How blocks will be mined? You seed the map only with already mined blocks but how will you be able to mine new ones?
Yes, as I said there are quite a few fatal problems with my original plan. I have two rough directions that I'm thinking now... either allowing the last N blocks to be used for seed (so when you win a new block you might not necessarily actually be securing the current block, but adding security to any of the last N blocks. This would, however, mean that people would need to wait N times as many confirmations to be confident in their coins... I still think this is fraught with problems, however, and I probably won't continue exploring it much further.
Another path that I am looking down is using something along the lines of the proof-of-activity proposal to allow user to collect up proof of stake data, and mine against that data to create blocks. Stake data would have to carry some "freshness" metric to avoid replay withholding, and manual human miners might only be able to mine coinbase TX in their blocks (unless they accept a map reset) but otherwise I'm thinking that it might work.
Currently, each block gives you infinite set of maps, not 2^32 but infinite.
Ok, I was assuming people were "playing fair" on their timestamp, as well. (My bots don't do any timestamp manipulation, they just take the "***Work" block that the client spits out.) Even with the timestamp the block count isn't quite infinite (there's an limit on timestamp drift allowed by the network ofc) but this does make the search space so large that, pragmatically, it may as well be infinite.
You propose to add some other method for actually mining blocks and leave game just for fun and for generating/distributing coins?
No, not at all! What I'd like to get to is a state where bots can mine without affecting human miners, and human miners can still solve blocks to win coins, and the two still compete not directly "block for block" as currently but instead compete only on TargetTime thresholds. Under this scenario the network is maximally secured (by the large computational effort of the bots) and still human mineable.
At launch we had a very insecure network that was great for human miners of all skill levels.
Right now we have an
exceptionally secure network that very very few humans are able to mine on.
The goal is to keep the network as computationally strong as it is now, but with a possibility for (ordinary, sane) human miners to continue to compete for coinbases. (EDIT to clarify: I mean secure the network without just punting and adding hashing based PoW like HUC does.)