Author: Anthony Towns 2021-04-17 11:47:17
Published on: 2021-04-17T11:47:17+00:00
A discussion on the possibility of transitioning to a proof-of-burn (POB) system for Bitcoin mining was initiated by Erik Aronesty via bitcoin-dev mailing list. The transition could involve validating nodes requiring proof-of-burn in addition to proof-of-work, leading to a drop in proof-of-work as it becomes more expensive for miners. Eventually, the required POB could increase to 100% of the required work to mine. However, it is unclear whether a hard fork would be necessary for this transition. While the proposed changes are technically a soft fork, they do not maintain the property that old software follows the same chain as new software once the difficulty of proof-of-work has dropped significantly. This could lead to old nodes switching to a cheaper chain without proof-of-burn while new nodes continue to follow the proof-of-burn chain. Therefore, it may be necessary for everyone to be running the new software by some date to ensure they follow the same chain. Jeremy suggests that hard deprecating the proof-of-work may be necessary for this transition to work effectively, as old miners may become "toxic waste", and one miner could ramp up difficulty for everyone else. It is assumed that the proof-of-burn system would have its own way of preventing burners from mining blocks too fast.
Updated on: 2023-05-21T02:18:30.423901+00:00