10 minutes blockchain vs difficulty level

[haltingprobability]

2). I don't believe for one second that more powerful and faster computers is the absolute single solution to have a secured blockchain,

It isn't. Cohen recently announced a combined proof-of-space + proof-of-time algorithm that would perform a similar function as Bitcoin's PoW (hashcash). Litecoin uses a different PoW function that acts more "proof-of-space-ish" than hashcash.

higher hash rate is unnecessary and a completely waste of time and energy - its sole purpose is merely to give people a delusional perceptions of some "intrinsic values" built in with the newly mined bitcoins with the higher hashrate and high level of difficulty !!

Some people seem to think this but they are incorrect and this is certainly not what Satoshi explained the function of the PoW to be in the whitepaper. All that the proof-of-work does is prove that time is passing. That's it. When I look at the block hash for a block, I can see that an immense amount of computation has been expended to generate that block hash and that proves to me that - even given all the computation power available on the Bitcoin network - a non-trivial amount of time (probably close to about 10 minutes, on average) had to pass in order for that block hash to be generated. The network adjusts the difficulty factor for precisely this reason, so that anyone can independently inspect a block hash and come to the conclusion that time has passed while the block was being mined.

The importance of time passing is that, when combined with hash-chaining, it means that the blocks in the blockchain form a kind of non-telescoping time series - at 497254 blocks, about 4,972,540 minutes have passed since the Genesis block (plus/minus a cumulative error margin due to variation in the block mining time). So, I believe that the current unspent transaction output set is a true record of stake within the Bitcoin network because I can verify (independently, at the low cost of checking block hashes) that there has been no funny business since the Genesis block. That is why hashing is performed in order to mine blocks.

You have jut described a text book definition of Centralization !

The cost of entry to the mining business is a few thousand dollars. That is hardly "centralization".

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[Anarc Senior]

Wow, a lot of bolded text in this thread...  


There is no unfair advantage. You can mine Bitcoins for about $4k - just buy a mining rig and join a mining pool.

I have no reason not to believe you. But, base on what I've heard upto now is that mining for Bitcoin is a lost cause,  a private person whose invested,  as you said ~ $4k will no longer earn a decent return, and that buying bitcoins from the exchange is the better way to invest your money...if you are a real life miner, whose actually and currently getting bitcoins from mining, and come out ahead of buying bitcoin from the exchange-  then I am all ears !! I would like to learn how you are pulling it off ??  Please PM me if you are a real deal !

I would love to see the real  cost vs benefits of spending $4k in equipment rather just buying bitcoins ?

[Anarc Senior]

You have jut described a text book definition of Centralization !

The cost of entry to the mining business is a few thousand dollars. That is hardly "centralization".
[/quote]

Once again I would love be educated and learn on what is the reality of the current bitcoin mining scenario-  what is the ROI of bitcoin mining ?

[haltingprobability]

Once again I would love be educated and learn on what is the reality of the current bitcoin mining scenario-  what is the ROI of bitcoin mining ?

I'm not a miner and I'm not saying you could actually make a profit by only investing $4k. What I'm saying is that the idea that Bitcoin is controlled by the big miners and that "nobody else" can get into mining, is false. If you have access to cheap electricity and live in a cold climate with cheap, fast Internet, then you should be able to make money mining even with just a single state-of-the-art mining rig (about $4k). There's no inherent advantage to owning 1000 mining rigs over 1 mining rig unless it allows you to broker bulk discounts on electricity or something.

If you're worried about the political aspect of Bitcoin - i.e. the idea of people being able to "have a say" in how the Bitcoin network operates, including tx processing - just run a mining rig and join a mining pool. You might be operating at a loss but if "having a say" is something that matters that much to you, you're free to have a say. It's not even going to cost you $4k since you will recoup at least some of the cost of the mining rig and electricity from mining.

[Anarc Senior]

Once again I would love be educated and learn on what is the reality of the current bitcoin mining scenario-  what is the ROI of bitcoin mining ?

I'm not a miner and I'm not saying you could actually make a profit by only investing $4k.

That's it, I give up !! You've made a lot of points and got me all excited that perhaps any common person could realistically invest $4,000 and have a good chance to mine bitcoin and, as you said "have a saying"...Now you said, no you are not a miner, an no you couldn't actually make a profit by only investing $4K.  You Sir, essentially have missed all the points that we have been discussing...thanks for wasting my time !

