Quote from: jstyler on March 05, 2025, 10:35:50 AM

Congrats on your 1st birthday Hoosat Network, wishing you many more milestones to come! I'm curious about your approach to securing Proof of Work Integrity, can you elaborate more on how it protects against Grover's Algorithm? Also, I've noticed you have a 360-block pre-mining phase, did you consider the potential implications of this on decentralization and fairness in the early stages of your network?

Thank you for your insightful questions.

In Bitcoin and other Proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies like Kaspa, miners do not directly submit the PoW hash to the stratum or node. Instead, the PoW hash generated by the miner is not validated immediately. The key requirement is that the input to the PoW algorithm must be recalculable to produce a valid PoW hash that meets the target. As a result, the miner only needs to submit the block template data and the nonce. I won’t delve into the specific differences between stratum and node submissions, or the distinctions between Bitcoin and Kaspa here.

However, our Securing Proof of Work Integrity solution changes this approach by requiring miners to submit the PoW hash for validation, ensuring it matches the recalculated hash. This process is enforced across the entire network. Our method ensures the correct application of the PoW algorithm, detects nonce spamming, and enables us to take immediate action against it. Specifically, at HTN nodes, we can prevent Grover's Algorithm from being exploited for nonce spamming by forcing its search space to include the PoW hash.

If Bitcoin were to adopt our patent-pending solution, the search space against Grover's Algorithm would increase significantly. Currently, the search space is limited to 64 bits (nonce (32-bit) + extranonce2 (32-bit)). With our solution, it would expand to 320 bits (nonce (32-bit) + extranonce2 (32-bit) + SHA256D PoW hash (256 bits)). This change would shift the search space from 2^32 to 2^160 for Grover’s Algorithm.

Regarding the premine, I did take into account its potential impact on decentralization and fairness, because of that the premine represented only 0.58% of the maximum supply. From the premine 86% was later burned, deceasing the circulating supply.