Author: Justus Ranvier 2014-06-16 17:07:24
Published on: 2014-06-16T17:07:24+00:00
The email conversation discusses the possibility of a lottery system that involves limiting the number of "lottery tickets" any given individual could acquire without any resource-limiting factors like proof of work or proof of stake. It is argued that Bitcoin mining was invented to overcome the Sybil problem, which allowed computer scientists to limit the number of lottery tickets any given individual could acquire, but a similar problem could arise in this new lottery system. However, if pay-to-play networks were included in the solution set, it would be easier to find a solution. The proposed solution involves every node competing with its peers in terms of relevancy, established by delivering newly-seen transactions first. Each node keeps track of which of its peers send it transactions that it hadn't seen and forwarded to them yet, and uses that information to determine whether it should be paying that peer, or if that peer should be paying it, or if they are equal relevancy and no net payment is required. Once any given pair of nodes can establish who, if anyone, should be paying, they could use micropayment channels to handle payments. The market for the service of delivering transaction information would be established, and price signals would properly match supply and demand. Nodes that are well-connected and with high uptimes would end up being net recipients of payments while mobile nodes and other low-uptime nodes would be net payers. People who hate market-based solutions could always run these nodes and configure them to refuse to pay anyone and charge nothing to their peers if that's what they wanted.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T00:09:29.652077+00:00