[haltingprobability]

If you have access to cheap electricity and live in a cold climate with cheap, fast Internet, then you should be able to make money mining even with just a single state-of-the-art mining rig (about $4k)

I did say this, right? <_<

[sunshine61]

I've been giving a lot of thought to this lately. While I understand that Proof-of-Work is currently intrinsically wasteful, I've been trying to find a way that makes it much more energy efficient while maintaining security and functionality.

The way Bitcoin is coded currently, the 10-minute block is a constant that must be maintained to prevent block rewards from flooding the network and pushing the price down, as well as preventing orphaned blocks. However, what if difficulty was fixed, the block reward was eliminated, and block creation was driven by network transaction activity instead?

What I have devised so far is that each block is limited to 50 transactions (arbitrary number, could be higher or lower based on Bitcoin's throughput, but this figure works for Litecoin currently), and once there are 50 transactions in the mempool, they are grouped together into a work unit, and sent to a specific miner/pool for hashing. With a fixed difficulty, crunch time is based purely on that miner's hash rate, but is ideally less than a minute. Once hashing is complete on that block/workunit, it is broadcast to the network and added to the chain. However, before being added to the chain, that block must be crunched and verified by 5 other, randomly selected miners. So, each time a work unit is created by the network, it is sent to at least 6 totally random miners (not based on hash rate, wallet balance, etc.), and the block must have 6 results that jive before being added to the blockchain. The miner selection is done by group consensus of all core nodes (each randomly votes 10 miners, top 6 are selected by popular vote). Additionally, the top 6 miners are prevented from working on the block following the one they worked on (same miner can't crunch two blocks in a row). This prevents an entity running several malicious nodes/miners from taking control of the blockchain.

Now, how do I account for eliminating the block reward? That's simple. The transaction fee is hard-coded at .1% of the transaction amount. So, if someone sends 1 BTC (at the moment, valued at roughly $11,000), the transaction fee would be .001 BTC, or $11. If someone sends $5, the fee would be .5 cents. So, if a block's 50 transactions move a total of 25 BTC, the 6 miners that returned valid hashes would split the .025 BTC of transaction fees evenly (at current price of $11,000, each of the 6 miners would get $45.83 for solving that block). That accounts for miner rewards and transaction fees, but how does this add coins to the network? It would also be hard-coded that depending on the number of coins in circulation compared to the designed max coins, a certain number of additional miner hashes would be credited similar to the transaction fees. While I haven't pinned down appropriate numbers yet, say an additional 10 valid hashes are broadcast after the initial 6. The first 10 valid hashes submitted would get an equivalent BTC amount to what each of the 6 miners received in transaction fees. So, in total, 16 miners would receive .0041667 BTC each for a total reward of .0666667 BTC for that block, and of that, .0416667 BTC would be new to the network. As market cap reaches 100% in circulation, the number of "follower" miners would be reduced, similar to how the block reward halves currently. The timeline for market growth would then be tied to transaction activity, not time.

Blocks come as fast or slow as transactions are happening, and the next group of 50 transactions can only be confirmed once the previous block has been fully verified by the 6 random miners. And if there are insufficient transactions in the mempool, block creation has a backup timer that kicks out work units 5 minutes after the previous block in case 50 transactions haven't occurred since then. This transforms the network from having a fixed throughput to being driven by network activity (the bottleneck then becomes how fast 6 miners can be selected and for those miners to crunch the transactions and make a block). So, what does this mean for miners? While this part is above my knowledge, it likely means that CPUs would become dominant again, as they are likely to sit idle most of the time, making ASICs far too power hungry to be profitable. Even GPUs may not make financial sense.

Just a thought.

[Anarc Senior]

If you have access to cheap electricity and live in a cold climate with cheap, fast Internet, then you should be able to make money mining even with just a single state-of-the-art mining rig (about $4k)

I did say this, right? <_<

It's like saying "You are guaranteed to have a complete decentralized government and freedom, only if you live on top of the mountain and never to come down to the flat land, and only pay a small amount of tax (only 50% of your income) and oh by the way, report to where you are about every 15 minutes - other than that you are a lucky man to live in such a decentralized and free system - you can thanks us later by sharing with us every bitcoins you ever own...and don't worry, you will have the complete anonymity, so long that you provide us your public address, as well as your Private/ secret keys"

[ranochigo]

1). Consider the hash rate and its level of difficulty is within a black box:  from the end users standpoint, there are 12.5 bitcoins being produced every 10 minutes - no more, no less.  I cannot fatom or see any clear evidence that the higher hash rate, difficulty would directly correlate to a larger market cap of bitcoin ??

