Author: Troy Benjegerdes 2014-03-28 15:10:30
Published on: 2014-03-28T15:10:30+00:00
The situation in which a single entity controls 40% of the hashing power should be rare and potentially dangerous for Bitcoin. There is a single entity, possibly a cartel, that effectively controls between 30% and 50% of the sha-256 hashing power and is quite terrified of any alternative. A system is needed in which 1 to 10% of the hashrate can provide reasonable check-and-balance and competitive pressure to 90% of the hash rate, or it will be fundamentally unstable. Hashing algorithms are often mixed in discussions against merged mining. If an algorithm hardfork change was introduced, something with similar properties to SHA256 would probably be chosen like being easy to implement specialized hardware for it. Unfortunately, people often use the fallacy that ASIC resistance promotes decentralization when any information machine built with software can also be built with specialized hardware and vice versa. The ecological crime of starting a new chain with no plans of doing merged mining represents a real issue without proposing any mechanism in which the ecologically correct thing is also the economically rational thing. To address this problem, a secure mechanism is proposed to audit energy sources for miners on a new chain called 'Ecocoin' in which the block reward is proportional to how much energy the owner of the newly generated block reward personally harvested from renewable sources. The reward curve will have to be calibrated and adjusted to minimize the overall costs and fraud risk of auditing the energy input sources.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T15:48:10.263130+00:00