In response to Old C coder's messages.
It seems increasing PoW difficulty for more PoS blocks, is the wrong "inducement" for a "greedy/maliciu=ous miner". It would benefit him to have no PoS blocks between his/her PoW blocks, it seems to me?
Yes and no. Increasing PoW diff after PoS block hasn't changed
from peercoin. You need a way to push one type of blocks apart (PoW) in order to accommodate more blocks of a different type (PoS). And if community had enough hashpower, higher diff would not be a problem, since block mined like that would get more trust due higher difficulty.
Wouldn't it be more of an inducement to make the difficulty less, or at least not more?
In a way, that is what
one of the fixes accomplishes - but so that it does not hurt chaintrust of "community" blockchain.
And if the miner chooses to mine on the PoS block, doesn't his "time" begin when he gets that PoS block? Isn't there a Merkle hash or some such making that time and block count the "top" on which he creates his next PoW block? So isn't he still (in priciple) on a one minute "difficulty"?
NO NO NO.
If you have a chain with one week of mixed PoW-PoS-PoW-PoS blocks, PoW target spacing then amounts to two! minutes.
Time is later considered in equation as difference from two previous blocks of same type. If those two previous PoW blocks from example are less than 2 minutes apart, difficulty is raised.
PoS is always fixed at 1 minute so the chain wants to "become" like this :
PoS-PoS-PoS-PoS...
(by having algorithm push PoW blocks apart by raising difficulty after each new PoS block arrived)
Or is their a problem there? Also how is the value (trust/worthiness...) of a chain rated/valued/calculated for chains with PoS blocks rated vis a vis chains with only PoW blocks?
That is what chaintrust (sum of GetBlockTrust values of each block in a branch) is all about. This is a tricky part for any hybrid. A quick overview
is here, but a lot more has been talked about on yacoin dev thread.
And if we have a limit on one PoS block in a row maximum, how do we rate/value... competeing PoS blocks for the "next" block after a PoW block? If amount of coin favors the "wealthy", and age of coin favors the "oldest-earliest adopters" then how about a "lowest hash" type of comparison ala Pow but being random I presume, a random node's PoS block would win?
Regarding "lower hash" it's easy to compare two blocks at the tip of a chain for lower hash. But when you have two block branches of 20(or 2000) mixed blocks each you need to quantify those "differences" with some non-exploitable formula.
Then you can also have two mixed type block branches mined on lower difficulty - and you need to compare against them too somehow.