Currently, the market cap is fixed so I'm not talking about that. However, with a constant difficulty, you are bound to have blocks that would be faster and faster with a constant block reward. This would result in the total market cap increasing. If you decrease the block reward proportionately, then they won't achieve your aim.

2). I don't believe for one second that more powerful and faster computers is the absolute single solution to have a secured blockchain, which would maintains its scarcity and holding its high value.  IMHO, higher hash rate is unnecessary and a completely waste of time and energy - its sole purpose is merely to give people a delusional
perceptions of some "intrinsic values" built in with the newly mined bitcoins with the higher hashrate and high level of difficulty !!  Which we all know is a complete BS !

Does it make sense for Bitcoin to be available to be mined for everyone in general? That's a question that has to be thought about.

Now, the main flaw of the blockchain is that any attacker with at least 51% of the hashrate could essentially damage the blockchain by modifying it or preventing transactions from being confirmed. If you were to make mining available for the general public, you would likely eliminate most of the bigger mining operations. This would in turn result in the network having a low difficulty.

3). More expensive equipment  and larger pool of miners do not equate to true technological innovation- let more general population in the task and soon there will be true competitition and innovation emerging...

True but do we really need innovation? This isn't a smartphone. We just need miners to have a high hashrate density and a increased efficiency is a nice cherry on top. There is a huge demand for miners by the big corporations.

Miners are available to the general public, at a decent pricing too. A lot of the time, it just doesn't make sense to throw a hot miner in your house where electrical pricing might be a lot higher than what big corporations can get.

You have jut described a text book definition of Centralization !

Mining itself is centralised right now. How would you address that problem while also addressing the problems I've stated?

[Anarc Senior]

I've been giving a lot of thought to this lately. While I understand that Proof-of-Work is currently intrinsically wasteful, I've been trying to find a way that makes it much more energy efficient while maintaining security and functionality.

The way Bitcoin is coded currently, the 10-minute block is a constant that must be maintained to prevent block rewards from flooding the network and pushing the price down, as well as preventing orphaned blocks. However, what if difficulty was fixed, the block reward was eliminated, and block creation was driven by network transaction activity instead?

What I have devised so far is that each block is limited to 50 transactions (arbitrary number, could be higher or lower based on Bitcoin's throughput, but this figure works for Litecoin currently), and once there are 50 transactions in the mempool, they are grouped together into a work unit, and sent to a specific miner/pool for hashing. With a fixed difficulty, crunch time is based purely on that miner's hash rate, but is ideally less than a minute. Once hashing is complete on that block/workunit, it is broadcast to the network and added to the chain. However, before being added to the chain, that block must be crunched and verified by 5 other, randomly selected miners. So, each time a work unit is created by the network, it is sent to at least 6 totally random miners (not based on hash rate, wallet balance, etc.), and the block must have 6 results that jive before being added to the blockchain. The miner selection is done by group consensus of all core nodes (each randomly votes 10 miners, top 6 are selected by popular vote). Additionally, the top 6 miners are prevented from working on the block following the one they worked on (same miner can't crunch two blocks in a row). This prevents an entity running several malicious nodes/miners from taking control of the blockchain.

Now, how do I account for eliminating the block reward? That's simple. The transaction fee is hard-coded at .1% of the transaction amount. So, if someone sends 1 BTC (at the moment, valued at roughly $11,000), the transaction fee would be .001 BTC, or $11. If someone sends $5, the fee would be .5 cents. So, if a block's 50 transactions move a total of 25 BTC, the 6 miners that returned valid hashes would split the .025 BTC of transaction fees evenly (at current price of $11,000, each of the 6 miners would get $45.83 for solving that block). That accounts for miner rewards and transaction fees, but how does this add coins to the network? It would also be hard-coded that depending on the number of coins in circulation compared to the designed max coins, a certain number of additional miner hashes would be credited similar to the transaction fees. While I haven't pinned down appropriate numbers yet, say an additional 10 valid hashes are broadcast after the initial 6. The first 10 valid hashes submitted would get an equivalent BTC amount to what each of the 6 miners received in transaction fees. So, in total, 16 miners would receive .0041667 BTC each for a total reward of .0666667 BTC for that block, and of that, .0416667 BTC would be new to the network. As market cap reaches 100% in circulation, the number of "follower" miners would be reduced, similar to how the block reward halves currently. The timeline for market growth would then be tied to transaction activity, not time.

