• Forum has been upgraded, all links, images, etc are as they were. Please see Official Announcements for more information

Dash Needs to Move to Proof Of Stake

Status
Not open for further replies.
Kevin Stalker

Kevin Stalker

Active member
This seems like a radical idea. A proposal for fundamental and scary change at a time when the space is unpredictable and scary. But it's needed...

Here's why:
In recent days a LOT of money has come into the crypto market, and when you analyse it you find that it's not coming into proof of work coins. Bitcoin uses enough electricity to power a small country to process 7 transactions a second. People are soon going to be laughing about it. ASICs are becoming centralised and have a bad press. It's going to get worse.

All dash has to do to double it's price is pass a proposal saying it is planning to move to proof of stake, and that's enough. We can take a year to do it if we want. And I think the masternodes will vote yes.

Here's how:
Dash has a wonderful plethora of trusted masternodes running software that can be upgraded to support a new model. All we do is cap the proof of work difficulty, and then gradually reduce it. That would mean the miners would find blocks more and more quickly. But we change the protocol so that they all have to wait until the blocktime has elapsed, adding their solutions to a list. Entries have to be unique. When the time is up the masternodes jointly choose a winner randomly. This is similar to normal POS, but the choice is a random choice between POW winners. Also, we reduce the reward when there are a lot of entries in the list. The remaining reward goes to the masternodes who participated in choosing a winner. If there are a very large number of entries the reward will be very small.

I also suggest that the masternode software could be enhanced to mine, so they would be putting solutions into the pot, in the event that the difficulty gets so low that they can compete. That way you always get at least some entries.

There will be a limit to the size of the mining list, but this will be large. Tests will determine what works.

Here's why we can do it:
The more I think about it the more I realise that it's possible. It's not a rewrite. We keep the mining and the masternodes and everything else. It's just a change to the difficulty, kinda. And we can take a bit of time over it, as long as we know it's happening we are safe.

Here's how it would play out:
At first nothing changes, because the difficulty is unchanged. But as it reduces the number of entries in the pool grows, so the mining reward reduces (since there are a lot of entries). This discourages mining, so some drop out, but others keep going. However, powerful miners are disincentivized to create thousands of entries, because the more they create the lower the reward. Spamming costs work, and pays little.

The masternodes will vote yes to the proposal, because they will earn more for holding their existing masternodes. Woohoo.

And, even better, we can now think about blocktimes in a more flexible way. The blocktime affects the number of transactions we can process and so defines our scalability. This system is more flexible in the long term concerning blocktimes and transactions per second. I suggest. Probably.

Electricity is saved. Dash moves with the times. Prices rise. Welcome to the future.

I'm now ready to be shot down in flames - by the people who know better - do your worst
 
I don't know better, but not shooting you down in flames at all. I recently felt like someone was walking over my grave when I saw ADA pump with its supposedly provably secure POS method. I'm all in favour of burning less juice, and upon first read your algorithm seems sound.

To do this, though, we would also have to utilise peer reviewed proofs. Someone once told me that he thought he had heard that proof of stake is provably centralising..
 
Before you reinvent the wheel, check the road map. Collateralized mining (kind of like PoS) is coming.

In the meantime, it sounds like your only reason to rush to put together an announcement that we're moving to PoS is only to get a price bump.

https://www.dash.org/2017/06/27/roadmap.html


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
  • Like
Reactions: Nyk
jeffh said:
Before you reinvent the wheel, check the road map. Collateralized mining (kind of like PoS) is coming.

In the meantime, it sounds like your only reason to rush to put together an announcement that we're moving to PoS is only to get a price bump.

https://www.dash.org/2017/06/27/roadmap.html


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Click to expand...

Collateralized mining is just an idea to my understanding. I would be in favor of collateralized mining or what is suggested above. As long as it works and reduces the electricity that a fully functioning blockchain uses.
 
wow, I was completely sure this was a terrible idea. Talk about rocking the boat. It would be very very risky to get something like this wrong. But it sounds like there is a discussion to be had. At least some of us see that POW is soon going to be thought of as Blockchain 1.0

Obviously, the plan above is just a discussion and proper programmers are expected to put it right. Please note, I am NOT a do-gooder trying to save the world. I am looking ahead at what the successful currencies are going to look like in two year's time. Proof of work might be used, but the majority of transactions will not need much work. So that means POS, or side-chains, lightening network, or similar. Either POS or off-chain transactions. TBH having a single blockchain with all the data in the world on it does feel a bit ambitious, even when there is money to fund it.

I read the roadmap a bit more carefully. Yes, it mentions the words Collateralised Mining but it seems to continue to talk about ASICs right to the end. I feel that we need to be crystallising a plan sooner.
 
"I am NOT a do-gooder trying to save the world."

