{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub1swfeusu3ua9trup00qcnrgc2yndksyvgku4epk5tec7u4fmrez6qxpul5t","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub1swfeusu3ua9trup00qcnrgc2yndksyvgku4epk5tec7u4fmrez6qxpul5t","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2015-02-12\n📝 Original message:\u003e Miners are *not* incentivised to earn the most money in the next block\n\u003e possible. They are incentivised to maximise their return on investment.\n\u003e\n\nThis would be right if you assume that all Bitcoin miners act as a single\nentity. In that case it is true that that entity's goal is to maximize\noverall ROI.\n\nBut each miner makes decisions on his own. Are you familiar with a concept\nof Nash equilibrium, prisoner's dilemma, etc?\n\nThe fact that nobody is using this kind of a behavior right now doesn't\nmean that we can rely on it.\n\nFor example, Peercoin was horribly broken in 6 months after its release\n(e.g. people reported that they are able to generate 50 consecutive blocks\nsimply by bringing a cold wallet online) and yet nobody bothered to exploit\nit, and it managed to acquire non-negligible \"market cap\".\n\nSo we have an empiric evidence that proof-of-stake miners are motivated to\nkeep network secure. So, maybe, we should switch to proof-of-stake, if it\nwas demonstrated that it is secure?\n\nThere are good reasons to not switch to proof-of-stake. Particularly, the\nkind which is used in Peercoin is not game-theoretically sound. So even if\nit works right now, it can fail in a big way once attackers will really get\naround to it. An attack requires significant knowledge, effort and,\npossibly, capital, so it might be only feasible on a certain scale.\n\nSo, well, anyway, suppose Peter Todd is the only person interested in\nmaintaining replace-by-fee patches right now, and you can talk him into\nabandoning them.\nOK, perhaps zero-confirmation payments will be de-facto secure for a couple\nof years. And thus a lot of merchants will rely on zero-confirmation\npayments protected by nothing but a belief in honest miners, as it is damn\nconvenient.\n\nBut, let's say, 5 years from now, some faction of miners who own\nsoon-to-be-obsolete equipment will decide to boost their profits with a\nreplace-by-fee pool and a corresponding wallet. They can market it as \"1 of\n10 hamburgers are free\" if they have 10% of the total hashpower.\n\nSo would you take a responsibility for pushing the approach which isn't\ngame-theoretically sound?\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150212/b4b4de32/attachment.html\u003e"}