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by barbegal
3083 days ago
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The key is: >you could come up with some rotation mechanism so that only certain accounts can participate in a certain round which is impossible to do in a way that can't be exploited and is fair (without relying on some external source of randomness). And I advise against trying to come up with a way to do so because the internet is full of failed attempts. |
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- Use the block index as the random seed. (Yes, the resulting random sequence is predictable, but that's okay...)
- Randomly select N UTXOs weighted by their output sizes. (This could be done efficiently by storing UTXO hashes in a sort of trie structure, with larger UTXOs higher in the trie, and descending the trie based on the random value until we get to the deepest node with at least N UTXOs beneath it.)
- Only the owners of those N UTXOs may participate in the current burn contest.
- If none of those owners are active or choose to participate, an empty block is added to the chain.
As for the value of N, for maximum security we would want N=1, which makes this equivalent to proof of stake. Then it's impractical for attackers to generate more than a few blocks in a row, since they would need to target single owners who might not be selling.
Higher N values might have some performance advantages (fewer empty blocks), and more even rewards (everyone gets a tiny reward as coins are burnt), but worse security. We would probably want to use N=1 for every, say, 10th block, so that if someone needs a particularly strong guarantee that their branch will prevail, they can wait for ~5 * 10 = 50 blocks.
I think proof of stake is better overall -- it's simpler and there's not much downside -- but both approaches seem viable.