How to Improve Mining Efficiency

[SapphireSpire]

The main obstacle for adoption right now is energy consumption and waste.  The main source of waste in Bitcoin is the competitive aspect of it's POW protocol.  Miners compete by doing the same work in parallel but it's only the miners who win whose work contributes to the security of the blockchain, the rest is wasted.

After examining the BIPs on github, the only one that even attempts to address efficiency is BIP 52 and it's about using optical chips.

The most straightforward way to improve the efficiency of Bitcoin is to eliminate competition and this can be done in one of three ways:

1. Focus all mining work on the same block by getting all miners to work for the same pool, or create a super pool that consolidates the work of all mining pools.  This would distribute block rewards most fairly but it would reduce energy consumption the least as the minimum work required for a share of the block rewards would only discourage the slowest miners from participating.  This can be adjusted though.

2. Employ some kind of dice roll or rock-paper-scissor scheme to select a miner at random who then does the actual work alone.  This would greatly reduce energy consumption but it would not distribute block rewards as fairly as solution #1.  Hash power would no longer effect a miner's odds of winning so this would eliminate mining pools.

3. Yet another idea is to have nodes announce their intent to mine (register) and wait their turn in a queue.  This would reduce energy consumption as much as solution #2 and it would distribute block rewards more fairly over time and it would eliminate mining pools.

[Hydrogen]

Moore's law and the doubling of transistors on a given die size, will improve mining efficiency, as long as it remains a relative constant.

Proof of work energy expenditure could be considered collateral or intrinsic backing of crypto assets. No energy is wasted in this process, all of it is directed towards guaranteeing the reliability and security of the infrastructure. If the us dollar is backed by more than 4,000 tons of gold in fort knox. Then bitcoin could be backed by the electrical consumption of its mining sector as proof of its reliability.

There are existing forks of bitcoin, like bitcoin cash. I would like supporters of bitcoin proof of stake mining, forking bitcoin to a PoS variant. It would essentially be a more vulnerable and less reliable fork of BTC. The question is, what would anyone do with a less reliable and more vulnerable bitcoin. What would the motive for it be.

[jackg]

The main obstacle for adoption right now is energy consumption and waste.

 

It really isn't.

The main obstacles are its lack of mainstream acceptance/adoption by companies, usability problems and its newness.

1. Focus all mining work on the same block by getting all miners to work for the same pool, or create a super pool that consolidates the work of all mining pools.  This would distribute block rewards most fairly but it would reduce energy consumption the least as the minimum work required for a share of the block rewards would only discourage the slowest miners from participating.  This can be adjusted though.

You want to take trustless decentralisation and make it "trustworthy centralisation"?
Mining pools don't use much energy to run, it's the miners that do.

2. Employ some kind of dice roll or rock-paper-scissor scheme to select a miner at random who then does the actual work alone.  This would greatly reduce energy consumption but it would not distribute block rewards as fairly as solution #1.  Hash power would no longer effect a miner's odds of winning so this would eliminate mining pools.

If you're not implementing some sort of pow, I'm going to get a computer and make 64^2 virtual machines and claim I want to mine, then others will start dojng the same and soon we'll get miners exclusively for making low resources VMs that use the same energy as current miners do.

3. Yet another idea is to have nodes announce their intent to mine (register) and wait their turn in a queue.  This would reduce energy consumption as much as solution #2 and it would distribute block rewards more fairly over time and it would eliminate mining pools.

This is PoS and it is already being done. If you think it's the future, just invest in a PoS coin.

[stompix]

Haven't you come up with a new name for this one yet?
How was it, Proof of Validation, Proof of Advanced Delegation, so Proof of Destruction now?

1. Focus all mining work on the same block by getting all miners to work for the same pool, or create a super pool that consolidates the work of all mining pools.  This would distribute block rewards most fairly but it would reduce energy consumption the least as the minimum work required for a share of the block rewards would only discourage the slowest miners from participating.  This can be adjusted though.

No, it won't as the same amount of reward is distributed based on the corresponding hashes created, nobody will turn off their miners because it will mean they are losing money. Miners burn energy because for each spent cent for that they get x cents in return,  if suddenly for 1 cent they would get 1 $ everyone would be plugging more and more miners, not dropping out.

And I don't understand what slow miners are and not why they would be discouraged.

2. Employ some kind of dice roll or rock-paper-scissor scheme to select a miner at random who then does the actual work alone.  This would greatly reduce energy consumption but it would not distribute block rewards as fairly as solution #1.  Hash power would no longer effect a miner's odds of winning so this would eliminate mining pools.

It will simply mean miners will create a lot of solo workers for each miner and a lot of people will plug in a ton of USB sticks, mining will stop becoming profitable for large miners, you're going to see a drop in hashrate, and with all the discarded gear sold at scrap metal price anybody with a few bucks could launch a 51% attacks on the network.

3. Yet another idea is to have nodes announce their intent to mine (register) and wait their turn in a queue.  

This is not even PoS as jackg said, it's worse than it, making ques for it it's one of the weirdest ideas I've seen, it would be so centralized you could drop the whole confirmation and blocks thing, just rebrand it as visa 2.0.

Moore's law and the doubling of transistors on a given die size, will improve mining efficiency, as long as it remains a relative constant.

Efficiency doesn't mean lower consumption, if BTC goes to 100k you will see people spending more money on gear as those are more profitable ending with more gear and more consumption despite being more efficient.
You will simply get more hashrate for the same $ but the running costs out of which the biggest chunk is electricity is tied to the daily reward.