Does anyone have any thoughts on how we might migrate to Proof of Stake? Proof of Stake has a slightly different block format then the regular blockchain. The only way I can see to do it would be to create a new Particle2 blockchain and do a 1:1 swap out of the coins, which scares me and I think is dangerous because we would need to get all of the exchanges and pools on board. I think it is too disruptive.
What I'm trying to think of is if there is a way to migrate the existing blockchain and add the PoS functionality after a hardfork. We could hardcode it to ignore coinstake until after the hardfork. But how do we pull the existing blockchain in so the block headers have the PoS mods... this is what I'm thinking through now. If we could construct the new PoS enabled blockchain from the existing one, then its an easy matter to hardfork it and require everyone to simply update their client. I'm just not sure how to do this without winding up with two clients within one codebase that knows how to do the conversion, which is a lot of work. I'm not sure if you had a normal peer and a PoS peer if the PoS one would be able to accept the block inventory. Maybe it would "just work". In that case, I could simply stand up the PoS node let it sync and build the new blockchain, and then we do a hardfork.
I'm not aware of any other coins that have successfully done this migration, does anyone know of one?
Open to any ideas.
I'm not sure how different the main code is between algos, but the only Quark based coin with POS so far has been PROBE. And I would say it has been somewhat of a disaster with forking happening over and over. Whether the forking problems are due to the POS code I'm not sure. Might be interesting for you to look over that code and see if it gives you ideas.
I do remember Bottlecaps (one of the earlier POS scrypt coins) have lots of forking issues at one point that was due to errors in the POS code. As another warning Bottlecaps just never really recovered after a few forks as people lost confidence...
**Are you back to thinking POS instead of the Dividend idea you mentioned a few days ago?
not instead of, in addition to.
I am setting up a multipool, but my concern was that folks will mine on the multipool instead of as opposed to in addition to mining on PRT. The ideal situation would be that people do both.
The value of PRT will be enough to incentivize people to mine it, but I am concerned about the nethash rate. Which is why I started thinking about PoS again.
I read through some code, and I'm pretty sure I could make the migration work seamlessly, but now I am debating whether it is worth it, because of the issues you illustrate. The PoS stuff is not foolproof and comes with baggage of its own. It would also mean essentially going backwards in time a couple of versions of the bitcoin core and losing some RPC functionality etc. I know PoS is a popular fad right now, but I am not too thrilled about it and the legacy codebase you have to use.
Right now PRT is relatively cheap, I know its gone up a bit % wise on BTER but at the moment it is cheap - but it is not going to remain so for long with the things that are coming. Thats a good thing, but it also brings concerns because as we climb coinmarketcap and start dropping news we are going to start gaining a lot more attention. One thing I am thinking about at the least is automated checkpointing.
I just want to make sure we maintain hashrate on our network
in addition to mining on the multipool for payouts in PRT. Because we aren't PoS we need both.