Author: yanmaani at cock.li 2021-05-17 05:17:54
Published on: 2021-05-17T05:17:54+00:00
A member of the Bitcoin community recently proposed a new Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm to reduce energy consumption while maintaining the network's robustness. The idea is to eliminate the need for miners to continue mining for nine minutes after the last block was found. This would incentivize miners to create chips that are idle for 50% of the time and work harder during the remaining 50%, requiring them to buy twice the chips to use the same amount of power. This proposal would increase operational costs for miners, with a greater portion spent on chips and a smaller portion on electricity. This reduces incentives to use cheaper power and turn off when it's expensive, making it difficult to recoup investments. To address this problem, the author suggests creating a PoW algorithm where power costs become a greater portion of miner expenditures by making chips easier to manufacture. This could also incentivize someone to find an NSA backdoor.To prevent pre-mining in the nine-minute window, the author suggests two possible ideas. One is to create a global network timer sending a salted hash time code after nine minutes, which enables validation by nodes. The other is to make mining jobs before nine minutes have a higher difficulty, making it more efficient to wait than pay high bills. This would give Bitcoin a "puls." While the author acknowledges that these ideas may not solve all problems, they offer a working solution to end energy fud without losing robustness.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T21:54:52.048288+00:00