ZmnSCPxj [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2023-08-29 🗒️ Summary of this message: The text ...
📅 Original date posted:2023-08-29
🗒️ Summary of this message: The text discusses the contentious nature of drivechains and recursive covenants in Bitcoin mining, highlighting the potential for miners to spend funds and the vulnerability of Nucleus nodes to attacks by wealthier entities.
📝 Original message:
Dear Mr Nucleus, and list,
Some more points:
* Miners in existing Bitcoin are only given the ability to reorder transactions, but not to outright spend funds.
This is why drivechains --- and recursive covenants, which, with some additional covenant features (that are more useful in general for covenants), could potentially enable a drivechain-like facility --- are contentious.
Drivechains escrow some set of funds to the miners, allowing the miners to vote to outright spend those funds as they please.
Now you might say, that if a 51% miner already exists, it can easily censor any transaction, and you would be unable to spend your funds anyway, so would be no different from theft.
The difference is that a miner (without drivechains) also cannot spend those funds and thus lowers the incentive to do this, but in addition to that, is the next point.
* Miners need to provide a proof external to what they are controlling --- that is, miners can be evicted.
Proof-of-work mining means that if a coalition of miners exists which is willing to censor, it is possible, theoretically, for honest non-censoring participants to acquire energy and hardware to perform mining.
Indeed there is an incentive to do so --- censored transactions will increase their feerates because of lack of confirmation, and thus, there is incentive for a non-censoring miner to increase their hashrate (possibly from 0 --- every fullnode IS a miner, it is just that most fullnodes have 0 hashrate) in order to get paid the fee.
Proof-of-stake cannot evict, because once a coalition of stakers exists, they can censor new staking transactions.
Thus, honest participants cannot break into a proof-of-stake scheme that has been captured by a majority of censoring stakers.
Your proposed scheme seems much more similar to proof-of-stake in this case.
Once a much richer adversary is able to get more than 51% voting rights, by spinning up more capacity than you can --- it is helpful to remember that in the Real World, a lot of people have < 1% the personal net worth of the richest --- then they can prevent entry of honest participants into your personal Nucleus.
Thus:
* Nucleus nodes can be attacked by entities far richer than they are.
* Those attackers can outright take the funds of the poorer participants.
Regards,
ZmnSCPxj
🗒️ Summary of this message: The text discusses the contentious nature of drivechains and recursive covenants in Bitcoin mining, highlighting the potential for miners to spend funds and the vulnerability of Nucleus nodes to attacks by wealthier entities.
📝 Original message:
Dear Mr Nucleus, and list,
Some more points:
* Miners in existing Bitcoin are only given the ability to reorder transactions, but not to outright spend funds.
This is why drivechains --- and recursive covenants, which, with some additional covenant features (that are more useful in general for covenants), could potentially enable a drivechain-like facility --- are contentious.
Drivechains escrow some set of funds to the miners, allowing the miners to vote to outright spend those funds as they please.
Now you might say, that if a 51% miner already exists, it can easily censor any transaction, and you would be unable to spend your funds anyway, so would be no different from theft.
The difference is that a miner (without drivechains) also cannot spend those funds and thus lowers the incentive to do this, but in addition to that, is the next point.
* Miners need to provide a proof external to what they are controlling --- that is, miners can be evicted.
Proof-of-work mining means that if a coalition of miners exists which is willing to censor, it is possible, theoretically, for honest non-censoring participants to acquire energy and hardware to perform mining.
Indeed there is an incentive to do so --- censored transactions will increase their feerates because of lack of confirmation, and thus, there is incentive for a non-censoring miner to increase their hashrate (possibly from 0 --- every fullnode IS a miner, it is just that most fullnodes have 0 hashrate) in order to get paid the fee.
Proof-of-stake cannot evict, because once a coalition of stakers exists, they can censor new staking transactions.
Thus, honest participants cannot break into a proof-of-stake scheme that has been captured by a majority of censoring stakers.
Your proposed scheme seems much more similar to proof-of-stake in this case.
Once a much richer adversary is able to get more than 51% voting rights, by spinning up more capacity than you can --- it is helpful to remember that in the Real World, a lot of people have < 1% the personal net worth of the richest --- then they can prevent entry of honest participants into your personal Nucleus.
Thus:
* Nucleus nodes can be attacked by entities far richer than they are.
* Those attackers can outright take the funds of the poorer participants.
Regards,
ZmnSCPxj