[ANN] Bitcoin PoW Upgrade Initiative

[hobbes]

Alternative that doesn't screw over the all the miners.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833046.0

....yeah... I don't think that works... For reasons others commented in the thread.

Keep working on it though-- the mutually assured destruction angle seems interesting. It may be possible to salvage the concept. I might even give it a few cycles.

Regarding deterrence it would be cool to change the PoW algorithm at the same moment BU activates.

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[jaybny]

Alternative that doesn't screw over the all the miners.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833046.0

....yeah... I don't think that works... For reasons others commented in the thread.

Keep working on it though-- the mutually assured destruction angle seems interesting. It may be possible to salvage the concept. I might even give it a few cycles.

there is something here - its about "scaring" miners to stop signaling BU .. hope someone else can run w this idea.. changing POW is a bad idea - it will push all "good" miners  to BU

[jaybny]

Alternative that doesn't screw over the all the miners.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833046.0

....yeah... I don't think that works... For reasons others commented in the thread.

Keep working on it though-- the mutually assured destruction angle seems interesting. It may be possible to salvage the concept. I might even give it a few cycles.

Regarding deterrence it would be cool to change the PoW algorithm at the same moment BU activates.

yes, as a poison pill, that will stop it from happening on the first place

[gollum2133]

LOL. Core has offially jumped off the deep end. This proposal is insanity.

Can't win the vote by means that were established since 2009, and for good reasons (The Byzantine Generals Problem) - No Problem! Let's just change the way voting works.

You guys just proved that YOU are the ones trying to take control over Bitcoin. YOU are the ones trying to centralize it. You should be ashamed of yourselves for this blatant attempt to hijack the blockchain.

Go fuck yourselves, you dimwitted fanatics. But what did I even expect from people like luke-jr that officially stated that the Sun orbits around the Earth, and not vice versa? It's like talking to someone that's never even been to a school before.

But hey, be my guest, have fun with your centralized altcoin controlled by Blockstream. Great choice!

FYI: There aren't even any real developers contributing to this proposal - because they are not insane. Nobody with half a brain would put his name under this stinking turd of mental diarrhea. This is merely a marketing ploy to stir up shit. Luke-jr is not a developer, and he is far from being renowned. He's a religious fanatic that's paid to spread propaganda in Core's bitcoin reddit. I can provide you some of his quotes if you're interested. In short, he said that the death sentence is justified, that slavery is not immoral, that gays should not be allowed to marry, that the Sun orbits around the Earth, that masturbation and any kind of sexual relation not leading to procreation is a sin, and many more nonsensical statements like these.

Just google "luke-jr insane religious fanatic best-of quotes" or take a look at this reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/4936kw/lukejr_is_a_seriously_a_super_crazy_person_quotes/ - This guy has some messed up views. He is certainly not a developer or contributor. He is just trying to stir shit up because Core is becoming desperate since it's become inevitable that SegWit will not be activated.

[tenletters]

... I think a large enough economic majority will make the current miners come along in a UASF.  The miners have no interest in mining worthless coins after all.

Sturle, I am not an expert cryptocurrency programmer, but on the topic of business I feel qualified to comment: as a KnC exec said during their company's dying swan song, it's unlikely the Chinese mining operations would be able to operate at their margins unless the Chinese miners receive virtually unlimited funding from a state-level entity (e.g. the government of China or perhaps the PBoC).

Many of the people in those original reddit threads expressed concerns about Bitmain's disregard for market cap (e.g. Jihan Wu going unhinged, saying ""These stupid c*nts are going to be caught unprepared for the complex circumstances in which the fork is going to occur." source).

Recently, in the face of Bitfinex releasing tokens for people to speculate on the future value of forked variants (with BitcoinCoreCoin being valued around 0.8 BTC, and BitcoinUnlimitedCoin valued around 0.125 BTC), Jihan doubled down (and dropped the market cap a good $1 billion or so) by threatening to accelerate the BU hard fork.

That is why I suspect Bitmain does not simply want to gain control of Bitcoin, they are paid by governments to actually see to its destruction (economically).

In my view, the best way to remove Bitmain and other tyrants (for a year or two) is to have the full PoW change, rather than having 50% SHA-256 and 50% a new algorithm.

OTOH, yes I feel regret about the economic harm it would do to the non-tyrannical miners; maybe it's worth keeping say a 15% weighing of SHA-256 work so they are not totally wiped out.

I think a hardfork change is too drastic, and will certainly end in a contentious hard fork.  A POW change light can be implemented as a soft fork by a requirement for an extra proof of work of a different type in the coinbase transaction or in another special transaction.  This will encourage cooperation between miners having lots of specialized SHA256 hardware and users mining the extra proof of work on their CPUs.

