Creating robust, secure, energy efficient and decentralized blockchain network

If you look at other cryptocurrencies, the reason they attempt to provide ASIC resistance is decentralization. The core tenant of the cryptocurrency world is zero trust, especially with a coin based on Monero privacy. The focus should be on maximum decentralization and minimum trust, not environmental impact as per the goals of this project.

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Personally I would go the route of CrytpoNightV7 for now. There is no need to waste cycles attempting to do something better when there is a proven algorithm already available. Focus on the smart contracts and other roadmap items instead of cycling on this issue.

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I agree you
i think crytponight v7 now is good,
every 6 month update is good.

BTC is NOT decentralized and it’s because of the monopoly Bitmain has on ASICs.

Here’s my 2 cents on this topic:

Kill ASICs and don’t affect CPU miners (monero7) = Give CPU botnets increased ability to launch attacks, but most decentralized approach as barrier to entry remains lower for most people. Not affecting CPU performance sort of balances the impact by GPU pools/NH too.

Don’t kill ASICs (leave algo as is) = Increase centralization but mitigate what botnets can do to the network because ASIC owners have a stake in keeping the system “clean” in order to maximize profits. ASICS are only useful for one task and most operators have an incentive to keep their rig running and generating long-term income. This will all but eliminate any CPU or GPU miners but will also prevent most CPU/GPU botnets from causing damage (unless someone is running an ASIC botnet???).

Kill ASICS and lower CPU performance (CN-Heavy) = Give big ETH or ZCASH pools the ability to launch attacks and/or have a constant HR spike as they auto-switch to different coins. This will deter the impact CPU botnets have though. It’s sort of a middle ground regarding centralization too. The common CPU miner has no stake in this race though.

I’m sure there are other consequences I’m not thinking of right now too.

A change to full PoS leaves room for anyone with deep pockets to QUICKLY take ownership of the network.

A hybrid approach seems like the future tbh. Check out what Decred has done as an example https://www.decredible.com/mining/hybrid-consensus/

IF ASICs where accessible, the same way GPU’s are accessible today, that would not have been an issue. But it’s still much better than what an ASIC driven coin would look like if we ignored the issue today.

The idea here is to look beyond PoW algorithms.

Dero’s article on Medium mentioned that there could be a signing authority for example for things like KYC.
Let’s say the wallet intending to stake, sends the staked amount + data regarding staking period (lock) to a smart contract, that signs it and adds a publicly visible amount (or tier if tiered staking) and stake time, then returns all that to the wallet. Then staking is done using that signature, from that wallet, for the specified period. (A “unlock” option might be provided using same/other contract if needed)

Therefore no view keys are published, staked amounts are declared/verified without exposing all data related to that wallet.

Regarding reducing the effect of “rich gets richer”, we can set a max amount for staking per wallet/node. Therefore, people staking high amounts, would then need additional nodes, adding to their costs AND forcing them to support the network the network as well.

Ideas?

If you want to use the amount in committee sortition and SC can be utilized to conceal the amount then it may work. Limiting the stake size will cause the owner to split his balance into multiple addresses if there is a reward for mining a block via PoS.
For the security of the network PoS may be superior to ASICs unless there is an attack from a competitorbor govt for whom the gain from killing the network outweighs the cost of buying 2/3 of the coins or whatever the threshold is. And if balance is not in the calculation then how to prevent anyone from running enough nodes to kill the network? This is a big problem with PoS. Same argument goes to ASICS: buy enough of them and you can shut down the network at the cost of these ASICs. GPUs/CPUs are more evenly distributed but fungible and can mine ETH after killing DERO for example.

Then let’s assume tiered staking with a max tier.

Anyone who wants to stake more, then they would add nodes and support the network.

Therefore, anyone wishing to “control” would have to face an increasing requirement of wealth. And then once control is established, the value would go down, causing the person attempting control to lose a fortune bying upwards a coin that nobody else wants.

If a country tries to buy 10% of coins in circulation, price spike would be huge. Then if they want to kill the coin, they dump them. That is not an issue of PoS or PoW, just how the markets are.

But then, we face another problem. Emissions.

I’ll have to wait on confirmation from Captain on that, but would a sharded system negatively impact the robustness and reach of smart contracts? That is would then smart contracts operate on a shard, but not the other?

If future plans are not negatively impacted by sharding, we can have a dual PoW/PoS system, with lesser PoW rewards and reduced block size/times.