Blocks come as fast or slow as transactions are happening, and the next group of 50 transactions can only be confirmed once the previous block has been fully verified by the 6 random miners. And if there are insufficient transactions in the mempool, block creation has a backup timer that kicks out work units 5 minutes after the previous block in case 50 transactions haven't occurred since then. This transforms the network from having a fixed throughput to being driven by network activity (the bottleneck then becomes how fast 6 miners can be selected and for those miners to crunch the transactions and make a block). So, what does this mean for miners? While this part is above my knowledge, it likely means that CPUs would become dominant again, as they are likely to sit idle most of the time, making ASICs far too power hungry to be profitable. Even GPUs may not make financial sense.

Just a thought.

.

 Thank you Sir  for your thoughtful inputs - I still have to digest through your proposal as there is a lots of details to think it through.  But, this is exactly the kind of ideas and the "thinking out of the box" that this community could or should embrace !

From the very highest level (at the 30,000 feet) and looking down on to the current hashing, validation of the Bitcoin blockchain , it does not take much for someone to see that there have got to be better ways to make improvements.  I know it's easy to say than done !  But this exactly what I look forward to hear from the good people on this forum...

Thanks and Cheers,
-ding

[haltingprobability]

@Anarc: I don't know what you're on, but it's rude not to share...

Proof-of-Work is currently intrinsically wasteful,

Proof-of-work is not wasteful, its purpose is to prove the passage of time in a secure, verifiable and scalable way. It's actually very cheap when you consider that only the miner has to work, everybody else can verify that the miner has done all this work very quickly. Suppose P=NP, then this would not even be possible with any sub-exponential algorithm. So, we should hope that P!=NP and that the entire network does not have to replicate the work of the miners to be sure they are actually doing that work.

The way Bitcoin is coded currently, the 10-minute block is a constant that must be maintained to prevent block rewards from flooding the network and pushing the price down, as well as preventing orphaned blocks.

The 10-minute interval target has nothing to do with the price.

What I have devised so far is that each block is limited to 50 transactions (arbitrary number, could be higher or lower based on Bitcoin's throughput, but this figure works for Litecoin currently), and once there are 50 transactions in the mempool, they are grouped together into a work unit, and sent to a specific miner/pool for hashing.

Let's stop right here. Your model is assuming coordination beyond basic p2p relay. There must be someone who "groups" the transactions and someone who "sends" them to a miner, a miner who is the designated recipient, etc. In Bitcoin, all peers are symmetrical with respect to the mempool and the blockchain. The only variation from one peer to another is the peers they are connected to (and perhaps some local variation in the mempool as peers are not required to store transactions in the mempool in any particular order or even at all). So, you want to set up your network in such a way that you achieve this peer-symmetry if you intend to replace Bitcoin's PoW but not fundamentally alter Bitcoin's security/distributed model.

With a fixed difficulty, crunch time is based purely on that miner's hash rate, but is ideally less than a minute. Once hashing is complete on that block/workunit, it is broadcast to the network and added to the chain. However, before being added to the chain, that block must be crunched and verified by 5 other, randomly selected miners. So, each time a work unit is created by the network, it is sent to at least 6 totally random miners (not based on hash rate, wallet balance, etc.), and the block must have 6 results that jive before being added to the blockchain. The miner selection is done by group consensus of all core nodes (each randomly votes 10 miners, top 6 are selected by popular vote). Additionally, the top 6 miners are prevented from working on the block following the one they worked on (same miner can't crunch two blocks in a row). This prevents an entity running several malicious nodes/miners from taking control of the blockchain.

This is an attempt to do sharding with blocks but you really don't need to shard blocks because blocks are not the bottleneck of the network, consensus is.

