Sign to Mine technology

[DiabolusLoki]

Anyone working on Sign to Mine technology? I am just learning about it from a whitepaper and think it's worth debating the concept.

Sign to Mine™ (S2M) is a mining algorithm that requires the miner who solves a block to be able also to spend the reward for that block. Under this system, a pool with many anonymous miners would not be feasible because all miners in the pool would be able to accept rewards according to their shares when others solve a block, but then abscond with the whole block reward when they are the one to solve a block. Thus, a certain level of trust should be established before allowing a miner into one’s pool.

I wondering how this could be used in intranets and other private mining scenarios where you want a greater equal distribution among nodes.

[jonald_fyookball]

I don't get the use case.  why not simply solo mine if each miner gets the rewards of their own solved blocks?
even if you owned all the nodes in the pool, why not let each one solo mine?

[cbeast]

Do you have a link to the white paper?

[DiabolusLoki]

Do you have a link to the white paper?

Section 3.1 here: http://www.ziftrcoin.com/docs/ziftrcoin-whitepaper.pdf

[jonald_fyookball]

well im no expert, but looks like dubious benefits... slightly smaller block header and
protection against cryptography breaks during the moment
you're mining.

[cr1776]

Anyone working on Sign to Mine technology? I am just learning about it from a whitepaper and think it's worth debating the concept.

Sign to Mine™ (S2M) is a mining algorithm that requires the miner who solves a block to be able also to spend the reward for that block. Under this system, a pool with many anonymous miners would not be feasible because all miners in the pool would be able to accept rewards according to their shares when others solve a block, but then abscond with the whole block reward when they are the one to solve a block. Thus, a certain level of trust should be established before allowing a miner into one’s pool.

I wondering how this could be used in intranets and other private mining scenarios where you want a greater equal distribution among nodes.

It also seems very dubious that "Sign to Mine" is a trademarked term owned by a company in New Hampshire.  Not a non-profit foundation or anything.  For something to be part of an open source project, this seems very odd to me.

[conizer14]

It also seems very dubious that "Sign to Mine" is a trademarked term owned by a company in New Hampshire.  Not a non-profit foundation or anything.  For something to be part of an open source project, this seems very odd to me.

Good point - Is someone trying to gain something from this technology?

[StephenMorse]

Hi All, I'm one of the devs working on Sign to Mine at ziftr. I did my Senior Thesis on Elliptic Curve Cryptography, and am a cryptocurrency enthusiast. I'm also a moderator over at the bitcoin stack exchange (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/).

@cr1776:

There is a trademark on Sign to Mine: http://www.inovia.com/products/directory/trademarks-number-86365227/sign-to-mine-trademark-owned-by-myvbo. You can also go to http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/ -> Trademark Search -> Basic Word Mark Search, and search for Sign To Mine.

The ziftrCOIN code will be open sourced, and the Sign to Mine code will be available for use. Only "Sign to Mine" the term is trademarked. It's like cotton swabs and Q-tips. Anyone can make cotton swabs, but only one organization is allowed to market them as Q-tips.

@jonald_fyookball:

Those benefits were mentioned in the first version of the white paper. Sign to Mine has been refined since then. There are going to be updates to the ziftrCOIN specs site and the ziftrCOIN white paper very soon.

The use case for Sign to Mine is basically preventing centralization of miners into pools. If you look at https://blockchain.info/pools, I think you would probably agree that centralization like this isn't what satoshi had planned. There are proposals to limit the centralization in Bitcoin (one of my favorites is Multi-PPS, by Meni Rosenfeld), but miners are often reluctant to implement such proposals. With Sign to Mine, miners have to cryptographically prove that the person who mined the block is the person who is getting the rewards for the block.

Automated pools can still exist for those that want to mine together, but it doesn't eliminate the risks. It's more of a convenience thing for people who trust each other and want to mine together.

[jonald_fyookball]

Thanks for the explanation.

It would seem that Sign to Mine and trustless pools are mutually exclusive then,
is that correct?

As I'm sure you know, the reason for pools is to mitigate variance of ROI.
How would this be accomplished without pools?

[othe]

wheres the difference to spreadcoin?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=715435.0
http://spreadcoin.net/files/SpreadCoin-WhitePaper.pdf

"To prove knowledge of the private key and whole block there are two new fields in the block header:
MinerSignature and hashWholeBlock"


Read the whitepaper for more information, spreadcoin sourcecode is available:
https://github.com/spreadcoin-project/spreadcoin/blob/4e085e8f3feba1c36cacf0355840f886c14a71ac/src/main.h#L1461 etc.

