The upcoming ETH switch to Casper is a key decision point for ETC. I personally ETC should not follow ETH into becoming a Proof of Stake coin. If general agreement for this point could be reached now, it would be a powerful inducement for miners to switch from ETH to ETC now.
I would like to open a debate over PoW vs PoS and FORKSThe difficulty miners experience will increase dramatically very soon in our current (PoW), we need to sort that. This can only be done via a fork so we need to ALL be in agreement unless you want a “Splinter Classic” chain as well as a Classic chain.
I asked Charles if we could soft fork to fix it. ---
Charles: "
It can only be defused by a hard fork. It requires changing rules in the protocol that current nodes would reject."
greenuser: I have often wondered what would happen if it was just very very difficult to mine? Would it not become more scarce? More valuable?
Charles: "
That would destroy any PoW algorithm based blockchain. Mining difficulty is continually adjusted to allow the network to be secure and allow blocks to be solved within a targeted time frame. Setting the difficulty arbitrarily high, would discourage miners from mining because it would make blocks harder to solve, and therefore they would generate less rewards for a greater expenditure of computational work. You would have to increase the market value of that coin exponentially to compensate, and that is impossible."
Please post your feelings....I plan to put this to Charles, what do people think?
Muh feelings:
0. We can't switch ETC to PoW "right meow." We can't even credibility announce such an intention, only float the trial balloon. Which PoW? Who is going to code it all up and commit to maintenance? What about PoS supporters? Do we just tell them to fuck off to BailoutEdition?
1. It's too soon to be sure about anything except No Bailouts. ETC is still defining itself and bootstrapping an ecosystem. We must table any notion of a "final vote" about Po[X] in the ETC community until after BailoutEdition has been running Casper or whatever for at least two weeks or, ideally, 6 months.
2. The greater the divergence from ETH, the more dev resources are required to maintain ETC. We should prepare for both contingencies, with low-maintenance minimally divergent PoS and high-maintenance maximally divergent PoW roadmaps, along with prioritization considerations for something in the middle.
3. On PoS. Do we copy ETH's work no matter what, or is adoption contingent on some notion of fairness/equality/decentralization? My instinct is to eschew minimum staking amounts (either all wallets stake or none do) to avoid the centralizing rich-get-richer combinatorics Peter Todd's recent paper on pool mining describes. We don't want any fucking Masternodes compounding their stake and control.
I don't like PoS. I've seen the Theft -> FUD -> Panic -> Rollback movie before and it doesn't have a happy ending. It's harder to steal a mine in China than some private key in a server (unless you are the PLA
).
Peercoin is "cheating" using checkpoints; Decred has some advanced gambling based system that's mind-bogglingly complex. Charlie Hos has a version that is reportedly validated in some kind of math/crypto model. He's paying for 3 devs, but are they sufficient to support such an incompatibility-intensifying branch?
4. On PoW. SHA-512 might be the KISS solution. But But ASICS. Boolberry's Cryptonite-derived Wild Keccak memory reqs grow with the blockchain so that's cool. What are the pros/cons of just keeping Dagger minus the diff bomb? The obvious question is how do we redefine the emission curve without Pope Vitalik to guide us?
5. The Golden Rule. All of this brainstorming doesn't make a difference without development. And devs are expensive. As in Bitcoin, governance is not a democracy but rather an extreme meritocracy. He who makes the Code makes the Rules. And that is fitting because they have to put out the fires when it all turns into a flaming tire-filled dumpster. If the miners want to stay PoW, they must provide for the requisite dozens of devs and/or support the Genesis Foundation.
6. Self-awareness. Let's all savor the irony of ETC setting out to create a controversial hard fork immediately after rejecting ETH for that exact reason.
!!!!
