Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Floating-Point Nakamoto Consensus

From: ZmnSCPxj <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 06:31:41 +0000

>  At this point very little is stopping us from speeding up block creation times. PoS networks are proving that conformations can be a minute or less - why not allow for a block formation time that is 6 or 12 times faster than the current target and have 1/6th (or 1/12th) of the subsidy to keep an identical inflation target.

What?

That is surprising information to me.

My understanding is that speeding up block creation times is highly risky due to increasing the tendency to "race" in mining.

The average time to propagate to all miners should be negligible to the average inter-block time.
Efforts like compact blocks and FIBRE already work at the very edges of our capability to keep the propagation time negligible.

Indeed, looking forward, part of my plans for Earth-based civilization involves sending out hapless humans into space and forcing them to survive there, thus the inter-block time may need to be *increased* in consideration of interplanetary communications times, otherwise Bitcoin would dangerously centralize around Earth, potentially leading to the Universal Century and awesome giant robot battles.

(Hmmm, on the one hand, centralizing around Earth is dangerous, on the other hand, giant robots, hmmm)

"PoS" networks mean nothing, as most of them are not global in the scale that Bitcoin is, and all of them have a very different block discovery model from proof-of-work.
In particular, I believe there is no "racing" involved in most PoS schemes in practice.

>
> … The really interesting part is the doors that this patch opens. Bitcoin is the best network, we have the most miners and we as developers have the opportunity to build an even better system - all with incremental soft-forks - which is so exciting.

Changing inter-block times is not possible as a softfork, unless you are planning to (ab)use the timewarp bug, which I believe was proposed by maaku7 before.
My understanding is that the preferred approach would be to close the timewarp bug, in which case increasing the block rate would not be doable as a softfork anymore.

Regards,
ZmnSCPxj