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

Summary:

The issue of miner centralization in Bitcoin is a concern for John Hardy, who believes it poses a significant risk to the security of Bitcoin. To protect the network against malicious actions taken by any party that can influence a substantial portion of SHA256 hardware, Hardy proposes implementing a Malicious Miner Reactive Proof of Work Additions (MR POWA). This would be a hard fork activated in response to a malicious attempt by a hashpower majority to introduce a contentious hard fork. The activation would occur once a fork was detected violating protocol with a majority of hashpower.Hardy suggests introducing multiple new proofs of work that are already established and proven within existing altcoin implementations instead of eliminating SHA256 as a hashing method and changing POW entirely. As an example, he suggests adding Scrypt, Ethash, and Equihash. Diversification of hardware, a mix of CPU and memory-intensive methods, would also be positive for decentralization. This example would mean 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. This means there would only be 50% of hardware hashing at a time, and a sudden gain or drop in hashpower from a particular method does not dramatically impact the functioning of the network between difficulty adjustments. 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. If successful, this should help prevent the same situation occurring in the future.

Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:14:59.766583+00:00