Now, how do I account for eliminating the block reward?
<snip>
Just a thought.

I don't want to rain on your parade but basically none of what you described would work. There is a proposal for a blockchain sharding system called ELASTICO. You would probably like it. It still uses regular proof-of-work mining, though.

[ranochigo]

What I have devised so far is that each block is limited to 50 transactions (arbitrary number, could be higher or lower based on Bitcoin's throughput, but this figure works for Litecoin currently), and once there are 50 transactions in the mempool, they are grouped together into a work unit, and sent to a specific miner/pool for hashing.

Isn't that centralisation now? Bitcoin doesn't have a consistent mempool through the network. Every node has a differing mempool with differing rules. How would you know if a miner is not hashing transaction A at the same time as you?

With a fixed difficulty, crunch time is based purely on that miner's hash rate, but is ideally less than a minute. Once hashing is complete on that block/workunit, it is broadcast to the network and added to the chain. However, before being added to the chain, that block must be crunched and verified by 5 other, randomly selected miners. So, each time a work unit is created by the network, it is sent to at least 6 totally random miners (not based on hash rate, wallet balance, etc.), and the block must have 6 results that jive before being added to the blockchain. The miner selection is done by group consensus of all core nodes (each randomly votes 10 miners, top 6 are selected by popular vote). Additionally, the top 6 miners are prevented from working on the block following the one they worked on (same miner can't crunch two blocks in a row). This prevents an entity running several malicious nodes/miners from taking control of the blockchain.

The way Bitcoin currently works is that nodes and miners are treated the same. It is impossible to tell which node is a miner and which node isn't. Why can't a node be verifying it though? Just like how it is.

Just for the record, nodes currently do not trust each other and independently verify the blocks and its content.

The transaction fee is hard-coded at .1% of the transaction amount.

So I can easily send a 1BTC transaction with a 1MB transaction size with a 0.001BTC fee? That'll surely spam the network up.

The first 10 valid hashes submitted would get an equivalent BTC amount to what each of the 6 miners received in transaction fees. So, in total, 16 miners would receive .0041667 BTC each for a total reward of .0666667 BTC for that block, and of that, .0416667 BTC would be new to the network. As market cap reaches 100% in circulation, the number of "follower" miners would be reduced, similar to how the block reward halves currently. The timeline for market growth would then be tied to transaction activity, not time.

As said, there is no way of telling the actual transaction volume. The best would just be having a singular node with an extremely good peering. Even with that, its not accurate.

I don't get this part.

Blocks come as fast or slow as transactions are happening, and the next group of 50 transactions can only be confirmed once the previous block has been fully verified by the 6 random miners. And if there are insufficient transactions in the mempool, block creation has a backup timer that kicks out work units 5 minutes after the previous block in case 50 transactions haven't occurred since then. This transforms the network from having a fixed throughput to being driven by network activity (the bottleneck then becomes how fast 6 miners can be selected and for those miners to crunch the transactions and make a block). So, what does this mean for miners? While this part is above my knowledge, it likely means that CPUs would become dominant again, as they are likely to sit idle most of the time, making ASICs far too power hungry to be profitable. Even GPUs may not make financial sense.

If you don't eliminate the ASICs and only make CPU mining profitable, anyone with sufficient motivation could execute a 51% attack easily.

[Anarc Senior]

1). Consider the hash rate and its level of difficulty is within a black box:  from the end users standpoint, there are 12.5 bitcoins being produced every 10 minutes - no more, no less.  I cannot fatom or see any clear evidence that the higher hash rate, difficulty would directly correlate to a larger market cap of bitcoin ??

Currently, the market cap is fixed so I'm not talking about that. However, with a constant difficulty, you are bound to have blocks that would be faster and faster with a constant block reward. This would result in the total market cap increasing. If you decrease the block reward proportionately, then they won't achieve your aim.

Sir:  many things you said above are not true at all:

1). Currently, the market cap of bitcoin is not fixed at all !! In fact it's growing so fast that it blows many big corporations completely out of the water -  as of today bitcoin market cap is approximately ~ 185 billions usd !!

2). The total bitcoin being released per day is ~  1800 bitcoins -- do you understand anything about bitcoin blockchain??

