Author: Andrew Johnson 2017-03-20 16:10:32
Published on: 2017-03-20T16:10:32+00:00
John Hardy expressed his concern over the state of miner centralization in Bitcoin and suggested a preemptive action to protect the network from malicious actions by any party able to exert influence over a substantial portion of SHA256 hardware. He proposed implementing 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. Andrew Johnson agreed that Bitcoin only works if most miners are honest. However, he was worried about how much this proposal could change the economic incentives behind bitcoin mining since people might not be able to invest in hardware reliably without knowing their profitability. John Hardy suggested that instead of changing the POW entirely, they should introduce multiple new proofs of work that are already established and proven within existing altcoin implementations. As an example, Scrypt, Ethash, and Equihash could be added as hashing methods with 40-minute block target difficulty for each. This would mean four proofs of work, and two different proofs of work must find a block before a method can start hashing again. Furthermore, he suggested waiting until all other methods have found a block before allowing the malicious SHA256 hash power to hash again. The activation would occur once a fork was detected violating protocol with a majority of hash power. This solution would add protection from attacks by malicious SHA256 hash power and diversify hardware, which would be positive for decentralization. Such a hard fork could also introduce a block size increase since while hard forking it makes sense to minimize the number of future hard forks where possible. It could also activate SegWit if it hasn't already. MR POWA would just serve as a deterrent and never activate. Nodes would be able to upgrade, and MR POWA would automatically activate on non-upgraded nodes, but it would be of no economic significance.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:16:15.205941+00:00