Nostr Web Client

You could be right

I prefer checkpoints to an inflationary hard fork. The problem could be on us sooner than people think, though

I like that there's R&D in this area, though its something for everyone to think about. I hope we keep the good people that we have researching this.

jimbocoin 🃏 2y ago

> I prefer checkpoints to an inflationary hard fork.

I don’t know what you mean by “checkpoints”.

One other option nobody ever mentions: increasing the block time. If the block time were to increase on a schedule like the halvening, then the block subsidy would never run out.

Increasing the block time can be achieved by a soft fork. Legacy nodes would simply see blocks coming in too slowly and continue to ratchet the difficulty level down, while upgraded nodes increased required difficulty per the increased block time.

Such a change would have the added benefit of eventually unlocking the possibility of mining elsewhere in the Solar system. The current 10-minute time is too short for Martian miners to reliably receive terrestrial blocks, for example.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Melvin Carvalho 2y ago

Satoshi first introduced checkpoints to prevent large reorgs, thereby limiting the amount of damage that miners can do. Heuristics show us that accidental reorgs can happen up to 2 or 3 blocks. But a reorg much larger than that would almost certainly be an intentional attack. Checkpoints limit the effectiveness of that attack, and so feeds into the game theory to make it less worthwhile. Checkpoints however introduce another weakness in that a node that has left the network and rejoins needs a source of checkpoints, and if there are two sources the node wont know what to do. Perhaps nostr could fix this as people are publishing blocks already.

jimbocoin 🃏 2y ago

Checkpointing is an intentional divergence from proof-of-work. It brings us back down to politics, and is therefore a bad idea, irrespective of who advocates for it.