Evolution: Mining efficiencies?

[TroyDASH]

I was just thinking and wanted to bounce this idea off the community.

With InstantX, if this is going to be the default mode in Evolution, it seems to me like the average block time is not something that is as important in DASH as it is with other currencies.

It seems wasteful for miners to be constantly putting transactions into blocks and trying to solve PoW all of the time. What if we were to implement something where a block will not be accepted unless it has at least x number of transactions, or x amount of transaction fees? Or in other words, shouldn't miners only have to use up resources to mine when the network actually needs a new block?

Conceivably, if there is a certain threshold before which a new block is not allowed to be created, then miners could essentially turn off or use their computing power for other things, until the next block is actually needed. Then once the new block is needed, the difficulty could be made less in order to find the new block more quickly (using less resources), then rinse and repeat.

There is also the possibility in Evolution, that we could require miners to register with tier-2. Not sure if there would be any applications for doing that.

Thoughts?

 

[stan.distortion]

Funny, I was just wondering a few days ago if the way the block interval works could be changed from a fixed time to a new block only when the current block is full. No idea if that kind of change is possible but there's probably an awful lot of minds turning over the same thought

 

[TroyDASH]

One potential trouble to avoid would be that we would want to make sure the system is not set up such that miners are incentivized to spam the blockchain in order to fill up blocks. Could potentially be an issue. But if something like this were possible to do, it could do a lot to help address one of the largest criticisms of PoW.

 

[stan.distortion]

Something from Gavin Andreeson that might be worth a look, head first mining:
https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic/pull/152

 

[TroyDASH]

Something from Gavin Andreeson that might be worth a look, head first mining:
https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic/pull/152

I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what that is doing, but it looks like it's in the same ballpark. What problem is Gavin's "head first mining" supposed to be addressing in the bitcoin network?

He does mention a hardcoded timeout of sorts, which makes me think what if instead of going by # of transactions or transaction fees, if there was a way to enforce a minimum block time? This would remove any possible incentive for miners to spam the blockchain to fill blocks. It would have to be something where there is absolutely no incentive to use resources to attempt to solve the PoW until the minimum block time has been reached. Perhaps the masternode network can somehow be used to release some kind of effectively random value at regular intervals that needs to be used in order to solve the PoW?

The overall effect I am thinking here would be something like, new block is created, then for the next 20 minutes the miners will assemble txns (of which most are instant and secure via InstantX) but not bother wasting resources on the PoW problem. At the designated time the network somehow discovers/releases the "key" needed to be able to solve the PoW, and the difficulty is set such that the miners will find the PoW solution in avg of 15 seconds, then turn off again and just collect more txns until the next PoW problem is available in another 20 minutes. Net effect is that wasteful PoW mining only happens 1.25% of the time instead of 100% of the time.

 

[stan.distortion]

Tbh I only saw a loose relevance to this thread but wanted to give it a bump and gave this thread a bump at the same time, wasn't really worth starting a new one for. As far as I can tell it's supposed to at least partially address one of the reasons there's so much opposition to changes to the Bitcoin blocksize, propagation times. The theory is the great firewall of China causes a fair amount of lag that already puts miners there at a disadvantage and bigger blocks would add to that problem, seems a little clunky to my uneducated brain but it could be a step towards sidesteping propagation time issues and maybe that's also relevant to Dash, idk.

 

[IronVape]

IAt the designated time the network somehow discovers/releases the "key" needed to be able to solve the PoW, and the difficulty is set such that the miners will find the PoW solution in avg of 15 seconds, then turn off again and just collect more txns until the next PoW problem is available in another 20 minutes. Net effect is that wasteful PoW mining only happens 1.25% of the time instead of 100% of the time.

Very interesting idea!