Author: yanmaani at cock.li 2020-10-15 16:02:09
Published on: 2020-10-15T16:02:09+00:00
The proposal of Floating-Point Nakamoto Consensus (FPNC) is aimed at making the network better for the future by avoiding ambiguity and allowing determinism to take hold. The system works by assigning floating-point fitness values to blocks, which allows miners to have two equally valid options when mining a block with a high block reward but a floating point fitness very close to the minimum. They can either attempt to create a block building on top of that block or replace it. With the probability of this happening increasing as the block subsidy gets lower, the proposal incentivizes reorgs which can be problematic. However, the author argues that adding more bits of precision can avoid confusion in the system. This will allow the network to decide immediately without waiting for a chain to be further extended. When comparing two competing blocks, there is an indirect reference to a higher proof of work due to the greater precision in the block hash, although the total proof of work is not directly calculated. The proposal has nothing to do with SegWit, but it is an update that will make the network better for the future. Any blockchain using Nakamoto Consensus can be modified to use FPNC, and an example implementation has been written and submitted as a PR to the bitcoin core which is free to be adapted by other networks. The complete implementation of FPNC can be found in the links provided.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T15:35:19.982685+00:00