Author: Ryan J Martin 2018-02-19 05:10:31
Published on: 2018-02-19T05:10:31+00:00
The author of the article, Greg Slepak, asserts that the use of timestamps in Bitcoin's blockchain may be unnecessary. He suggests an alternative difficulty adjustment algorithm that would maintain the same security guarantees without requiring miners to maintain global clock synchronization. This would involve modifying the block reward algorithm to issue coins into perpetuity with no maximum and tying the number of coins issued per block directly to the difficulty of the block.Miners would be free to mine blocks of whatever difficulty they choose, up to a maximum deviation, and the blockchain may at times produce blocks very quickly or more slowly. Powerful miners would be incentivized to raise the difficulty to remove competitors. The timestamp could still be included in blocks, but it would no longer need 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 most straightforward risk comes from the potential increase in total transaction throughput that such a change would introduce, which could result in additional centralization pressures on miners and full nodes. Two possible mitigations are introducing state checkpoints into the chain itself and creating a sharded protocol where each shard uses a sufficiently different PoW algorithm.Overall, the author suggests that attempting to make these changes to the existing Bitcoin blockchain would be a non-starter and proposes instead forking to a new coin.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T00:46:54.262147+00:00