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Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: changes to miners from ignoring PoS blocks
by
old c coder
on 04/10/2015, 15:49:05 UTC
Hi Senj,

...
Changing how particular peer mines blocks does not change much - bad miners can edit code, build their own release and produce blocks as they please.
Agreed.  But what if we added a rule in accept block or add block or whatever it is called that didn't allow consecutive PoW blocks?  Is there code in those areas to prevent consecutive PoS blocks, or is it only in the mining code?

Yacoin is based on Novacoin and that means fast proof-of-stake algorithm - the goal was to eventually accomodate as many PoS blocks as possible kept one minute apart on average. But also to keep PoW blocks at 10 minute spacing. That would one day accomplish ultimate decentralization with proof-of-work "checkpointing" every 10 minutes.
How, in code could one accomplish a 10 minute average PoW block period, I wonder?  If the desire is 9 (up to 9?) PoS blocks, then the code would have to sense the 8 (9 -1) minutes since the last PoW block, and then start PoW-ing on the latest PoS block and on the average, solve for it in 1 minute?

That seems like a 'tall order' to me.  I would think miners would code as soon as they see 1 PoS block.  Now if consecutive (up to 9) PoS blocks had more "weight" than the same number of PoW blocks, perhaps the miners could be "influenced"?
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If I am not mistaken, here is how pocopoco's source basically controls it and that didn't change from launch.

Fixes I made also strive towards that goal.

Last time I checked there were near 11x more PoW blocks than PoS blocks. Making PoW-PoS-PoW-PoS order mandatory would probably cause long delays while waiting for PoS block.
I seem to remember that in the past, before this miner and one of the previous versions of YACoin IIRC, that we would have consecutive PoS blocks quite often.  Perhaps the code could "cook" a PoS block if no PoS (or PoW) one appeared after one minute, "randomly" rewarding someone or no one with a minimum PoS amount, whatever that is?  Perhaps a minimum reward to the development team to goad them on to greater heights so that the coin will become popular enough that the minimum reward blocks would not be necessary? Perhaps those rewards could go towards funding a new feature, like the built in explorer or the live price display (LOL).
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There could be other problems too, depending on addressing issues with small PoS blocks.
What probelems are there with PoS blocks that are too small?  Is it some kind of flooding the block chain with "dust" as it were?
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These changes, I presume, have to be run by all the peers(full nodes) to "reject" submitted blocks that don't "measure up"?

Yes, hard fork is needed. I am certain we can't fix all problems without it.


Just some more idle musings...

Ron