Malice Reactive Proof of Work Additions (MR POWA): Protecting Bitcoin from malicious miners

Summary:

The author is concerned about the state of miner centralisation in Bitcoin and believes that preemptive action needs to be taken to protect the network from malicious actions by any party able to exert influence over a substantial portion of SHA256 hardware. The author proposes the implementation of a Malicious miner Reactive Proof of Work Additions (MR POWA), which would be a hard fork activated in response to a malicious attempt by a hashpower majority to introduce a contentious hard fork. Instead of eliminating SHA256 as a hashing method and changing POW entirely, the author suggests introducing multiple new proofs of work that are already established and proven within existing altcoin implementations such as Scrypt, Ethash, and Equihash. This diversification of hardware would also be positive for decentralisation. Under MR POWA, there would be four proofs of work with 40-minute block target difficulty for each. There could also be a rule that two different proofs of work must find a block before a method can start hashing again to ensure that only 50% of hardware is hashing at a time. This adds protection from attacks by the malicious SHA256 hashpower. Such a hard fork could also introduce a block size increase since it makes sense to minimize the number of future hard forks where possible. It could also activate SegWit if it hasn’t already. The author believes that this method creates a huge risk to any malicious actor trying to abuse their position and would serve as a deterrent. If consensus were to form around a hard fork in the future, nodes would be able to upgrade and MR POWA, while automatically activating on non-upgraded nodes, would be of no economic significance: a vestigial chain immediately abandoned with no miner incentive. Overall, the author sees this as a great way to help prevent malicious use of hashpower to harm the network and emphasizes that the beauty of Bitcoin lies in the fact that for any roadblock that emerges, the economic majority can always find a way around it.

Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:16:39.911795+00:00