Published on: 2018-02-21T21:58:10+00:00
The email conversation explores the idea of modifying the Bitcoin blockchain to address concerns about state checkpoints and full node verification. The proposal suggests creating a new protocol that solves these issues rather than being limited by Bitcoin's current design constraints. However, Damian Williamson raises concerns that new full nodes may not have complete knowledge of utxo's if large sections of the blockchain are skipped during verification.Another proposal suggests removing timestamps from the Bitcoin blockchain's difficulty adjustment algorithm. The author argues that timestamps may be unnecessary for the blockchain to operate with the same level of security. Under this proposal, miners would have the freedom to mine blocks of any difficulty they choose, up to a certain maximum deviation. This could incentivize powerful miners to raise the difficulty and remove competitors. While timestamps could still be included in blocks, they would no longer represent anything significant other than metadata about when the block was produced.This alternative difficulty adjustment algorithm carries some risks, including potential centralization pressures. To mitigate these risks, two solutions are proposed. One is introducing state checkpoints into the chain itself, which would allow full nodes to skip verification of large sections of historical data when booting up. The other solution is implementing a sharded protocol that uses a sufficiently different Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm. These mitigations aim to address concerns about centralization pressures on both miners and full nodes.A member of the Bitcoin community suggests that the Y% difficulty adjustment should still be calculated through an averaging of a certain number N of past blocks. This suggestion aims to prevent a network halt caused by two lucky high difficulty blocks in a row. They also propose a logarithmic scaling reward function based on past average difficulty and the total number of mined coins. This function could discourage mining blocks with excessively large difficulties while still maintaining the 21 million coin cap.While these proposals generate discussions within the Bitcoin community, it is important to note that there are no concrete plans mentioned to modify Bitcoin in the thread. Greg Slepak, the author of the article, suggests that attempting to make these changes to the existing Bitcoin blockchain would be a non-starter and proposes forking to a new coin as an alternative.In summary, Greg Slepak questions the necessity of timestamps in Bitcoin's blockchain and proposes an alternative difficulty adjustment algorithm. This algorithm ties the number of coins issued per block directly to the difficulty of the block. However, implementing such a system may introduce risks, including centralization pressures on miners and full nodes. Mitigations such as state checkpoints and a sharded protocol using a different PoW algorithm are suggested. While these proposals generate discussions, there are no concrete plans mentioned to modify Bitcoin in the thread. Greg Slepak ultimately suggests forking to a new coin instead of modifying the existing Bitcoin blockchain.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T22:45:05.494815+00:00