Published on: 2014-05-05T20:27:08+00:00
In an email thread dated 2nd May 2014, Sergio Lerner proposed a new mining protocol that would include 'uncle' blocks in the reward system. Joseph Bonneau raised two concerns regarding this idea. Firstly, he questioned whether the parent block would receive one unit of the reward while the uncle block would receive 0.5 units or if both would receive 0.5 units. Sergio confirmed that the latter was the correct interpretation.Secondly, Bonneau suggested that including uncle blocks could encourage kickback-style attacks where miners ignore uncles to avoid sharing the reward, which would favor large mining pools. However, Sergio refuted this suggestion by stating that including an uncle block can be done at any time before a coinbase matures (100 blocks). Therefore, it is difficult for a miner to prevent other miners from including the uncle and taking the reward given by uncle inclusion. Furthermore, he argued that a big miner trying to bribe all other miners not to include the uncle would be too costly.Joseph Bonneau also expressed concern about the method used to break ties between blocks A and B in the DECOR protocol. He suggested that hashing the blocks to decide the "winner" would allow miners to predict their block's likelihood of winning a collision by looking at how high or low its hash is, leading to selfish mining. Instead, he proposed seeing if H(A||B) could be used to determine in advance if a block is likely to win a collision. However, Sergio believed that selfish miners cannot get any advantage in the DECOR protocol since the blocks that lose the latency race will come back as uncles and get their reward share anyway.In a blog post titled "Decor," author Sergio Lerner discusses a method of decorating Bitcoin transaction messages in order to add personalization and privacy. Lerner proposes a format for these decorated transaction messages, which includes a unique identifier followed by the desired message and a checksum for verification purposes. This method can increase privacy by making it more difficult for third parties to link transactions together.Lerner provides examples of how this method could be used, including adding a personalized message to a donation transaction or indicating the reason for a payment. He also suggests that businesses could use this method to include additional information about their products or services in transaction messages. Overall, Lerner argues that this method of decorating Bitcoin transaction messages adds a level of personalization and privacy to the Bitcoin network, and encourages others to adopt this method.The Bonneau's Kickbacks problem is an interesting issue as it creates a destabilizing incentive. A way to prevent Kickbacks and provide a conflict resolution strategy that benefits all members of the network has been found.The GHOST protocol is a paper that addresses the Bitcoin block-chain design and aims to achieve higher TPS securely by changing the way nodes decide which is the best chain fork. However, one issue not considered in the paper is the existence of a selfish bias independent of the miner’s hashing power. Double-betting is a mining strategy pre-programmed in the Satoshi reference miner. If two competing miners could detect the other miners' identity in blocks, they could apply a cooperative strategy like Tit for Tat.DECOR (DEterministic COnflict Resolution) is a reward strategy that incentives resolving conflicts in a deterministic way that benefits all conflicting miners at the same time. It practically eliminates any possible block-chain reversal when miners are rational. The DECOR strategy can be implemented along with the GHOST protocol. Using both protocols together, along with route optimizations proposed here, maybe 2000 TPS can be achieved today.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T09:09:53.095741+00:00