Interleaved Mining - Increase decentralization of full nodes and mining

[GamerSg]

50% of the minting & tx fees for block N would have to go to a valid stamp for block (N-3).  If there was more than 2 valid POS stamps (meets difficulty), then the strongest one would be used. 

I highly doubt that will sit well with miners today.
I suppose the way the protocol would work is that 50% of the reward will be locked up, to be awarded 3 blocks later to whoever stamps the block.

Some downsides i see are:
- POS miners will lose the chance to mine transactions, which would have introduced much greater diversity in transaction selection (Increase censorship resistance)
- Block propagation advantage would be lost.

Upside is that POW hashrate is not reduced due to idle time.

No it is just POS validation of the POW chain.  The purpose is to make it harder to do forks.

That is perhaps the most important goal of this scheme.
Hardening the blockchain would significantly increase the security of the blockchain and in turn greatly increase viability of Bitcoin being a long term Store of Value.

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[indstove]

Seems existing systems are working well. Why do you need all of these considerations. However, I'm willing to join this discussion later.

[GamerSg]

Seems existing systems are working well. Why do you need all of these considerations. However, I'm willing to join this discussion later.

Please read the first post for details, but in short there are few big goals

- Increase decentralisation of validation by incentivising full nodes
- Solve block propagation issues  by having smaller alternate blocks, allowing POW larger blocks without mining centralisation risk
- Prevent 51% POW mining attack

[Anduck]

This looks brilliant to me. Feels like this would be natural development for Bitcoin.

• This fixes the 51% attack problem.
• Increases the general reliability of the system as mining centralization risks would be gone and there would be an incentive to run a node.
• Normal nodes could also show their opinion about soft forks.
• Hard forking would be a lot harder, and it would be easy to see what actual nodes (with bitcoins) are "voting" for.

I think the best way to implement this scheme would be to change as little as possible of the current system. PoW blocks interval could be kept at 10 minutes target with same block & tx fee rewards as of today. PoS blocks could be made with with 10 or 20 minutes intervals. It would decrease the block interval slightly. PoS blocks would earn only through fees from the transactions they include. I heard it could be possible to do this without the need of keeping staking coins online, too, which makes this secure too.

With this scheme there could even be a possibility to implement properly working mechanism to adjust the blocksize limit. Nodes, which currently pay the costs of the network, would be able to vote for their preferred blocksize limit, or adjustment.

Please let me know if I fail here.

[Anduck]

Could the PoS blocks be used to determine the blocksize limit / capacity limit change? For example, if the system sees that there's too little coins being staked or too little amount of PoS blocks being generated, it decreases the limit. In other words, could this scheme be used to determine the safe capacity zone of Bitcoin?

[GamerSg]

This looks brilliant to me. Feels like this would be natural development for Bitcoin.

• This fixes the 51% attack problem.
• Increases the general reliability of the system as mining centralization risks would be gone and there would be an incentive to run a node.
• Normal nodes could also show their opinion about soft forks.
• Hard forking would be a lot harder, and it would be easy to see what actual nodes (with bitcoins) are "voting" for.

I think the best way to implement this scheme would be to change as little as possible of the current system. PoW blocks interval could be kept at 10 minutes target with same block & tx fee rewards as of today. PoS blocks could be made with with 10 or 20 minutes intervals. It would decrease the block interval slightly. PoS blocks would earn only through fees from the transactions they include. I heard it could be possible to do this without the need of keeping staking coins online, too, which makes this secure too.

With this scheme there could even be a possibility to implement properly working mechanism to adjust the blocksize limit. Nodes, which currently pay the costs of the network, would be able to vote for their preferred blocksize limit, or adjustment.

Please let me know if I fail here.

Yup, sounds like you fully understand the advantages and how it would work.

[GamerSg]

Could the PoS blocks be used to determine the blocksize limit / capacity limit change? For example, if the system sees that there's too little coins being staked or too little amount of PoS blocks being generated, it decreases the limit. In other words, could this scheme be used to determine the safe capacity zone of Bitcoin?

The issue with such a scheme is that you add yet another magic number into the protocol, potentially causing rifts as to what the right amount should be.

Also as the bitcoin economy grows, we should expect wealth concentration to continue to dilute over to a larger number of people. Many small holders would not be willing to spend resources to run a node if the probability of mining a block is miniscule. So i would expect the number of coins being staked to decrease as Bitcoin grows, kind of the opposite effect you are looking for.

Also, number of coins staked != number of different ppl mining

[dime2spend]

Wouldn't it be sufficient to replace the PoW sheme with something far more complicated than SHA-256 to kick all the big ASIC-farms out? Just replacing SHA2 with something that can't be put onto an ASIC for years to come would be an easy solution to distribute mining again as the mining could be done by those running full nodes again. Mining wouldn't be a business anymore but more a compensation for running a full-node all the time.
If then some ASICs should show up in the future the PoW could be changed again. This also rather helps to secure the network in the long run as I just don't see how huge ASIC-Farms in third world countries providing more then 50% of hashing-power help secure BTC.

[GamerSg]

Wouldn't it be sufficient to replace the PoW sheme with something far more complicated than SHA-256 to kick all the big ASIC-farms out? Just replacing SHA2 with something that can't be put onto an ASIC for years to come would be an easy solution to distribute mining again as the mining could be done by those running full nodes again. Mining wouldn't be a business anymore but more a compensation for running a full-node all the time.
If then some ASICs should show up in the future the PoW could be changed again. This also rather helps to secure the network in the long run as I just don't see how huge ASIC-Farms in third world countries providing more then 50% of hashing-power help secure BTC.

The goal is not to replace miners, that would be a violation of the social contract the protocol offered to miners.
Miners have invested large sums of money into protecting Bitcoin and screwing them is just not logical.

Also, as long as the current ASIC mining farms are protecting the chain, they are a great advantage as they greatly increase the barrier to attack the chain. The goal of the proposal is to leave revenue with them but diffuse political power by sharing it with stake holders. Or in other words, to increase diversity in miners so that 2-3 parties cannot hold the currency hostage.

[dime2spend]

The goal is not to replace miners, that would be a violation of the social contract the protocol offered to miners.
Miners have invested large sums of money into protecting Bitcoin and screwing them is just not logical.

I happen to disagree. The large miners have invested large sums of money in order to earn a lot of BTC.

Also, as long as the current ASIC mining farms are protecting the chain, they are a great advantage as they greatly increase the barrier to attack the chain. The goal of the proposal is to leave revenue with them but diffuse political power by sharing it with stake holders. Or in other words, to increase diversity in miners so that 2-3 parties cannot hold the currency hostage.

The large ASIC mining farms are theoretically protecting the chain with their enormous hashing power. But the main reason for their very existence is to make money they care only so much for BTC as it concerns their money making industry. In theory this hashing power should be supplied by a lot of decentralized miners but in reality this hashing power comes from a few huge miners. And that's not how it was meant to be in fact it's now almost how it shouldn't be as the big miners have more weight than anybody else.

I don't see how this could be changed more easily than by changing the PoW from SHA2 to something much more complex.