Good thoughts but miners will never approve this proposal with BIP 9 and I doubt even 51% so would need to be a UASF , whicj will likely end up as a HF only . This proposal is more of a HF in reaction to a 51% attack from miners which would not be as controversial.

The current miners will still have a huge advantage with the extra-POW soft-fork model, since SHA256 hashing power as well is required to find blocks, so I think a large enough economic majority will make the current miners come along in a UASF.  The miners have no interest in mining worthless coins after all.  They will have to share their power and some of their income with CPU miners, since none of them can operate alone, but will likely still have most of the payout.  It is easier to recruit another CPU miner for peanuts, than getting enough ASIC hashing power to compete at the current difficulty.  The most challenging task here is to find the right balance between first and second POW difficulty, and how to adjust this autonomously in a way compatible with the current difficulty adjustment scheme.

[tenletters]

there is something here - its about "scaring" miners to stop signaling BU .. hope someone else can run w this idea.. changing POW is a bad idea - it will push all "good" miners  to BU

Yes, I noticed that BitFury has been sending their people to meet with Bitmain recently; maybe they are feeling a bit nervous due in part to this PoW talk.

[jaybny]

there is something here - its about "scaring" miners to stop signaling BU .. hope someone else can run w this idea.. changing POW is a bad idea - it will push all "good" miners  to BU

Yes, I noticed that BitFury has been sending their people to meet with Bitmain recently; maybe they are feeling a bit nervous due in part to this PoW talk.

some kind of financial incentive to non BU signaling miners is a must. also I think there are two separate issues

1) how to avoid the fork
2) how to defend against attack post fork

starting the convo with POW change will not help to stop the fork

maybe we change from "PoW Upgrade initiative" to "Defending Bitcoin initiative" 
 

[UK-Coin]

LOL. Core has offially jumped off the deep end. This proposal is insanity.

Can't win the vote by means that were established since 2009, and for good reasons (The Byzantine Generals Problem) - No Problem! Let's just change the way voting works.

You guys just proved that YOU are the ones trying to take control over Bitcoin. YOU are the ones trying to centralize it. You should be ashamed of yourselves for this blatant attempt to hijack the blockchain.

Go fuck yourselves, you dimwitted fanatics. But what did I even expect from people like luke-jr that officially stated that the Sun orbits around the Earth, and not vice versa? It's like talking to someone that's never even been to a school before.

But hey, be my guest, have fun with your centralized altcoin controlled by Blockstream. Great choice!

FYI: There aren't even any real developers contributing to this proposal - because they are not insane. Nobody with half a brain would put his name under this stinking turd of mental diarrhea. This is merely a marketing ploy to stir up shit. Luke-jr is not a developer, and he is far from being renowned. He's a religious fanatic that's paid to spread propaganda in Core's bitcoin reddit. I can provide you some of his quotes if you're interested. In short, he said that the death sentence is justified, that slavery is not immoral, that gays should not be allowed to marry, that the Sun orbits around the Earth, that masturbation and any kind of sexual relation not leading to procreation is a sin, and many more nonsensical statements like these.

Just google "luke-jr insane religious fanatic best-of quotes" or take a look at this reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/4936kw/lukejr_is_a_seriously_a_super_crazy_person_quotes/ - This guy has some messed up views. He is certainly not a developer or contributor. He is just trying to stir shit up because Core is becoming desperate since it's become inevitable that SegWit will not be activated.

THIS!!! So fucking much!

There will be no PoW change, this is merely a propaganda act by Blockstream to spread FUD about Bitcoin Unlimited. Core is about to lose the vote and now they're butthurt about it.

And luke-jr is a despicable idiot. Nothing more. Certainly not a developer of or contributor to anything, other than outdated views and retarded ideas.

[tenletters]

Zooko, I appreciate the information-driven post. I think we should attempt to model this discussion on an empirical approach...

Everyone, I am not the judge here, but I would like to offer a ranking of different types of communications, from most to least valuable:

(1) Empirical data - Tests, competitive benchmarks between PoW algorithms when merged with Bitcoin codebase, accurate descriptions of vulnerabilities/exploits with sample code.

(2) Analysis of data - Identification and further extrapolation of patterns in data, technical critique of methods used in tests, model-based predictions of outcomes of tests (if the tests themselves are too resource/labor intensive to actually carry out)

(3) Interpretation of results - Discussion (with proof/justification) of what the results and analysis of the tests will mean for the Bitcoin market cap, decentralization, censorship-resistance, and any new vulnerabilities.

(4) Broader discussion - Including discussion of businesses related to Bitcoin, quotes by notable personalities relevant to Bitcoin, regulations and other activities of governments with respect to Bitcoin, and what implications these things have for the PoW project.

