Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] [Bitcoin Advent Calendar] Decentralized Coordination Free Mining Pools

From: Billy Tetrud <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2022 12:15:15 -0600

@vjudeu
>  If you introduce signing into mining, then you will have cases, where
someone is powerful enough to produce blocks, but cannot, because signing
is needed..  your consensus is no longer "the heaviest chain"

You've misunderstood my suggestion. This would not be possible with what I
suggested. Why do you think of the signature as some kind of barrier? What
I was suggesting was that, when a miner participating in this protocol
mines a valid bitcoin block, they then sign a superblock with a public key
that can be verified alongside the coinbase output (eg say with data in the
first tapleaf of the output address). The block is still connected to
something secured by PoW. You really made a lot of incorrect assumptions
about what I suggested.

On Thu, Dec 23, 2021 at 1:05 PM Jeremy <[email-masked]> wrote:

> If you introduce signing into mining, then you will have cases, where
>> someone is powerful enough to produce blocks, but cannot, because signing
>> is needed. Then, your consensus is no longer "the heaviest chain", but "the
>> heaviest signed chain". That means, your computing power is no longer
>> enough by itself (as today), because to make a block, you also need some
>> kind of "permission to mine", because first you sign things (like in
>> signet) and then you mine them. That kind of being "reliably unreliable"
>> may be ok for testing, but not for the main network.
>
>
> this is a really great point worth underscoring. this is the 'key
> ingredient' for DCFMP, which is that there is no signing or other network
> system that is 'in the way' of normal bitcoin mining, just an opt-in set of
> rules for sharing the bounties of your block in exchange for future shares.
>