92 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
92 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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# katex
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title: >-
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consensus
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sidebar: true
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notmine: false
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abstract: >-
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consensus is a hard problem, and considerably harder when you have shards
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Nakomoto Satoshi's implementation of Nakomoto consensus, aptly described
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as wading through molasses, failed to scale
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---
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This document is work in progress, incomplete and inchoerent.
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# Failure of Bitcoin consensus to scale
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Mining pools, asics
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# Monero consensus
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RandomX prevented asics, because RandomX mining is best done on a general purpose CPU,
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but as Monero got bigger, it came to pass that payouts got bigger. And because
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more and more people were trying to mine a block, they got rarer and rarer
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So miners joined in mining pools, so as to get smaller, but more regular and
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predicable payouts more often. Which destroys the decentralization objective
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of mining, giving the central authority running the mining pool dangerously great
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power over the blockchain.
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Monero's workaround for this is P2Pool, a mining pool without centralization.
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But not everyone wants to use P2Pool.
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Monero has a big problem with people preferring to mine in big pools, because
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of the convenience provided by the dangerously powerful central authority.
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It easier for the individual miner to let the center make all the decisions that
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matter, but many of these decisions matter to other people, and the center could
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make decisions that are contrary to everyone else's interests. Even if the
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individual miner is better off than mining solo, this could well make everyone
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including the individual miner worse off, because he and everyone may be
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adversely affected by other people's decision to pool mine.
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# POW
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> why do you hate POW? Because of resource waste? I thought it was the
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> reason for success of BTC. With proof of share, or proof of stake,
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> there will be always discussions of pre-mine, centralization etc.
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> Would it be the case?
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Hate the resource waste. It offends me. Plus a system that does
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not directly handle money, that is a a messaging system between
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systems that do handle money, cannot incentivise the
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necessary resource waste.
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It could bill people for messaging, and the payments could go to the block winner, but then
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it would be a dao or yet another crypto currency, and not a neutral platform that other daos
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and crypto currencies could use.
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Suppose we have a filecoin style proof of spacetime .
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Which also wastes resources, but identifies those
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peers that are contributing to the network by storing
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information and are capable of passing it around,
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and have lots of connections to other peers.
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All peers that pass the proof of space test become
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authorized consensus makers for
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a certain number of blocks, say 8192 blocks.
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The test is not too hard. Most peers are authorized.
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We harvest randomness, possibly from the fact that parties
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do not know each other's secret keys, possibly from the
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proof of space time test, so that each round, or each group of rounds,
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a peer gets a random weight, such that the inverse of the weight is uniformly
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distributed between one and two to the fifty sixth
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Which means the weight is non uniformly distributed, with a very few peers
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having most of the weight.
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Each peer goes with the consensus block that has the highest chain of weights that it knows of.
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Actually that algorithm has pathologies that could lead to suprising chain re-organisations
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-- a slightly more complex algorithm is needed.
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Every time a proposed block consensus is shared, it now has addiitional support.\
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The weights of the two peers that have that consensus
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and have the highest weight of all peers having that consensus is propagated
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among all the peers that have that consensus, and the weight of the consensus is the weight of
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the lesser of the two peers, plus the weight of the lesser of the two peers of the block it
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was built upon that were known to the peer that built upon it at the time he built upon it,
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plus the weight of the block that block was built upon, and so on and so forth.
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Thus the most well known chain is propagated, becoming more well known. The more
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peers that know of a block, the greater the weight of the block.
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It is a better algorithm, but a whole lot more work to implement than RandomX POW. |