Proposal: Force to do nothing for first 9 minutes to save 90% of mining energy

Summary:

The proposed solution suggests the implementation of a clock on a peer network level, which would require inclusion of a transaction broadcasted after a 9-minute delay. Though this solution is workable, it appears to be somewhat difficult at present. Typically, a 50% hashrate attack is required to reverse a transaction in Bitcoin, but with the proposed change, this seems to become a 5% hashrate attack, provided a second source of truth around time and order is added to verify proposed histories with. However, performing a 5% hashrate attack would be much harder as users of mining pools would be mining only 10% of the time, making compromising mining pools less useful. Hashrate has historically been increasing exponentially, implying that the difficulty of performing an attack, whether it is 5% or 50%, is still culturally infeasible due to being a multiplicative rather than an exponential change. If this approach were to be implemented, it would be important to consider how many block confirmations people wait for to trust their transaction is on the chain. A lone powerful miner could intentionally fork the chain more easily by a factor of 10, but they would need to have hashrate that competes with a major pool to do so.Regarding the concern of miners already computing the simpler difficulty problem directly after the block was found and publishing their solution directly after minute 9, such a chain would have to wait a longer time to add further blocks and would permanently be shorter. A claim was made that the proposal wouldn't save any energy because it does nothing to decrease the budget available to mine a block (i.e., the block reward). However, this assumption overlooks that if energy is only expended for 10% of the same duration, this money must now be spent on hardware. In the long term, a 10% decrease is a stop-gap measure, and things will be different in a lot of other ways too as we will have quantum computers and AI-designed cryptography algorithms.

Updated on: 2023-06-14T21:53:33.232019+00:00