Thank you very much Garlonicon for the link. Yea. You are absolutely right on A_hash. It was my first intuition and then I switched to B_hash to avoid congesting the network as every miner can do all the B_hash calculation by itself. Your remark on backward-compatibility is brilliant.

True. True.

This idea you can implement it easily. Just ask everyone to calculate their A_hash: hash = Hash(Block Head + sign(Block Head))
And Everyone will broadcast its A_hash and everyone will know that this A_hash can be produced only by the miner itself and no one else.

Now the issue is how to find the consensus:
1- The closest to the target like in PoW.
2- The closest to the arithmetic average mod a Big N of all the A_hash of the network.
3- The closest to the geometric average mod a Big N of all the A_hash of the network.
4- Others

And the idea is how to make sure that everyone is OK on the outcome? Bitcoin PoW proposed the criteria of the fastest miner which push people to invest heavily in CPU.

The idea has a lot of merit. But we need to find a way to implement it in such a way that most of honest players comply with it. Because as said by Vjudeu, miners can always create N sub-miners etc.

The other idea that I suggested along side with JPoW was to create a Placebo Proof-of-Work (PPoW): a group of miners unknowingly run the real PoW and another group of miners unknowingly run only a placebo PoW, a PoW with no hashing computation at all. And we adjust the seize of each group accordingly to get the desired number of miners to run the hash competition. But the issue again is that miners can still ignore the Placebo PoW and just use the traditional PoW disregarding the rules to win the block reward. So, I need to find a way to stop such behavior which I haven't figured that out yet.

We are not stopping individual miners but only limiting the hash computation to a group of miners at each block.

They can do that. But it will create for them the issue of managing a long list of addresses and keys. And that each time they will need to spend time calculating the signatures and the hashes. Which at the end may not worth it.

Yea. But this is NOT a desired outcome. Because we have a system that was supposed to be decentralized became de facto centralized in the hands of few miners. What if these few miners decided to engage in 51% attack without announcing it and steal people money.

The idea is to create a system that is as decentralized as possible. The current state of affaires is not at the best interest of Bitcoin ideologically. Today, we have few miners running the show and they can create a monopoly whenever they want to. Just another Banking system with a different name.

Yes. But like in Bitcoin, we bet that the network will be controlled by honest miners who will play by the rules. And even if they don't, their work will be simply ignored by the honest nodes and hence waste of money for the miners involved in such practice. 

Yes. There is no way to stop a miner from hashing if he want to launch his machine. But technically his hash work will go to dustbin.


Indeed. But it reduces pool mining to be only between miners who can share their private keys with each others. A total trust is required. Which means that there a is large number of miners who won't be able to create pools unless they trust each other 100%. And this in itself will create a limitation in the pool formation. It won't stop it.

Indeed. You are right. This is why we proposed equation (2) and (3)

Indeed. But it reduces mining only between miners who can share their private keys with each other. Which means that there a large number of miners won't be able to create pools unless they trust each other 100%.

In my opinion we have around 150+ millions crypto addresses. And the market cap is 2 trillions USD.
Plus miners are ready to run their machines for any job be it mining or hacking. With Amazon AWS / Google Cloud machines ready to be used by anyone. Personally, I think it is just a question of time. I was thinking about of this issue a long while. The person / groups who will crack an address, they will most likely not announcing it.   

So True. Pool domination is a reality. Now we need a way to complicate life for mining pools.
So I got this new idea that I called: Jakarta Proof of Work. Instead of running a Two-Round PoW, we just directly limit the miners that are going to participate in the hash competition for a block.
Read article here:
or here:
==============Begin==============
The other simple idea is to do like Jakarta’s odd-even traffic policy to limit the number of cars entering Jakarta: the policy stipulates that cars whose license plate ends in an odd number are only allowed to circulate on odd-numbered dates and vice versa. So, like in the case of Jakarta, we don't want every miner to participate in the hash computation all the time. So, we propose a Jakarta PoW (JPoW) where only miners with (hash mod N < K) where, for each block, for each miner with its public key $PublicKey$:
Equation (1):  hash = Hash(Block Head + Public Key)
If (hash mod N < K), then the miner will go for the traditional Bitcoin PoW.  If (hash mod N > K), then the miner will move to the next block without calculating any hash. $N$ and $K$ are parameters to adjust to determine the number of miners participating in the hash competition. To get a similar model like Jakarta odd-even policy, we can just choose $N=2$ and $K=1$.  When a miner receives an $nonce$ from another miner, it can easily verify that the sender is authorized to participate in the hash computation. If all is fine, it accepts the $nonce$ and moves to the next block competition. If the miner sending the $nonce$ is not authorized to participate in the hash computation, the miner receiving the $nonce$ will ignore what it received and continue solving for its own $nonce$ and listening to the network like in Bitcoin. In JPoW, if a miner ignores the rules and just go for the hash calculation, such miner will be ignored by the honest nodes in the network.
With equation (1), it will be still possible for miners that cannot participate in a hash computation to rent their machines to miners that are authorized to hash as the public keys information is available to all miners. So, to resolve this issue, we replace $Public Key$ by $sign(Block Head)$:
Equation(2): hash = Hash(Block Head + sign(Block Head))
The $sign(Block Head)$ can be produced by the miner only. And it is not available to all the miners at the time of the block creation. If a miner wants to participate in a pool, it will need to send its $sign(Block Head)$ to its pool. The pool will still be able to help on the hash calculation.
Even though $sign(Block Head)$ will slow down the process as the pool will still need to wait for its arrival before starting looking for the nonce while hashing for $Hash(Block Head + sign(Block Head) +  nonce)$. To complicate the problem further for the pool, we slightly modify the PoW and search for a nonce while hashing the following equation (3):  PoW hash = Hash(Block Head + sign(Block Head) +  sign(nonce))
The replacement of $nonce$ in PoW by $sign(nonce)$ will force the miner to either share its private key with the mining pool or calculate the hash itself. Sharing one's private key is a significant constraint and it is expected to complicate mining pool formation.
===============End====

