Re: [ANN][DRK] DarkCoin | First Anonymous Coin | First X11 | First DGW | DarkSend+ Is Live!
Sporkage is just putting the rules you mention into action. Same as if they were hardcoded in the first place.
Of course they had to be hardcoded in the first place for the spork to even work, but the fact that the software can be influenced by an external "switch" that can be turned on or off at any time is not in the spirit of cryptocurrencies. I am fine with it for betas/RCs/development/whatever, but the final product should definitely not have any spork switches.
I don't believe enforcement was ever difficult to implement, I think the problems resulted from the payment/election code sometimes causing different nodes to believe different masternodes should be paid. So when enforcement was switched on (via hard fork), little forks started emerging because there wasn't consensus.
That is what I understand to have been happening; could've been something else though.
This is certainly believable, and I guess it would be a problem if a given miners/pools "chose" the same MNs over and over again, excluding other MNs. 1. However, it is better for them to be paying MNs than not at all.
Personally I've always thought the "election" process was convoluted and prone to error (given that not all MNs can necessarily always be seen by all nodes on the network) and that the coinbase transaction should simply pay the MNs who provably performed the mixing during that particular block. Split it up among them proportionately. The clients will choose which MNs to send to at random; or if they mess with the code to always favor certain MNs, that's fine too (although they will probably be losing some privacy if they choose to always use their own MN = shooting themselves in the foot = hopefully nobody is so stupid as to do this). The MNs are paid for providing a service, and if they provide that service in a given block, then they should be paid in that block. JM2C
1. I believe this should have been a fairly easy "enforcement" switch to code, but in reality wouldn't have done too much. I believe the cause of the forking to have been nodes thinking different MNs should be paid, and rejecting the blocks that paid, but didn't pay the "right" node. However, just making so 20% had to be split off or the block rejected would allow the miner to just pay themselves in a separate transaction.
I think you have an interesting idea in doing that PoSvc thing (which I believe "flare" has talked about at dct): you should be able to determine which masternode signed each denomination transaction included in the block.
It sounds very cool and elegant at first, but it too has vectors that must be considered. Nothing stops you from choosing a masternode; they just sit around waiting for inputs. So you could constantly denominate the smallest # of inputs (to minimize fees) using your own node, which would nearly guarantee its inclusion in every block for payment. This only wouldn't make sense if fees were higher than the payout.
Additionally, what happens if no denominate transaction occurs in a particular block? Is the mining node then able to keep the entire reward for himself? What then happens if he simply refused to include those transactions in his block (I'm not sure how you can force them to include transactions?).
Several other ideas are rolling around in my head, mostly in relation to masternodes somehow/sometimes having block minting authority. I need to think about it some more though.