Author: Adam Back 2013-05-11 10:22:09
Published on: 2013-05-11T10:22:09+00:00
The discussion revolves around the possibility of merging bitcoin/hashcash mining with email to combat spam. It is suggested that by including the head of the bitcoin hash chain in email headers, merged stamps could be created. These stamps can act as an anti-spam measure and serve the same purpose as destroyed coins. By putting the bitcoin hash in DNS, clients can read it to reduce scope for stale mining.In addition to this, Rivest's PayWord is discussed as a potential mechanism for low-value micro-payments. The idea of making DoS attacks expensive enough that they are impractical is also brought up. The coinbase txout hashcash mechanism can force attackers to contribute to the security of the Bitcoin network or incur much higher opportunity costs for conducting their attack than honest nodes pay.PowPay is introduced as a method of making transactions that can provide greater scalability than Bitcoin. However, it is still limited in terms of actual fund transfers to recipients per second. PowPay allows the sender to provide the recipient with rewards and transaction fees but subject to the constraint that only blocks generated by the sender can be used to spend them. Eliminating PoW withholding is possible through structural incentives. A nonce N is chosen by the party paying for the PoW, such as a pool or PowPay recipient, and H(n) is included in the block header. The PoW function is then modified to consider the PoW valid if the sum of the expected hashes required to find H(B) and H(B | n) exceeds the current difficulty target. The analysis of this strange mixed bag of incentives is highly complex. The exact nature of relationships required to pay for mining is beyond the scope of this paper.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T16:46:40.091140+00:00