[StephenMorse]

@jonald_fyookball:

Yes, that sounds right. With Sign to Mine pools, there has to be someone to distribute the rewards. At the beginning at least, probably most mining on ziftrCOIN will be solo-mining, although there are ways to do pools (as a convenience) for groups where all members have mutual trust. Distributing block rewards more frequently (1 minute block time) and allowing for mini-pools where all members have established trust should help to limit the variance of rewards for miners.

@othe:

Neither Spreadcoin nor ziftr were the first to invent the idea of non-outsourceable cryptopuzzles. I believe Andrew Miller was the first one with the idea (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309073.0, someone correct me if I'm wrong), but proposals like Two-phase-proof-of-work from Ittay Eyal, and Emin Gün Sirer (http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/18/how-to-disincentivize-large-bitcoin-mining-pools/) are along the same lines. This person seems to have a similar idea too: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=652443.msg7314429#msg7314429.

It seems like ziftrCOIN and Spreadcoin both independently implemented their own versions of non-outsourceable cryptopuzzles. However, one of the main differences between ziftrCOIN and Spreadcoin seems to be that Spreadcoin is entirely opposed to pools (someone correct me if I'm wrong). We think pools are necessary to minimize the variance of rewards, but that they should be limited in how big they can get (i.e. you have to trust everyone in the pool, and that will limit how big pools can get).

ZiftrCOIN has a few other features as well. For example, in ziftrCOIN, the mature coins spent in each block are also counted and used as a tiebreaker when two blocks on the tip of the chain are discovered with the same work. This is the rough idea, there are some other conditions that have to be met to engage the tiebreaker. Note: we used to do this tie-breaker in terms of coin age destroyed in each block, after talking this over with Andrew Miller, we decided just counting the number of mature coins spent would limit fungibility problems. This tiebreaker encourages miners to actually include transactions, rather than how the default tie breaking algorithm (whichever one was received first) actually incentivizes miners to not include any transactions at all so that their blocks propagate faster.

We also limit the size of the block chain using a growth-dependent algorithm. We know Gavin Andresen thinks this will result in mining pool cartels, but together with Sign to Mine, we expect this to not be a problem.

[jonald_fyookball]

so basically means you CAN'T pool... at least not in the sense
we are used to with Bitcoin.

While this solves centralization via pool, by the same
token, it encourages centralization via corporate mining
farms and highly discourages solo mining once the difficulty
becomes high.

[othe]

@othe:

Neither Spreadcoin nor ziftr were the first to invent the idea of non-outsourceable cryptopuzzles. I believe Andrew Miller was the first one with the idea (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309073.0, someone correct me if I'm wrong), but proposals like Two-phase-proof-of-work from Ittay Eyal, and Emin Gün Sirer (http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/18/how-to-disincentivize-large-bitcoin-mining-pools/) are along the same lines. This person seems to have a similar idea too: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=652443.msg7314429#msg7314429.

It seems like ziftrCOIN and Spreadcoin both independently implemented their own versions of non-outsourceable cryptopuzzles. However, one of the main differences between ziftrCOIN and Spreadcoin seems to be that Spreadcoin is entirely opposed to pools (someone correct me if I'm wrong). We think pools are necessary to minimize the variance of rewards, but that they should be limited in how big they can get (i.e. you have to trust everyone in the pool, and that will limit how big pools can get).

ZiftrCOIN has a few other features as well. For example, in ziftrCOIN, the mature coins spent in each block are also counted and used as a tiebreaker when two blocks on the tip of the chain are discovered with the same work. This is the rough idea, there are some other conditions that have to be met to engage the tiebreaker. Note: we used to do this tie-breaker in terms of coin age destroyed in each block, after talking this over with Andrew Miller, we decided just counting the number of mature coins spent would limit fungibility problems. This tiebreaker encourages miners to actually include transactions, rather than how the default tie breaking algorithm (whichever one was received first) actually incentivizes miners to not include any transactions at all so that their blocks propagate faster.

We also limit the size of the block chain using a growth-dependent algorithm. We know Gavin Andresen thinks this will result in mining pool cartels, but together with Sign to Mine, we expect this to not be a problem.

I know amillers work and all that, thats why i asked about the difference. No spreadcoin does not prevent pools in general, as long as you trust the other poolers its possible, thats why i asked for the difference. Yes Amiller came up with that but its in spreadcoin since like half a year or so and only implemented there afaik.

That made me wonder why its trademarked a bit ...

We also limit the size of the block chain using a growth-dependent algorithm. We know Gavin Andresen thinks this will result in mining pool cartels, but together with Sign to Mine, we expect this to not be a problem.

Like adaptive growing blocksizes?

Monero and cryptonote use that already, just for info.

[stellar1]

Probably mining trying to evolve into a more acceptable avatar.

[sparkster]

What the hell. You can at least provide a reason or something.