[Bitcoin-development] Request for comments on hybrid PoW/PoS enhancement for Bitcoin

[Chris Page]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the feedback and letting me know that my earlier emails fell
victim to spam.

My scheme might be better because it would add further incentives for
running full nodes.  A full node can be run on even a cheap laptop.  In my
experience, once a person new to bitcoin accepts it as at worthy of
attention, the next area of interest is how to mine.  They'll learn about
mining pools, search, and if they are technical enough, they'll join the
pool and likely be disappointed with their results.  They'll then consider
a graphics card, or ASICs, or just stop mining altogether.  And I wouldn't
be surprised if, when making that selection of a mining pool, a person
might, based on limited information, decide that the best mining pool to
join is the largest.

I've made a number of assumptions in that progression to further my point,
but I don't think that journey is too far off mark.  I do so to illustrate
that for a person to enjoy some financial reward for running a full node,
in practice, it isn't as simple as running a full node .  My proposal makes
it easier for a full node to enjoy rewards, and to do so on modest
hardware.  In that sense, it is better than what we have now.

Many people new to bitcoin express an interest in mining.  I suspect that
the primary motive that they want a way to earn bitcoin using the computer
** that they have **.  If you too believe this, then I hope you'd agree
that my proposal offers a solution that meets the desires of that person
new to bitcoin.  It makes bitcoin more accommodating, which makes it
better, but this time on a "social" rather than technological scale.  This
would help ** keep ** people interested in bitcoin and result in ecosystem
growth.

With a larger ecosystem running full nodes, the blockchain becomes more
secure.  That's better.

Then there are the merits of "enodorsement" itself which is at the heart of
my new scheme which one might argue could raise the bar from 51% to 101% to
pull off such an attack.

I don't know that my scheme helps on the sybil front, but since it requires
and builds on top of the current system, I don't know that is makes it any
worse.

I tried to be more crisp, but that's one of the areas I need to improve.

Thanks
-Chris




On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 7:30 AM, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:

> Hi Chris,
>
> Just FYI you may not have received much feedback on this because Gmail put
> it into the spam folder for some reason. So I'm guessing a lot of people
> didn't see it.
>
> My main feedback is - I do not really see how this is different from
> actual mining. Mining also incentives the running of full nodes, miners are
> rewarded via coinbases, etc. I'm missing a crisp description of why your
> scheme is better than this, in particular, taking into account the
> difficulty of distinguishing full node sybils of each other.
>
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