#asknostr can you review my below idea and let me know any issues you see with it?

Idea for a #BIP / #Bitcoin improvement proposal to increase both mining decentralization and block time stability.

I propose a mining network rule change that targets a more widely and fairly distributed block reward, sharing it among all the miners who discover proofs of work of various difficulties that combine to produce a valid block before anyone else can find a solo hash of the target difficulty.

Block templates would continue to be created as normal with all the typical transactions including a transaction to the miner for the block reward, connected to the previous block and with a total targeted difficulty required to maintain the 10 minute block time target.

The difference however is that if an easier proof of work than is currently required is found, the miners alter the working block template to be the same as the found block but including the easier proof of work nonce and hash as only a fractional winner of the subsidy instead of the whole winner.

The block within a block should be unchanged aside from the fact that the block subsidy payout is adjusted. As the change is logical and can be easily reversed to verify the block hash, this means redundant block reward information does not need to be retained on the Blockchain. Then if any miner should find another proof of work that, combined with the previous hash, reaches the required difficulty, each winning miner takes home a fraction of the block subsidy equal to the fraction of the hash difficulty they contributed to the total combined difficulty.

This process repeats until all proofs of work have a combined total of the minimum target difficulty.

Simple example:

Block difficulty target = 100%.

A proof of work hash that is 15% as hard as the target difficulty is found by miner A, a valid proof of work although of insufficient difficulty to add the block to the main Blockchain, this block becomes a new template that is broadcast like a transaction for other miners to consider working on. Although with the payout line to miner A retained but altered to 15% of the total block subsidy, matching the fraction of the total targeted difficulty they found.

The new working template includes the logically altered block and the new proof of work target for this block template is set to a difficulty of 85 (85 + 15 = 100 total overall target) while a line for 85% of the total subsidy is added for miner B if they should succeed in finding the required hash.

If miner B when seeking a hash with a difficulty of 85 finds a hash but with a difficulty of 50 then that hash is retained in the block and their payout of the finished block is altered to be 50% of the subsidy. Now the same thing occurs and a new template with both previous hash contributions are retained and a 3rd hash with a minimum difficulty of 35 is targeted to complete the block and so on.

Possible benefits:

This has the potential to not only increase the mining reward's distribution among miners, which would seem to greatly increase the likelihood that solo miners win fractions of blocks, but it may also reduce block time variability which increases network consistency of block time.

Possible considerations:

This would not require a block size change but a miner might want to reserve some block space for future miners to help in completing the block. To prevent a runaway effect where blocks are always empty of real transactions and are instead filled with thousands of miners who provide low difficulty hash contributions, the number of miners able to contribute to the total difficulty should be limited somehow to a maximum allowed per block. Perhaps the minimum acceptable contribution could equal something like 0.5% of the difficulty/subsidy so no more than 200 miners/hashes can possibly split the block reward.

We could also allow new transactions to be added to any partially completed blocks with available transaction space below the block limit, to allow increasing amounts of total block reward as new transactions are broadcast.

This effectively creates a mini block chain within each and every block template, while the main block chain would still require a combined hash that would target 10 minutes per block. The blocks within each template would not have an internal time target however, as they're strictly attempting to find the biggest proof of work they can to contribute to the main block chain.

I have other ideas for BIPs but, since mining centralization seems like the largest concern for most Bitcoiners, I think this is a good first proposal that came to mind recently after much thought on the subject.

Thank you for taking the time to read my proposal, I hope you have a wonderful day.

☮️🧡₿