Author: Peter Todd 2017-06-19 18:31:54
Published on: 2017-06-19T18:31:54+00:00
A proposal has been made to change the Proof of Work (PoW) system in case of potential 51% attacks from malicious miners during a fork. However, such a change would render multi-billion-dollar investments in ASICs worthless and hurt the economy and innocent mining users. Instead of changing PoW, it is suggested to mix it with Proof of Stake (PoS) features to create a PoW+PoS system that protects existing investments, prevents malicious attacks, solves long confirmation time and scaling problems, and maintains the 21M cap on transaction fees. It is noted that existing pure PoS schemes may not make sense as an add-on, and careful design is required for PoW+PoS transition to be deployed with a soft fork. While pure-PoS is fundamentally broken in a decentralized setting, adding PoS block approval mechanisms may be possible to mitigate its problems with PoW and get a stronger security model than PoW alone. Discussions about this type of approach have been ongoing since around 2014 on the #bitcoin-wizards IRC channels.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T02:46:49.978128+00:00