[ranochigo]

1). Currently, the market cap of bitcoin is not fixed at all !! In fact it's growing so fast that it blows many big corporations completely out of the water -  as of today bitcoin market cap is approximately ~ 185 billions usd !!

Well, I thought you would understand but I'm talking about the coin cap.

2). The total bitcoin being released per day is ~  1800 bitcoins -- do you understand anything about bitcoin blockchain??

Yeah? Aren't you talking about trying to make the difficulty constant to make it profitable for small time miners?

If you were to make the difficulty constant over a long period of time, the block frequency would become faster. With that, a 5 minute blocktime would double the total Bitcoins that would be created a day. Is that wrong?

[Anarc Senior]

@Anarc: I don't know what you're on, but it's rude not to share...

Nah - I'm just a newbie, trying to learn 😉

How do we know you're not one of the Bcash's little soldiers - will have to keep an eye on you too 😉

[Anarc Senior]

1). Currently, the market cap of bitcoin is not fixed at all !! In fact it's growing so fast that it blows many big corporations completely out of the water -  as of today bitcoin market cap is approximately ~ 185 billions usd !!

Well, I thought you would understand but I'm talking about the coin cap.

2). The total bitcoin being released per day is ~  1800 bitcoins -- do you understand anything about bitcoin blockchain??

Yeah? Aren't you talking about trying to make the difficulty constant to make it profitable for small time miners?

If you were to make the difficulty constant over a long period of time, the block frequency would become faster. With that, a 5 minute blocktime would double the total Bitcoins that would be created a day. Is that wrong?

Dude:  no increase hashpower, no increase on difficulty - just time delay !!

[sunshine61]

This by no means a polished solution (I'm just tossing it out there in hopes to improve the technology), but when on the same day Bitcoin makes the news for how much power it consumes and that a few guys in Teslas are running rigs off of Superchargers through their cars, something needs to change. There's no way you'll get everyone to agree to cut their hash power by 90% (which, if that would happen, everyone's earnings would remain the same or even improve while running on 10% of the power consumption). This is why I feel PoW is wasteful. There is little difference from a network with 10 GH/s and one with 10 TH/s other than the barrier to entry is higher. Litecoin difficulty went from 130,000 to almost 1,000,000 with no difference in price or functionality this past summer.

Just to be part of Litecoin mining initially cost me $1,500, and later over $7,000 to keep up with difficulty. That "cost of entry" keeps getting higher, which is a symptom of how processing power is controlled. Unfortunately, PoS isn't much better on its own as it still favors those with resources (coins instead of hash power). I feel my proposal limits the barrier to entry to having a half-decent internet connection. Hashpower and wallet size are pretty much irrelevant as long as the miner selection protocol is purely random. A computer only needs to be on and connected to be selected to mine, so even something low power could mine the same as a gaming rig. My only question right now is, what is the best way for miners to advertise themselves as available to the network? Would mining be handled by the core software itself, and either vote for itself as 1 of the 10 miners or simply sign-in/sign-out of a shared database when the software is opened or closed?

The controlling factor as to what groups and sends transactions to miners is a group consensus of all online nodes. When 50 transactions are present in the mempool, they are flagged with the block number they will ultimately end up in (previous block number +1) in order of datestamp, compiled into a work unit, and broadcast to the 6+n miners that won the vote (6 required miners plus n additional miners based on minting requirements). Only those miners receive the work unit to crunch. No further transactions and no other miners are crunching until the required 6 work units are returned and match. Once that's done, then the next 50 transactions are grouped and sent to 6+n different miners. Each node randomly selects miners and votes for them. Just like a public poll, you can participate even though you don't know or trust the others that participated. Under this new system, the block size is limited by transaction count, not MB size. And since block time depends on how fast a block can be assembled and verified and transaction load, I don't really see what gain spamming would have?

As for the 10-minute block time and price, if block creation time suddenly becomes 3 minutes instead of 10 and the block reward doesn't change, then 3 times more coins than normal will be added to the network. That won't have an effect on price?

[ranochigo]

There is little difference from a network with 10 GH/s and one with 10 TH/s other than the barrier to entry is higher. Litecoin difficulty went from 130,000 to almost 1,000,000 with no difference in price or functionality this past summer.

You can try to calculate the cost of initiating a 51% against Litecoin now. Its way harder than before. Since the difficulty is directly proportional to the hashrate, it would signify an increase in the hashrate. With that, the cost of executing such an attack would have increased exponentially.

