On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 04:48:35PM -0400, Erik Aronesty via bitcoin-dev wrote: > The transition *could* look like this: > - validating nodes begin to require proof-of-burn, in addition to > proof-of-work (soft fork) > - the extra expense makes it more expensive for miners, so POW slowly drops > - on a predefined schedule, POB required is increased to 100% of the > "required work" to mine > Given all of that, am I correct in thinking that a hard fork would not > be necessary?
It depends what you mean by a "hard fork". By the definition that "the old software will consider the chain followed by new versions of the software as valid" it's a soft fork. But it doesn't maintain the property "old software continues to follow the same chain as new software, provided the economic majority has adopted the new software" -- because after the PoW part has dropped its difficulty substantitally, people can easily/cheaply make a new chain that doesn't include proof-of-burn, and has weak proof-of-work that's nevertheless higher than the proof-of-burn chain, so old nodes will switch to it, while new nodes will continue to follow the proof-of-burn chain. So I think that means it needs to be treated as a hard fork: everyone needs to be running the new software by some date to ensure they follow the same chain. (The same argument applies to trying to switch to a different PoW algorithm via a soft fork; I forget who explained this to me) Jeremy wrote: > I think you need to hard deprecate the PoW for this to work, otherwise > all old miners are like "toxic waste". > > Imagine one miner turns on a S9 and then ramps up difficulty for > everyone else. If it's a soft-fork, you could only ramp up the PoW difficulty by mining more than one block every ten minutes, but presumably the proof-of-burn scheme would have its own way of preventing burners from mining blocks too fast (it was assumption 2). Cheers, aj _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
