You might be interested in an idea I wrote about that is in a similar spirit here: https://medium.com/coinmonks/taming-large-miners-with-helper-blocks-6ae67ac242f6 From the article: When a block is solved, it randomly selects one satoshi from the utxo set and gives whomever controls that satoshi the power to generate a “Helper Block”. The Helper Block commits to a subset of transactions for inclusion in the next block. A miner can accept the Helper Block by including the suggested transactions and giving the associated transaction fees to a payment address specified in the Helper Block. Miners who do not use a Helper Block must satisfy a 25% higher difficulty. On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 9:56 AM Andrew via bitcoin-dev < bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > I discussed this more at bitcointalk: > https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4998410.0 > > The attacks I'm interested in preventing are not only selfish mining > and collusion, but also more subtle attacks like block withholding, > and in general anything that aims to drive out the competition in > order to increase hashrate fraction. I also scrapped the idea of > changing the block subsidies, and I am only focuses on fees. > > You can read more about the motivation and details in the bitcointalk > thread, but my proposal in short would be to add the concept of > "reserve fees". When a user makes a transaction, for each txout > script, they can add parameters that specify the fraction of the total > fee that is held in "reserve" and the time it is held in "reserve" > (can set a limit of 2016 blocks). This "reserve" part of the fee will > be paid to miners if the hashrate rises. So if hashrate is currently h > and peak hashrate (from past year) is p, then for each period (1 day), > a new hashrate is calculated h1, and if h1 > h, then the fraction > (h1-h)/p from the reserve fees created in the past 2016 blocks will be > released to miners for that period (spread out over the 144 blocks in > that period). And this will keep happening as long as hashrate keeps > rising, until the "contract" expires, and the leftover part can be > used by the owner of the unspent output, but it can only be used for > paying fees, not as inputs for future transactions (to save on block > space). > > This should incentivize miners to not drive out the competition, since > if they do, there will be less of these reserve fees given to miners. > Yes in the end the miners will get all the fees, but with rising > hashrate they get an unconditional subsidy that does not require > transactions, thus more space for transactions with fees. > > I can make a formal BIP and pull request, but I need to know if there > is interest in this. Now fees don't play such a large part of the > block reward, but they will get more important, and this change > wouldn't force anything (would be voluntary by each user), just miners > have to agree to it with a soft fork (so they don't spend from the > anyone-can-spend outputs used for reserve fees). Resource requirements > for validation are quite small I believe. > > On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 12:11 AM, Andrew wrote: > > As I understand, selfish mining is an attack where miners collude to > > mine at a lower hashrate then with all miners working independently. > > What are the current strategies used to prevent this and what are the > > future plans? > > > > One idea I have is to let the block reward get "modulated" according > > to peak hashrate. Say p is the peak hashrate for 365 periods (1 year) > > consisting of 144 blocks, h is the hashrate of the last 144 block (1 > > day) period, and r is the base subsidy (12.5 BTC currently). You can > > then make the max block reward 0.5 r (1 + h/p). So if hashrate is at > > peak you get the full reward. Otherwise you get less, down to a min of > > 0.5 r. > > > > If miners were to collude to mine at a lower than peak hashrate, then > > they may be able to do it profitably for 144 blocks, but after that, > > the reward would get modulated and it wouldn't be so much in their > > interest to continue mining at the lower hashrate. > > > > What flaws are there with this? I know it could be controversial due > > to easier mining present for early miners, so maybe it would have to > > be done in combination with a new more dynamic difficulty adjustment > > algorithm. But I don't see how hashrate can continue rising > > indefinitely, so a solution should be made for selfish mining. > > > > Also when subsidies stop and a fee market is needed, I guess a portion > > of the fees can be withheld for later if hashrate is not at peak. > > > > > > -- > > PGP: B6AC 822C 451D 6304 6A28 49E9 7DB7 011C D53B 5647 > > > > -- > PGP: B6AC 822C 451D 6304 6A28 49E9 7DB7 011C D53B 5647 > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev >