Gavin Andresen
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Re: Individual Block Difficulty Based on Block Size
February 19, 2015, 05:06:47 PM
 #27
Quote from: justusranvier on February 19, 2015, 03:46:49 PM
I think there's a large amount of cargo culting going on regarding the hash rate rather than useful analysis of threat models, attacker capabilities, and exactly what proof of work accomplishes.

I agree.

My guess is that we will end up with a very secure system with a modest amount of hashing in the future, because PoW hashing does three things:

1) Gives a steady 10-minute 'heartbeat' that limits how quickly new coins are produced
2) Makes it expensive to successfully double-spend confirmed transactions
3) Makes it expensive to censor transactions

The first becomes less important over time as the block subsidy halves.

I think we could do a lot to mitigate the second (see https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/630d4a6c24ac6144482a for a partly-baked idea).

And I think the third might be mitigated naturally as we scale up and optimize the information sent across the network (there will be strong incentives to create "boring" blocks that don't include or exclude transactions everybody else is excluding or including).
How often do you get the chance to work on a potentially world-changing project?"


Hello everybody, Gavin Andresen is a developer who is best known for his involvement in the development of Bitcoin. Before the creation of BTC in 2010, he was a developer of 3D creation software and virtual reality software. During the design of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto himself appointed him as responsible for the reference implementation. In other words, it was Gavin Andresen who generally decided the path to follow for Bitcoin.

Maybe MPC
What do you thinks ?