NEW PLANNED FEATURE RELEASEWith no trail time or warning at all (as is his way
), Come-from-Beyond committed code related to a new feature known as
Economic Clustering (EC) Mini take-aways are (as I am still digesting it. Please correct me, if require
):
i) Addresses the so called 'Nothing-At-Stake Problem'
ii) Analysis of the transactions will allow the detection of forks
iii) The community needs to build infrastructure of nodes and hubs (forging pools) as a first step and then they need to form the Economic Cluster
And we are another step towards full transparent forging Whoop whoop!
This is an important technical feature so skip the rest if you're not interested in the nuts and bolts
I'd like to announce a new feature. Today I committed code related to Economic Clustering (EC). This concept is a development of the idea of Economic Majority introduced by Meni Rosenfeld.
In his notes BCNext states that EC solves the most critical flaw of Proof-of-Stake concept, according to the description this flaw is what others call "Nothing-at-Stake" problem.
The 3rd part of the Plan contains such the words:
Mining in Nxt relies on cooperation of people and even forces it
That was said about EC.
The concept of economic clustering is quite simple. Words "economic majority" say enough to explain how it works. From technical point of view it means that if someone decides to rewrite the history of the blockchain he won't be able to include transactions of those who don't take part in the attack, because every transaction contains the id of one of the recent blocks. When Alice sends money to Bob in exchange for something she'll get what she wants only if Bob validates the transaction. And this can happen only if they are both on the same branch.
Forgers can't forge all branches at once, they are faced with a choice, an attempt to forge more than one branch will lead to their exclusion from one of the clusters.
The proposed technical solution will also be used for analysis of transactions to detect forks. This is one of the reasons why I decided to implement part of EC without waiting for complete TF. Another reason is that proposed solution should be peer reviewed. Recent hot debates on BitcoinTalk regarding Nothing-at-Stake show that people are paying a lot of attention to PoS cryptocoins. This is a good opportunity to get a lot of reviews.
Extra consensus rule mentioned in
the 1st part of the Plan is a rule that defines choice of an economic cluster a node sticks too. I can't reveal all the details yet, we still need to build infrastructure of nodes and hubs and (this is more important) to form such a cluster...
Source:
https://nxtforum.org/index.php?action=post;quote=26267;topic=1635.0