I don't think anyone needs to defend against accusations of wanting to help their fellow Planet Earthicans. I believe I heard Mr. Duffield himself mention something about do-gooding in the open house last spring.

In my opinion, consuming less of the world is a good thing. If the Dash network consumes less electrical power it helps everyone by a) reducing consumption of the world, making Dash an even more helpful product for the world than it already is, and b) helping the sales pitch, because BTC is already getting a black eye from the commie press for monster power drainage. In other words, we're the same as BTC, with the same reliability, except we burn up less power, and we're fast, cheap and fungible.
 
Yes, ok, gotta agree. The power consumption is bad, I like saving the world as well. I'm just mindful that you, me and everyone else feels that way, so not doing so will hit our popularity in the longer term.

More importantly, we CAN do it. We have the masternodes! They are perfectly placed to take over the job in a way that could be made to work, in a controlled way, over time. We need to flesh this out on the roadmap.
 
There are many reasons why I would vote for PoS on Dash.

Bitcoin looks more like a dinosaur on an evolutionary scale of the digital cash.

Digital technology is on an exponential rise. We have to keep up with technological advancement.

The green environmental approach is one I think we all like.

All it takes is to switch from computationally intensive puzzles to coin wealth or age.
 
Collateralized mining is a good start. Miners spent money to help secure the network, and cutting them off without proper warning (I'm talking a year minimum) is the wrong way to go about implementing a POS system imo. Collateralized mining seems to be the best of both worlds. You get the proof of work security, and the proof of stake security at the same time. With collateralized mining dash could potentially be efficient with its energy use by limiting the amount of hashing power required by the network depending on what the optimum level of security turns out to be.
 
"All dash has to do to double it's price is pass a proposal saying it is planning to move to proof of stake ....."
so this is just a lame pump idea ?
come on o_O

POS has many problems on its own and POW is proven all over to be solid
(and that is what it is all about , safety for the network - if u need a quick pump please try that somewhere else ;))
 
tungfa said:
"All dash has to do to double it's price is pass a proposal saying it is planning to move to proof of stake ....."
so this is just a lame pump idea ?
come on o_O

POS has many problems on its own and POW is proven all over to be solid
(and that is what it is all about , safety for the network - if u need a quick pump please try that somewhere else ;))
Click to expand...
He isn't really suggesting PoS more like a PoW/MN hybrid system.
 
The masternode system currently rely on POW to get randomness to choose the quorum.

If we change to proof of stake, the security is not guaranteed.
 
Nyk said:
With collateralized mining dash could potentially be efficient with its energy use by limiting the amount of hashing power required by the network depending on what the optimum level of security turns out to be.
Click to expand...
Yes, this is exactly what I am suggesting. Technically, there is more than one way to do it, so we have to get the details right, but it's possible.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, I am not here to pump the coin price. I said that because I feel people would buy into Dash more readily if we have a safe version of this idea written in detail and planned on our roadmap. I agree POS has problems, but I am suggesting the masternodes can be trusted to run the right software version (mostly) and stay online and maintain a huge blockchain, etc. They are already incentivised and on side.

Also, as you say, I couldn't see a truly safe way to get to full POS. I think we will end up with a hybrid solution, where the stake is needed, which enables us to cap the work. Hope this makes sense. I tried to put detail on it, but that could change when people get together and hammer it out. I a little green.
 
Yes, masternodes hold the whole blockchain and are incentivised to do so by proof of stake. That's exactly why we don't need a huge reservoir of workers burning electricity to finish the job. I'm not sure we can just move to masternode only, but we can reduce the work and use the masternodes to manage it.
 
Well, in fact my idea is more of a hybrid system, where some work is still needed, but where the cost of that work is a lot less. I would expect it to still be enough to stop Sybil attacks. I am not planning to change the algorithm, so ASIC miners would still be the fastest way to mine. Doesn't that mean that ASIC miners would find lots of solutions quickly, fill up the mining queue I am proposing, and stop lower powered sybil attacks from getting in?

Well, someone earlier pointed out that there is an existing item in the roadmap for Staked Mining. This is a very similar idea, as long as it leads to less power being used to mine, it might be the same thing. I'm not a blockchain expert.
 
I think something needs to be done. I can't say I fully trust POS, I'm sure there is a way to make it secure and in line with Satoshi's vision of users processing transactions. Please do not listen to people that say it's fine or that consuming massive amounts of electricity is acceptable. Currently, cryptocurrencies are about as efficient as a monster truck, if we keep going this way they will be just as popular.
 
In a recent interview, Ryan mentioned Graphene, which AFAIK is PoS. I imagine he means a variant where, instead of having 101 witnesses, the existing pool of masternodes would become witnesses. I suspect the end result might be a combination of PoS, PoW and nvidia hardware!. Think dash + eos + gpu mininga.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top