Quote from: Verdell on January 23, 2019, 04:21:29 AM

P0s update coming

Sorry, but we decided other way.

Many people ask me about the transition to PoS and about further plans. I apologize for the timeout we had to take. To understand how to move on we had to read a number of different whitepapers and scientific articles. We also had to go through the code of systems that already use the Proof of Stake algorithm and other solutions.

The main reason for the possible transition to PoS was to ensure the stable operation of the network, taking into account the growing number of 51% attacks on various blockchains, including ours. Just switching to another PoW algorithm couldn't solve this problem. One possible solution to 51% problem was the introduction of dynamic checkpoints, as was done in the PeerCoin project. However, they did it in a centralized way that does not meet our requirements. As a temporary solution, we prohibited deep reorganization of the network at the masternod level back in September. However, this was done in a rather primitive way, which does not provide a 100% guarantee. Therefore, we decided to switch to the Proof of Stake algorithm as a solution to 51% attack problem, but after we synchronize our code base with the latest changes from the Bitcoin and Dash projects.

Despite the decision, we still had doubts about the Proof of Stake, because of technical and economic characteristics of this algo. Now I will focus on the economic part. The main advantage of the Proof of Stake algorithm in my opinion is that it does not need to burn electricity to maintain the network. However, it also has significant drawbacks, one of which is that this algorithm operates on the principle of "the rich get richer". Because Sibcoin was originally developed as "people's money", i.e. egalitarian currency, I didnt like this way to solve "51% attack" problem which is quite technical. So, in parallel with studying technical details of Proof of Stake, I was looking for other ways to solve "51% attack" problem.

Fortunately, the guys from the Dash project have proposed an acceptable solution. You can read about it in this article:

https://blog.dash.org/mitigating-51-attacks-with-llmq-based-chainlocks-7266aa648ec9

Although there is not everything perfect and there are some technical issues, in general, it seems reliable. After some consideration we decided to use this solution.

Someone will surely note that, in the presence of ASICs, our currency is still not egalitarian because only small group of ASIC owners can mine now. Of course, because there are masternodes in the system, it cannot be absolutely egalitarian. But in the case of transition to the PoS, most people with small deposits will not mine for some small interest rate, and as a result only large holders will be engaged in this. In contrast, many people have a GPU card.

Mining on GPU cards caused us problems due to the dependence of the reward on the difficulty. This dependency will be removed.

Summarizing everything written above, we have the following plan for the next month:

1. We change the PoW mining algo to remove ASICs.
2. We remove the dependence of block reward on difficulty. The reward itself will be slightly increased.
3. We update our codebase with latest changes from Dash 13.0 version to be able to use that protection mechanism against 51% attacks.

These changes will be implemented in two updates. In the first update, we will change the mining algorithm and remove the dependence of the reward on difficulty. In the second, we will update codebase to mitigate 51% attacks with masternodes.