Floating-Point Nakamoto Consensus

Summary:

An email thread is discussing the proposed 'Floating-Point Nakamoto Consensus' and its potential benefits to Bitcoin's network. The proposal addresses the issue of short-term disagreements that can lead to reorganization of the blockchain by making it more expensive to replace an already mined block versus creating a new one. This resolves ambiguity in competitive solutions, incentivizes correct network behavior, and prevents disagreement from forming in the first place. The email also highlights how Nakamoto Consensus operates and the security threats associated with it, such as malicious miners exploiting denial-of-service vulnerabilities to gain an unfair advantage. The proposal aims to provide stability and determinism to the network, which is crucial for DeFi and smart-contract obligations.The consensus algorithm allows for a more efficient resolution of disagreements in a decentralized blockchain network by adding a fitness test to the traditional Nakamoto Consensus. This fitness value is calculated based on the hash of the block and ensures that any competing solutions are compared, with the most fit solution being chosen as the winner. The dominance of the winning chain is cemented and incentivizes miners to support the dominant chain, preserving global consensus.The algorithm uses a soft fork, making it compatible with existing nodes, and can be empirically derived from the existing proof-of-work, ensuring universality and identical verification by all nodes. It is less susceptible to 51% attacks and Byzantine fault injection than traditional Nakamoto Consensus, thereby improving network stability. Overall, Floating-Point Nakamoto Consensus is a promising solution for improving consensus generation in blockchain networks and has been submitted as a PR to the Bitcoin core for adaptation by other networks.A pull request for Bitcoin's codebase has been made on GitHub, with the changes aiming to implement a new consensus mechanism called Floating Point Nakamoto Consensus. The proposed mechanism is detailed in a research paper available on GitHub by InBlock Technologies, a blockchain development company which has also launched InSt, a digital asset trading platform. The paper suggests that using floating-point arithmetic could improve scalability and efficiency while maintaining security.

Updated on: 2023-06-14T15:32:46.014679+00:00