========================

If you're looking for a new Proof-of-Work, I can recommend the Equihash Proof-of-Work that we selected for Zcash.

We studied Proof-of-Work functions for a long time, chose Equihash (https://z.cash/blog/why-equihash.html), hired a legendary hacker to study it and write his evaluation (https://z.cash/blog/the-zcash-equihash-analysis.html), gave out $30,000 dollars in bounties to make the best implementations for CPU and GPU (https://z.cash/blog/announcing-miner-contest.html), got lots of good open source implementations (https://zcashminers.org/submissions), launched the network (https://z.cash/blog/zcash-begins.html), and mining has been working very well at scale ever since (http://www.coinwarz.com/network-hashrate-charts/zcash-network-hashrate-chart).

The reasons we chose Equihash are:

* it is memory-oriented rather than computation-oriented which makes it less cost-efficient to implement in ASIC,
* it is asymmetric, meaning that verifying a solution is much cheaper than generating that solution (_even_ starting from the nonce that generates that solution); In particular it requires substantial RAM (hundreds of MB, depending on parameter choices) to generate a solution (or an attempted solution), but it does not require that much RAM to verify a solution. This may be useful for constrained implementations such as SPV wallets in constrained hardware, implementation inside the Ethereum VM, etc.
* it has a good level of scientific investigation behind it, which makes me think it relatively unlikely than an algorithmic breakthrough would enable someone to find solutions much cheaper than the competition. This has been born out by the experience of live Zcash mining, where developers have made tremendous progress on micro-optimization, but as far as we know no algorithmic breakthroughs.

A reason to choose Equihash is that you benefit from the all of the research and implementation work described above. There are many well-tested implementations available, both open source and proprietary.

[jaybny]

THIS!!! So fucking much!

There will be no PoW change, this is merely a propaganda act by Blockstream to spread FUD about Bitcoin Unlimited. Core is about to lose the vote and now they're butthurt about it.

And luke-jr is a despicable idiot. Nothing more. Certainly not a developer of or contributor to anything, other than outdated views and retarded ideas.

BU is technically incompetent.... nobody will ever run the BU node with that mess of a codebase.. only chance for BU is: after they signal, make a large bounty and give real developers 14-30 days to properly upgrade core to 2mb limit.

Nobody trusts BU code - who cares about LuekJr religion. i trust his code.. and have nothing else in common with him.... I probably have more in common with you and Roger Ver, but will never run your BU nodes.

bitcoin is first and foremost a technical miracle.. economics is secondary

BU is actively attacking an 18 billion dollar asset that is owned by all humanity and has the best engineers volunteering their time for the greater good.

BU is cesspool - BU is negative - BU is unsustainable  

[Seldar]

there is something here - its about "scaring" miners to stop signaling BU .. hope someone else can run w this idea.. changing POW is a bad idea - it will push all "good" miners  to BU

Such a proposal, changing POW, is a sign of insanity.
It wil be the end of the trust in BTC, the network will be unsecure for a long time and BTC will become a shitcoin

[UK-Coin]

Denying scientifically proven, empirical evidence under the guise of religious views is not valid. It's insanity. And luke-jr is not a developer.

[jaybny]

there is something here - its about "scaring" miners to stop signaling BU .. hope someone else can run w this idea.. changing POW is a bad idea - it will push all "good" miners  to BU

Such a proposal, changing POW, is a sign of insanity.
It wil be the end of the trust in BTC, the network will be unsecure for a long time and BTC will become a shitcoin

changing POWis on the table because current centralized miners are attacking bitcoin, and will kill it. Satoshi said 1 CPU 1 vote.. never envisioned asics
 

[jaybny]

Denying scientifically proven, empirical evidence under the guise of religious views is not valid. It's insanity. And luke-jr is not a developer.

religion is insanity - whats your point - ive read luke-jrs code

i can scientifically prove with empirical evidence that luke-jr is a developer... hmm guess the religion here is called "BU"   

[pondjohn]

I believe the best option would be the addition of multiple proofs of work. Perhaps 4 (including SHA256).

There are many benefits: diversity of hardware, it dilutes the impact of centralised technology in one method, doesn't totally punish those who invested in ASICs - more likely to gain support.

Also, we could round robin different types of method, this would mean incompatible hardware would have 'down time', lowering the electric cost in relation to the hardware - also good for decentralisation.

If you had 4 proof of work methods, you could require that 2 seperate methods have found a block before a method is allowed to commence hashing again.

This also would allow for a soft fork if one method became malicious so that method could no longer produce blocks. Keeping each method honest.