If they would be impacted. We can have a full PoS system, and add a small reward per block on top of Tx fees.

I go with whatever Monero has done to circumvent the issue.

This is not an issue of ASICs, but general a general plan for the future (ASICs included, but not the only thing)

Additionally, Dero leads, doesn’t follow :slight_smile:

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Sharding can possibly work with SC, Enigma’s whitepaper proposes distributed private SC computation where work is partitioned between randomly selected subsets of nodes.

Re: buying a lot of coins and dumping them can only kill a PoW coin when mining energy cost is above coins mined profit and only the adversary will find it economical to keep mining to take over the network. For a PoS coin unless they scoop up most of the coins after a series of pumps and dumps price does not matter because mining cost is close to zero.
In essence it is easier to accumulate sufficient PoW power than PoS because hardware supply is unlimited and price for hashing power incremental increase drops with scale while the # of coins is limited and price (hashing power) rises with scale.

Ethereum Sharding Protocol is working on a similar solution, where validator nodes are randomly sampled on P2P networks.

Enigma functions off-chain. How relative that comparison would be if Dero is running everything on-chain, and with sharding between PoS and PoW.

Then we agree on that PoS would be much harder to kill.

We still need @DEVELOPER entry on the subject to know in which direction we can continue brain storming, and to confirm if our ideas actually make sense, or are just gibberish :expressionless:

Did CryptoNight Heavy ever solve this issue?

"4. Significant expansion of the scratchpad would require an increase in iterations, which in turn implies an overall time increase. “Heavy” calls in a trust-less p2p network may lead to serious vulnerabilities, because nodes are obliged to check every new block’s proof-of-work. If a node spends a considerable amount of time on each hash evaluation, it can be easily DDoSed by a flood of fake objects with arbitrary work data (nonce values).

One of the proof-of-work algorithms that is in line with our propositions is CryptoNight, created by Bytecoin developers in a cooperation with our team. It is designed to make CPU and GPU mining roughly equally efficient and restrict ASIC mining."

My second question would be: What’s stopping an ASIC manufacturer from making very minor changes to their next batch? A second 2mb pipeline with associated upgrades for example.

If CryptoNight Heavy is the way to go, did they actually solve the ASIC problem, did the solve they botnet issue or just cripple all CPU users?

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Thank you as well, I have been trying to get back to add more to your very appreciated and well thought out post. :slight_smile:

Edit: I’m still working to get back to you, I’m just giving your posts very thorough thought. Even though they’re gone I’m still considering the content. Thank you again btw, it did spark some creativity on this end.

This is not an issue of ASICs, but general a general plan for the future (ASICs included, but not the only thing)
Additionally, Dero leads, doesn’t follow :slight_smile:

It’s great to know that Dero leads which is also what I want. But the spirit of Free software is not to re-invent the wheel but to build upon what’s already available which could be awesome. If what’s available is not re-usable, then we can always write a new software to solve our problem.

You are right that this thread is not about ASICs, but I hope you do know that allowing ASICs to mine on the blockchain can drive a lot of people away from here. Anyways, as long as everything is alright no one cares.

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Re: DDoS due to the necessity to check new block hashes, there are some algos that are much more efficient to verify but it helps the pools and not so much protects from fake block attack, the best strategy there is perhaos a smart ban algo.

I have not looked at the details as I was only reading an announcement on the Sumo reddit pages, but I was reading last night that fireiceuk has apparently come up with some new sort of PoW algo which IF I read it correctly is a randomly generated variable PoW scheme. Might be worth looking into that some more.

@mojo, the ASIC power efficiency is illusionary - it /only/ applies relative to FPGAs/CPU type devices. In a network populated exclusively by ASICs, the hash rate rises by at least an order equal to the increase in efficiency of the ASICs to maintain the required emission rate. The correct way to think about it is the energy/coin emitted - which is tied to the network hashrate /and/ the power efficiency with the latter two maintaining an equilibrium

I think the correct term would be energy per block, but I agree with you regarding the overall efficiency thing. It’s a very good point.

I have left it here for ref … I must have been tired last night, but the piece on fireiceuk’s work referenced above is about speeding up nodes not anti ASICs - sorry for the misdirection - I think I was conflating two different things I was reading. Can’t recall where the one on a variable PoW was seen sadly …

Yes, I think you are right …