 

 

It is true that miners can/will organize themselves in pools and participate in the hash calculation all the time. TRPoW can still be able to reduce the total energy consumption in the network thanks to the non-pooled miners.
Now the question what is the fraction of non-pooled miners in Bitcoin network?

Thank you very much Vjudeu for your time and your great sharing and all the links. Much appreciated Bro. I learned a lot from you.

Be cool baby. Things will come in their due time. Stay tuned.

TRPoW does not affect the competition edge of a miner. So If everything stays the same, a miner will have a lower electricity bill
with more or less the same earning potential.  So, it will reduce the miners business cost and increase their profit.
The mining cartel will make more money And with less running cost. 

Proof of Space is driving the hard disk drive market crazy I read in the news. 

Good point.  High prices will drive competition crazy and we can expect miners to do whatever needed to make more money.

Hi Harry,

I do see your point very well.
But I think the question is a bit more philosophical: Just because we have a machine does this means that we need to use it at all cost and all the time?
We don't use our Laptop / Car all the time just because we bought them. We only use them when we need them.
Although the mining hardware is there, we still need Electricity to make it work. So the question now what is the tradeoff between electricity consumption and the hardware usage over a long run ?
It is known that the intensive usage of a hardware make it wear quickly.
So We can see TRPoW as way of reducing usage of mining machines which will make them last longer.

What do you thing?         

Totally agreed with you. I think the idea needs to be tested. At least for the sake of the experiment. 


Thank you Garlonicon for these great and precious ideas/suggestions. Much appreciated. Let's me think of it. I will update you here in all cases.

I don't think TRPoW is a recipe for disaster. Far from it. Keep in mind that Bitcoin worked with small group of miners for many years.

As I wrote to you previously. We can find an optimal value of N2 that does not undermine the security of Bitcoin with TRPoW. Intuitively an upper bound of such value is O(SquareRoot N1). Assuming that the winner of Second Round is among N2 List of N2 miners instead of only N2 first miners. I think an optimal value of N2 could be in O(Log(N1)) based on a similar calculation done by EPFL Distributed Algo team: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.01738

You can also see Bitcoin with PoW as Bitcoin with TRPoW where N2 = N1.

If we assume for the sake of argument that N1 = 1000000 and N2 = Square Root of N1 = 1000.
The reduction of energy can go drastically because we will have 1000 000  - 1000 = 999 000 miners (99.9% of the network) not doing the Second Round. We will save huge amount of electricity without undermining the security of the blockchain.

I don't think TRPoW is a recipe for disaster. Far from it. Keep in mind that Bitcoin worked with small group of miners for many years.

As I wrote to you previously. We can find an optimal value of N2 that does not undermine the security of Bitcoin with TRPoW. Intuitively an upper bound of such value is O(SquareRoot N1). Assuming that the winner of Second Round is among N2 List of N2 miners instead of only N2 first miners. I think an optimal value of N2 could be in O(Log(N1)) based on a similar calculation done by EPFL Distributed Algo team: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.01738

You can also see Bitcoin with PoW as Bitcoin with TRPoW where N2 = N1.

If we assume for the sake of argument that N1 = 1000000 and N2 = Square Root of N1 = 1000.
The reduction of energy can go drastically because we will have 1000 000  - 1000 = 999 000 miners (99.9% of the network) not doing the Second Round. We will save huge amount of electricity without undermining the security of the blockchain.

Great point indeed.