Author: Peter Todd 2022-08-01 13:37:47
Published on: 2022-08-01T13:37:47+00:00
In an email exchange between two developers, the idea of attaching work to low fee transactions was discussed as a possible compensation or spam prevention method. However, both scenarios were found to be vulnerable to ASICs. The compensation scenario involved wallets committing to the latest blockchain state in a transaction and attaching work, which would contribute to security and receive fee discounts or exemptions based on the offset of the state committed to and the amount of work attached. The scheme would be difficult to balance with ASICs since miners could easily seize subsidies for themselves. The alternative broadcast scheme would not be a consensus system, but rather a way to rate-limit access to a network used by a small minority of nodes. The PoW algorithm could be changed if someone builds an ASIC for it, and multiple versions of the scheme could run in parallel.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T23:23:19.069707+00:00