ZmnSCPxj [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2021-05-18 📝 Original message:Good morning Michael, > ...
📅 Original date posted:2021-05-18
📝 Original message:Good morning Michael,
> Nothing in a dynamic system like PoW mining can be 100% anticipated, for example there might be advanced in manufacturing of chips which are patented and so on.
>
> It sounds like your take is that this means no improvements can ever be made by any mechanism, however conservative.
Not at all.
Small-enough improvements over long-enough periods of time are expected and anticipated --- that is why there exists a difficulty adjustment mechanism.
What is risky if a large-enough improvement over a short-enough time that overwhelms the difficulty adjustment mechanism.
ASICBOOST was a massive enough improvement that it could be argued to potentially overwhelm this mechanism if it was not openly allowed for all miners.
>
> We do go into a fair amount of detail about Minimum Effective Hardness in our paper https://assets.pubpub.org/xi9h9rps/01581688887859.pdf , which is actually a special case of hardness that we invented for the context of adding an operation to a PoW, and how it applies to random matrix mults.
This certainly helps as well.
Regards,
ZmnSCPxj
📝 Original message:Good morning Michael,
> Nothing in a dynamic system like PoW mining can be 100% anticipated, for example there might be advanced in manufacturing of chips which are patented and so on.
>
> It sounds like your take is that this means no improvements can ever be made by any mechanism, however conservative.
Not at all.
Small-enough improvements over long-enough periods of time are expected and anticipated --- that is why there exists a difficulty adjustment mechanism.
What is risky if a large-enough improvement over a short-enough time that overwhelms the difficulty adjustment mechanism.
ASICBOOST was a massive enough improvement that it could be argued to potentially overwhelm this mechanism if it was not openly allowed for all miners.
>
> We do go into a fair amount of detail about Minimum Effective Hardness in our paper https://assets.pubpub.org/xi9h9rps/01581688887859.pdf , which is actually a special case of hardness that we invented for the context of adding an operation to a PoW, and how it applies to random matrix mults.
This certainly helps as well.
Regards,
ZmnSCPxj