Author: Zac Greenwood 2021-05-16 15:30:22
Published on: 2021-05-16T15:30:22+00:00
In an email to Michael Fuhrmann via bitcoin-dev, Zac argues that his proposal won't save any energy because it does nothing to decrease the budget available to mine a block. Even if it were technically possible to find a way for nodes to reach consensus on a hash generated after 9 minutes, all it achieves is that miners will be expending the entire budget given to them in the form of the block reward within a single minute on average. The energy expenditure of Bitcoin is a fundamental part of its design and an attacker has no other option than to expend as much as half of all the miners together do in order for a sustained 51% attack to be successful, making such attack uneconomical. Michael Fuhrmann had sent an email to bitcoin-dev suggesting that miners need not mine the 9 minutes after the last block was found, as Bitcoin should create blocks every 10 minutes on average. He proposed two ideas to prevent "pre-mining" in the 9 minutes time window. The first idea was a global network timer sending a salted hash time code after 9 minutes that enabled validation by nodes. The second idea was mining jobs before 9 minutes have a higher difficulty, making it more efficient to wait than pay high bills. However, Zac argues that he may not have seen all the problems behind these ideas, but if a working solution were found, the energy fud would end without losing robustness.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T21:54:36.375374+00:00