation. Initial difficulty could simply be an estimated portion of existing infrastructure.This means 4 proofs of work with 40 minute block target difficulty for each. There could also be a rule that two different proofs of work must find a block before a method can start hashing again. This means there would only be 50% of hardware hashing at a time, and a sudden gain or drop in hashpower from a particular method does not dramatically impact the functioning of the network between difficulty adjustments. This also adds protection from attacks by the malicious SHA256 hashpower which could even be required to wait until all other methods have found a block before being allowed to hash again. The proposal aims to prevent miners from having no idea when or if their profitability is going to be cut by 50-75% based on a whim. It is suggested that such centralisation poses a huge risk to the security of Bitcoin and preemptive action needs to be taken to protect the network from malicious actions by any party able to exert influence over a substantial portion of SHA256 hardware. The proposal suggests doing this gradually and pre-emptively, changing one at a time on a slow schedule, allowing a graceful transition. The proposal includes multiple secure hashes that can be implemented on GPU/CPU, but rotate through them - per block round robin. Miners with GPU/generalized hardware will always be in business. Hardware and infrastructure investment is protected. ASIC is not. Each PoW has different tracking metrics and difficulty adjustments. This means the difficulty adjust will be less accurate (1/8th the samples), but that's never been an issue. The proposal states that ASIC will never beat this because it will be 8x more expensive to maintain the cold circuits.

Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:14:34.584234+00:00