Quote from: iamnotback on November 09, 2016, 07:16:14 PM

Quote from: iamnotback on November 05, 2016, 11:34:02 AM

3. I intuitively expect some flaw around the variable control over fees collected per unit of PoW expended, i.e. control over difficulty. But I am too sleepy to work through this part of the paper right now.

...

Afaics, difficulty adjustments and a DAG seem fundamentally incompatible. Afair Iota doesn't need to adjust difficulty because the proof-of-work isn't rewarded.

A more concise reason why minting and DAGs appear to be fundamentally incompatible is because:

As the white paper admits in section 2.2.1, there is no total order perspective for which to compute the systemic difficulty, thus it can only be computed per DAG branch.
Minting reward (per unit of proof-of-work computation) is maximized by mining on the branch with the least cumulative proof-of-work, so there is an incentive to maximize the breadth of the tree which is a Nash equilibrium conflict with the fee mechanism and Theorem 2's assumption of an incentive to apply proof-of-work (i.e. append) on the "leading edge", i.e. the "altruistic-prime"¹ of the fee mechanism is an undersupplied public good relative to the individualized reward of minting.

¹ Given that systemically there is no income from fees because taking fees (instead of "pass-through") lowers the value for others to append to the branch. Thus the fees are effectively burned.