Properties of an ideal PoW algorithm & implementation



Summary:

The author of the context suggests using a repeated hashing method to prevent lossy implementations and relying on a single, simple crypto primitive such as blake2b. This primitive is conservative due to its large block size, which prevents asicboost-style attacks and eliminates the need for building logic for multiple blocks. Memory hard functions are currently effective but fail catastrophically when they do, limiting their use to hardware from a single vendor. The best PoW function for commodity mining hardware is repeatedly hashing with blake2b ten or a hundred times. Despite this, the author believes that hard forking the PoW function is a bad idea.


Updated on: 2023-06-12T00:29:48.476488+00:00