I created a topic on this idea, possibly in the wrong location:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1832581.0

[tenletters]

pondjohn, I know similar ideas have been tested in myriadcoin-- would you be able to create a test branch of Bitcoin and modify it to run your proposed round-robin method? Once you have it running in, say, testnetPodJohn, other developers and QA people will look for unexpected exploits, performance drags etc.

tl;dr - I like the proposal, can you and other contributors create a test version we can all analyze/evaluate? Also what is a loose-estimate for  when this could be ready?

I believe the best option would be the addition of multiple proofs of work. Perhaps 4 (including SHA256).

There are many benefits: diversity of hardware, it dilutes the impact of centralised technology in one method, doesn't totally punish those who invested in ASICs - more likely to gain support.

Also, we could round robin different types of method, this would mean incompatible hardware would have 'down time', lowering the electric cost in relation to the hardware - also good for decentralisation.

If you had 4 proof of work methods, you could require that 2 seperate methods have found a block before a method is allowed to commence hashing again.

This also would allow for a soft fork if one method became malicious so that method could no longer produce blocks. Keeping each method honest.

I created a topic on this idea, possibly in the wrong location:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1832581.0

[adaseb]

So basically only way to make this work is to get every single exchange out there to change their software to this new POW and it should work correct.

Because the SHA256 ASIC miners won't accept this.

How would this work exactly?

[krile]

No need to be fancy, just triple SHA256 would be enough to change the current dynamic and not deviate too much from Satoshi's plan.

Aren't we repeating just another cycle: Change algo -> asics get developed at some point -> same problem again ?

Btw this coin implemented sha256t for some empirical evidence: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1801129.0

PoS doesn't work, see this PDF https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

The same link above, the "OneCoin" has PoS with 0 block reward. Would such a solution be more feasible? PoS only might really not work, but if its complimented with PoW they make a good combination IMO.


But my real opinion is, don't change bitcoins fundamentals. The block size increase was planned by Satoshi anyway. Change of the proof of work algorithm was not and such a change would only lead to an "altcoin".

Bitcoins legacy is present in many altcoins, if you do not like Bitcoin then go devote your energy to an altcoin (like Vertcoin with its strong commitment to avoid ASICs and with that avoiding problems like this miner centralization).

bitcoin the protocol (the main thing behind Satoshis invention) is present in many of the altcoins, many up to date with Bitcoins codebase, even on the way of activating SegWit.

You will not betray Bitcoin if you do this, that's the point of a free market, if you do not like something, chose the alternative...

I assume Satoshi never wanted some fanatics fighting over this, if this means anything to you:

Code:

const char* pszTimestamp = "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks";

...the main point is to get away from this centralized systems, if you suspect Bitcoin is becoming one, go support another coin. That will make the miners think again and start caring more about their "customers".

IMHO

[BitUsher]

Alex from Bitfury is cool but Bitfury George has gone off an a mad totalitarian rant -

http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/03/19/bitfury-threatens-prosecution-potential-pow-bitcoin-fork

Streisand effect? I thought Bitfury were the good guys, the fact George even is threatening this is affront to individual sovereignty and is reprehensible. Now I am further motivated to move forward with a PoW change backup. Lawyers from the US don't scare me ... good luck tracking all of us down throughout the world.

Hybrid SHA256/Keccak is now off the table for me , if a PoW algo change is done 100% of SHA256 ASICs will be ignored.

[rograz]

Let's change PoW so that anyone with moderate amount of capital can attack us, sounds like a great idea! Both cpu and gpu minable chains would be an easy target at this point when the economic target is as big and hated? as BTC. You sit here and worry about BU miners trying to kill a minority chain in case of a fork and want to trade that for gpu miners (who many are heavily invested into alt coins) and/or bot net owners. I guess the BU miners wouldn't mind since they would win by default when the core chain self destructs on a new PoW.


If you want some tinfoil this is how I would take over BTC on a budget and couldn't just 51% the current network due to my inability/unwillingness to spend the needed funds.

- Get cosy with lead devs.
- Push for PoW change to something supposedly ASIC resistant.
- Develop ASIC solution in advance for when switch happens (can be on shit node and somewhat low cost, use mining profits to jump to bleeding edge asap later) This would cost a fraction of what building hardware to try and take over current network by building hardware (more than factor of 10-20x). This might even be within reach of a wealthy early adopter *hint*, a couple of mil is enough to do a mass rollout on say 65/40 nm.
- Easily keep CPU/GPU miners at bay due to them being unprofitable, doesn't even make it apparent anything strange is going on (someone just have cheaper power and more cards duh!)
- Reap majority of all block rewards.
- Stay cosy with the devs and push for any and all changes you want to do, congrats you now own the network without anyone the wiser.
- Even if competition starts developing their own ASICs its something that takes months to get working hardware out of and even longer to mass produce.