Thesis:
The purpose of mining is to secure the blockchain and ensure its integrity via decentralised consensus.
Distributed mining makes attacks upon the blockchain prohibitively expensive.
Centralised mining reduces the cost of an attack and decreases network security in direct proportion to that centralisation.
1000 individual miners are 1000x more expensive to attack than 1000 miners acting as one entity through one server.
Right now mining is almost entirely useless as a security mechanism, as over 50% of the nethash is centralised through only 3 servers - the complete opposite of the intended purpose of PoW mining.
Only 25% of the nethash is required to cause severe blockchain vandalism. > 50% guarantees complete control.
Darkcoin mining is useless unless it provides a provably greater barrier to attack than the Masternode network, or a secure and cost effective backup.
p2pool mining has obvious security advantages over mining via centralised pools, but is not without problems, most notably blockchain dustbloat.
Mandatory solo mining through users wallets gets rid of the dust problem and effectively guarantees distributed consensus but makes mining basically a lottery.
Which is more important to existing and future Darkcoin users, investors, and related businesses - network security or guaranteeing any given miners income?
Mining costs have been claimed to add value to the resultant mined coins, but this is demonstrably not the case. Darkcoin has never been profitable to mine (apart from the first few weeks) and most DRK are sold for less than the mining expense in electricity, never mind the hardware costs of mining rigs.
If PoW mining is to be kept as a security mechanism - and what other useful purpose does it serve? - then IMO enforced solo mining is the simplest way of achieving the desired decentralisation.
Solo mining removes all the middleware from the equation, whose sole purpose in the case of mpos/nomp is to increase income for miners at the expense of network security for all users, and reduces the developer workload as they would be dealing with a simpler and more manageable system, which they are already familiar with.
Proposed implementaion:
Work submitted by solo miners will only be considered as valid if the wallet submitting the work has a positive balance (I suggest minimum 1DRK) and is signed with a valid privkey tied to that wallets's main address.
Wallet balance does not matter beyond that, this remains Proof of Work, not Proof of Stake. The 1DRK requirement serves as an additional minimum deterrent to an attacker running thousands of wallets at purely electrical cost.
Wallets are user-configurable with regard to resources used in mining - number of cores, or maximum CPU load.
The Masternode network will form consensus on the validity of submitted work.
Expected objections:
Why don't you bugger off and do it yourself then, smartarse?
- I would if I could, and I'd be rich as a result, because if implementing this or some alternative scheme for ensuring sensibly distributed consensus is achieved, the blatantly false 'security' provided by all other PoW coins will be exposed as horribly inadequate by comparison.
If this is even possible, why has nobody done it before?
- Masternodes have not existed before now. They offer their own decentralised means of determining block/work validity.
tl;dr: Network security is more important to all Darkcoin users than providing guaranteed income for miners.
Interesting proposal to incentivise solo mining vs pool mining:
https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/theoretical-and-practical-nonoutsourceable-puzzles/
The purpose of mining is to secure the blockchain and ensure its integrity via decentralised consensus.
Distributed mining makes attacks upon the blockchain prohibitively expensive.
Centralised mining reduces the cost of an attack and decreases network security in direct proportion to that centralisation.
1000 individual miners are 1000x more expensive to attack than 1000 miners acting as one entity through one server.
Right now mining is almost entirely useless as a security mechanism, as over 50% of the nethash is centralised through only 3 servers - the complete opposite of the intended purpose of PoW mining.
Only 25% of the nethash is required to cause severe blockchain vandalism. > 50% guarantees complete control.
Darkcoin mining is useless unless it provides a provably greater barrier to attack than the Masternode network, or a secure and cost effective backup.
p2pool mining has obvious security advantages over mining via centralised pools, but is not without problems, most notably blockchain dustbloat.
Mandatory solo mining through users wallets gets rid of the dust problem and effectively guarantees distributed consensus but makes mining basically a lottery.
Which is more important to existing and future Darkcoin users, investors, and related businesses - network security or guaranteeing any given miners income?
Mining costs have been claimed to add value to the resultant mined coins, but this is demonstrably not the case. Darkcoin has never been profitable to mine (apart from the first few weeks) and most DRK are sold for less than the mining expense in electricity, never mind the hardware costs of mining rigs.
If PoW mining is to be kept as a security mechanism - and what other useful purpose does it serve? - then IMO enforced solo mining is the simplest way of achieving the desired decentralisation.
Solo mining removes all the middleware from the equation, whose sole purpose in the case of mpos/nomp is to increase income for miners at the expense of network security for all users, and reduces the developer workload as they would be dealing with a simpler and more manageable system, which they are already familiar with.
Proposed implementaion:
Work submitted by solo miners will only be considered as valid if the wallet submitting the work has a positive balance (I suggest minimum 1DRK) and is signed with a valid privkey tied to that wallets's main address.
Wallet balance does not matter beyond that, this remains Proof of Work, not Proof of Stake. The 1DRK requirement serves as an additional minimum deterrent to an attacker running thousands of wallets at purely electrical cost.
Wallets are user-configurable with regard to resources used in mining - number of cores, or maximum CPU load.
The Masternode network will form consensus on the validity of submitted work.
Expected objections:
Why don't you bugger off and do it yourself then, smartarse?
- I would if I could, and I'd be rich as a result, because if implementing this or some alternative scheme for ensuring sensibly distributed consensus is achieved, the blatantly false 'security' provided by all other PoW coins will be exposed as horribly inadequate by comparison.
If this is even possible, why has nobody done it before?
- Masternodes have not existed before now. They offer their own decentralised means of determining block/work validity.
tl;dr: Network security is more important to all Darkcoin users than providing guaranteed income for miners.
Interesting proposal to incentivise solo mining vs pool mining:
https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/theoretical-and-practical-nonoutsourceable-puzzles/
