Author: Keagan McClelland 2021-03-06 00:41:36
Published on: 2021-03-06T00:41:36+00:00
A proposal has been made to upgrade the cryptography layer of Bitcoin's hashing algorithm, aiming to make it more efficient and secure. The proposed hybrid proof would be a Proof of Space and Time (PoST) that is cryptographically compatible with Proof of Work (PoW). This upgrade could prevent potential issues related to NP-Completeness or Halting that could arise in the future. The current hashing algorithm works well for CPU/ASIC-specific mining, but hard memory allocation wouldn't be beneficial. A hybrid mechanism for PoST and PoW would benefit a large portion of BTC that is already mined through AWS servers and non-ASIC specific hardware. However, proposing a hard fork in the hashing algorithm may disincentivize future capital expenditure into mining hardware that may compute these more "useful" proofs of work. It is critical for the work to be "useless" in order for the security model to remain the same. The proposal puts forth various benefits outside of efficiency, such as making Bitcoin more decentralized and preventing mathematical proofs from being broken. It could potentially require a soft fork or minor upgrade to its chain in the future.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T19:08:41.038959+00:00