Author: Damian Williamson 2018-09-15 22:45:55
Published on: 2018-09-15T22:45:55+00:00
The email conversation between Andrew and Damian Williamson revolves around the topic of selfish mining prevention. Andrew proposes a solution to prevent various types of attacks, including selfish mining, by introducing the concept of "reserve fees". Under this proposal, when a user makes a transaction, they can add parameters that specify the fraction of the total fee that is held in "reserve" and the time it is held in "reserve". This reserve part of the fee will be paid to miners if the hashrate rises, incentivizing them to not drive out competition and to maintain a stable hashrate. However, Damian expresses concern about incentivizing global resource consumption and harming the environment but Andrew argues that centralization of energy does more harm than total energy consumption. He also allows for changing environmental conditions by measuring only the peak hashrate of the past year, instead of the full history of blocks. Damian suggests focusing on approaches that stifle greed and make mining more decentralized and competitive. He says lower hashrates are acceptable as long as the network is protected from large switch-ons. He also suggests other thoughts to approach greed that he has not yet made formal, unrelated to Andrew's proposal. While Andrew agrees that preventing greed should be a priority, he is PoW oriented and believes his proposal would work well alongside a dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm. Finally, Andrew provides a link to bitcointalk where he discusses his proposal in detail and asks for feedback on potential flaws.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T14:39:20.103871+00:00