2/ Quick note: contrary to popular belief that miners are bad & evil, they are vital to Bitcoin’s survival. So it’s imperative to foster a healthy mining industry.
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Yeah, Hugo is correct. I was wondering whether this could be baked in at the protocol level. It's not obvious to me that it's impossible or impractical, but that may be true.
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Hugo gave some good reasons for why it may be impractical.
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Let's see. You could do something at the protocol level, but it would be very expensive. Essentially every qualifying share would have to get recorded and that used to pay people out when Proof of Work actually gets found. You could soft fork this, but it's massively wasteful.
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Yeah this is sort of what I was thinking. Could you reduce the waste in some way? Perhaps restrict to dividing the reward I to, say, 100 parts? So the biggest pool would only be 1% of hash power... My thoughts here are very incomplete :)
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You could change to a high share threshold. You could probably reduce the need to store the data permanently and can be thrown out after verifying. Bandwidth you can reduce by having people essentially mine similar blocks. Verification is the killer. Each share has to be verified
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Yeah the overhead in traffic/validation will be insane. It can also be a new attack vector as bad miners send bogus shares across the network. The other big problem, assuming you can solve the record-keeping problem, is whether you can enforce that payouts do honor that record.
End of conversation
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By "protocol level" do you mean the Bitcoin protocol? I don't think that's possible
It's binary: either you successfully mine a block, or you don't.
Pool protocols are different though, since they work on top of Bitcoin, they can assign rewards proportionally.