rich1.0npub1swfeusu3ua9trup00qcnrgc2yndksyvgku4epk5tec7u4fmrez6qxpul5thttps://nostr.ae/npub1swfeusu3ua9trup00qcnrgc2yndksyvgku4epk5tec7u4fmrez6qxpul5tnjumphttps://nostr.ae📅 Original date posted:2015-02-12 📝 Original message:> Miners are *not* incentivised to earn the most money in the next block > possible. They are incentivised to maximise their return on investment. > This would be right if you assume that all Bitcoin miners act as a single entity. In that case it is true that that entity's goal is to maximize overall ROI. But each miner makes decisions on his own. Are you familiar with a concept of Nash equilibrium, prisoner's dilemma, etc? The fact that nobody is using this kind of a behavior right now doesn't mean that we can rely on it. For example, Peercoin was horribly broken in 6 months after its release (e.g. people reported that they are able to generate 50 consecutive blocks simply by bringing a cold wallet online) and yet nobody bothered to exploit it, and it managed to acquire non-negligible "market cap". So we have an empiric evidence that proof-of-stake miners are motivated to keep network secure. So, maybe, we should switch to proof-of-stake, if it was demonstrated that it is secure? There are good reasons to not switch to proof-of-stake. Particularly, the kind which is used in Peercoin is not game-theoretically sound. So even if it works right now, it can fail in a big way once attackers will really get around to it. An attack requires significant knowledge, effort and, possibly, capital, so it might be only feasible on a certain scale. So, well, anyway, suppose Peter Todd is the only person interested in maintaining replace-by-fee patches right now, and you can talk him into abandoning them. OK, perhaps zero-confirmation payments will be de-facto secure for a couple of years. And thus a lot of merchants will rely on zero-confirmation payments protected by nothing but a belief in honest miners, as it is damn convenient. But, let's say, 5 years from now, some faction of miners who own soon-to-be-obsolete equipment will decide to boost their profits with a replace-by-fee pool and a corresponding wallet. They can market it as "1 of 10 hamburgers are free" if they have 10% of the total hashpower. So would you take a responsibility for pushing the approach which isn't game-theoretically sound? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150212/b4b4de32/attachment.html>