A computer only needs to be on and connected to be selected to mine, so even something low power could mine the same as a gaming rig. My only question right now is, what is the best way for miners to advertise themselves as available to the network? Would mining be handled by the core software itself, and either vote for itself as 1 of the 10 miners or simply sign-in/sign-out of a shared database when the software is opened or closed?

I would say the best implementation is to have it fully peer to peer. There needs to be a consensus as to which miner is mining which and that is not achievable without them being centralised which is not what we want.

The controlling factor as to what groups and sends transactions to miners is a group consensus of all online nodes. When 50 transactions are present in the mempool, they are flagged with the block number they will ultimately end up in (previous block number +1) in order of datestamp, compiled into a work unit, and broadcast to the 6+n miners that won the vote (6 required miners plus n additional miners based on minting requirements). Only those miners receive the work unit to crunch. No further transactions and no other miners are crunching until the required 6 work units are returned and match. Once that's done, then the next 50 transactions are grouped and sent to 6+n different miners. Each node randomly selects miners and votes for them. Just like a public poll, you can participate even though you don't know or trust the others that participated.

As said, due to the way Bitcoin works, none of the nodes would have a similar mempool. The consensus is not easy to reach, especially with the transactions being broadcasted so rapidly. There is no way that the order of transactions and the timestamp would be consistent with all the nodes. It would most likely work if a central server decides which are the miners and which are the nodes.

Under this new system, the block size is limited by transaction count, not MB size. And since block time depends on how fast a block can be assembled and verified and transaction load, I don't really see what gain spamming would have?

With the cost of creating large transactions down, it is easy for people to start broadcasting transactions with huge size. This would just exacerbate our current problem with the storage space. You're just going to be driving Bitcoin less to the masses with the storage space.

As for the 10-minute block time and price, if block creation time suddenly becomes 3 minutes instead of 10 and the block reward doesn't change, then 3 times more coins than normal will be added to the network. That won't have an effect on price?

Definitely would have an impact on the price. Under the current implementation, if you want it to be more profitable, that's the only way.

[haltingprobability]

I feel my proposal limits the barrier to entry to having a half-decent internet connection.

By all means, go build an altcoin - if your idea is sound, it could even supplant Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is built as a 100% distributed, peer-to-peer network so your idea is simply incompatible with Bitcoin.

As for the 10-minute block time and price, if block creation time suddenly becomes 3 minutes instead of 10 and the block reward doesn't change, then 3 times more coins than normal will be added to the network. That won't have an effect on price?

Perhaps. The link between coinbase and 10-minute blocks is independent of price - price could go up, go down, or stay the same. Either way, the number of bitcoins issued through the coinbase block-reward remains on a fixed schedule. Increasing the block rate would increase the rate at which bitcoins are being issued, ceteris paribus.

[Anarc Senior]

Perhaps. The link between coinbase and 10-minute blocks is independent of price - price could go up, go down, or stay the same. Either way, the number of bitcoins issued through the coinbase block-reward remains on a fixed schedule. Increasing the block rate would increase the rate at which bitcoins are being issued, ceteris paribus.
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It seem like we are going around in circle here:

Let's talk about three variables on this equation:  hash rate, level of difficulty and amount of bitcoins awarded to the validated block.  I know there are other parameters, such as tx fee...but for now, let's just focus on the three mentioned above:

1). Bitcoins amounts is fixed to release at 12.5 every 10 minutes- (in compliant  with bitcoin blockchain's white paper).  So let's lock this down.

2). The hash rate could increase due to more miners on the network- or perhaps better hardware.

3). As the way the bitcoin core code is written now, the level of difficulty is inversely correlated to the hash rate, to keep the average of blockchain interval  @ ~ approximately ~ 10 minutes- thus 12.5 bitcoins is released every 10 minutes.

All we are saying is to save wasteful electricity, hash rate push for more powerful equipment - why don't we just not increase the level of difficulty ( keep the same level of difficulty)  > faster validation of the block, e.g. 1 minute instead of 10 minutes  > but don't release the new block until the 10 minutes is up...in the end we would be able to completely avoid the hash rate race, thus saving energy,  avoid mining push for fancy equipment and centralization of mining pool/ conglomerates ...?