New Mining Approaches Provide Hedge Against Centralization As Hash War Looms

[Mark Mason]

New Mining Approaches Provide Hedge Against Centralization As Hash War Looms

Zcash recently announced their new protocol upgrade, Blossom, which among many new developments will include “Harmony Mining”, which will enabling the network to utilize two proof-of-work algorithm.

The forum post described the feature as “a dual-proof-of-work scheme, where one algorithm is backwards compatible with current mining equipment, and another is designed to work well with GPUs on a temporary time scale”. The post went on to describe how the upgrade will allow the network to attract both ASIC and GPU miners “to make the Zcash ecosystem more resilient by spreading issuance and political influence among distinct kinds of stakeholders”. Currently, most GPU miners are crowded out by the more powerful ASIC miners.

Read more - https://www.dashforcenews.com/new-m...dge-against-centralization-as-hash-war-looms/​

 

[mage00000]

"Funny", because I was just thinking about that while reading about sharkpool. I do not think Dash is in any danger from these freedom hating BCH-fans or others.
Do the math, and see how much X11 hashpower they would need in order to get, say 25% of Dash's hashpower. And even then they would only mine 1 out of 4 blocks. Instead of 3 million transactions per day we would then process 2.25 million. Not a real issue.

Having said that, there is something wrong about the current mining set-up and I was (pleasantly!) surprised to read that Evan has thought of this before, namely that the miners are not incentivized to support the network. Given the fact that they have some influence on the network health, they should be incentivized to do the right thing.
The other option that came to mind was that just as masternodes can reject blocks that try to double spend instant send transactions, they could do some other validations like "is the block empty while there are transactions in the mempool?" or other blocks that damage the network health. Thus taking away some of the power that un-incentivezed miners have.

As I said I don't think this is a pressing issue for Dash, but I do think action needs to be taken.
Thoughts?