Author: Tao Effect 2018-02-19 01:29:50
Published on: 2018-02-19T01:29:50+00:00
The author, Greg Slepak, questions the necessity of timestamps in Bitcoin's blockchain and poses the hypothesis that it may not be required for maintaining global clock synchronization. He suggests an alternative difficulty adjustment algorithm that ties the number of coins issued per block directly to the difficulty of the block and removes the concept of "epochs" or "block reward halving". Miners are free to mine blocks of any difficulty they choose, with a maximum deviation of 20% from the previous block. The chain selection rule remains "chain with most proof of work". An equilibrium will be naturally reached to produce blocks at a rate that should minimize orphans. A timestamp may still be included in blocks, but it no longer needs to be used for anything significant other than metadata about when the miner claims to have produced the block.However, such a system may introduce risks that require further modification of the protocol to mitigate. The removal of timestamps would allow a cartel of miners to produce high-difficulty blocks at a fast rate, potentially resulting in additional centralization pressures not only on miners but also on full nodes who then would have greater difficulty keeping up with the additional bandwidth and storage demands. Two mitigations exist to address this - introducing state checkpoints into the chain itself could make it possible for full nodes to skip verification of large sections of historical data when booting up, or a sharded protocol where each shard uses a "sufficiently different" PoW algorithm would create an exit for users should the primary blockchain become captured by a cartel providing poor quality-of-service. The author ends the article with a disclaimer requesting not to email him anything that one is not comfortable sharing with the NSA.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T05:14:41.788675+00:00