Hey Michael,

First I think the idea of "do nothing in the first 9 minutes" will unfortunately not be useful as the computed work is mainly there to prevent miners from altering the history of previous blocks. Thus following your suggesting would probably drastically decease the security of the network as less work protects previously mined blocks allowing for lower cost to compute a reorg. 


Let us assume the aforementioned point could somehow be resolved there would be another practical issue. It is hard / impossible to sync clocks in a distributed network which I think would be necessary for a system that you propose. (actually Bitcoin is one way of introducing a temporal ordering of events in a distributed network) 

Finally even if that was also resolved: How would you prevent miners to already compute the simpler difficulty problem directly after the block was found and publish their solution directly after minute 9? We would always have many people with a finished / competing solution.

So while I appreciate the idea I have the feeling it would be impractical but maybe I missed something.

Best Rene

Michael Fuhrmann via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> schrieb am Sa., 15. Mai 2021, 23:57:
Hello,

Bitcoin should create blocks every 10 minutes in average. So why do
miners need to mine the 9 minutes after the last block was found? It's
not necessary.

Problem: How to prevent "pre-mining" in the 9 minutes time window?

Possible ideas for discussion:

- (maybe most difficult) global network timer sending a salted hash time
code after 9 minutes. this enables validation by nodes.

- (easy attempt) mining jobs before 9 minutes have a 10 (or 100 or just
high enough) times higher difficulty. so everyone can mine any time but
before to 9 minutes are up there will be a too high downside. It is more
efficient to wait then paying high bills. The bitcoin will get a "puls".


I dont think I see all problems behind these ideas but if there is a
working solution to do so then the energy fud will find it's end. Saving
energy without loosing rosbustness.



:)
_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev