Proof of burn bitcoin minerals
In this article, we will explain the revolutionary consensus mechanism behind Slimcoin: If you need a super-short explanation, you can go to the tl;dr section at the end.
The blockchain is the main database of a cryptocurrency. It contains all valid transactions. All nodes - all participants that proof of burn bitcoin minerals a full-featured client software - save the blockchain on their hard disks. A block is written when the nodes agree to a set of transactions that the nodes regard as valid. But how do the proof of burn bitcoin minerals agree which transactions should be saved into a block? There is no central authority that validates the transactions, so this work must be done by the nodes in a collaborative way.
The blockchain technology already prevents that some node could create money out of thin air. But there could be dishonest nodes that tried to use a coin twice - this is called a double spend. For example, they could buy an item in an online shop and inmediately try to send the same coins to an exchange. This way they could fool the shop owner and the exchange owner and get both things - the bought item and the money. To prevent double spendsthe nodes must come to an agreement which transactions are valid and which are not.
On proof of burn bitcoin minerals first glance, we could let the nodes vote for which transactions are included into a block, with each node having one vote. But there is a problem: A malicious participant could create thousands of nodes and manipulate the vote.
In Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, a mechanism called Proof of work is used. We could describe the process the following way: The nodes miners compete to write a block into the blockchain. To include a block, their proof of burn bitcoin minerals must first do some work: The node that first solves it gets the right to write the block, and gets a reward for it to incentive this work.
This process is colloquially called mining. If you want to double spendyou must have the computing power proof of burn bitcoin minerals write several blocks in a row. Only this way, you can be sure that both of your transactions are included in the blockchain.
The important thing to understand is that the raw computing power is not important to prevent manipulation by double spending. What is important is the cost of the computing power. It must be costly for an attacker to achieve the power to mine several blocks in a row.
So in Proof of work, the right to mine blocks is proof of burn bitcoin minerals to a monetary cost for the miner. The more a miner pays for computing equipment that is able to solve the cryptographic puzzle mining rigsthe more chances he has to get the right to proof of burn bitcoin minerals blocks. That is the principle behind Proof of Burn.
We call it also mintingbecause no real work is done. But the brilliant mind that has invented Proof of Burn, Iain Stewart, has provided us an analogy: Burnt coins are mining rigs! The act of burning coins can be compared to the act to buy a mining rig. In Proof of Burn, every time you burn coins, you buy a virtual mining rig that gives you the power to mine blocks. The more coins you burn, the bigger that virtual mining rig.
If you burn coins, you not only get the right to compete for the next block. You burn coins and this rises your chance to get blocks for a long time - at least for a year.
Now, to prevent early adopters from benefitting too proof of burn bitcoin minerals or attacking the systemthe power of burnt coins decays every time a block is mined. But this also mimics mining: Mining rigs eventually become obsolete because there is better technology available. So miners, to stay competitive, will have to renew their equipment sometimes. The same is true for Proof of Burn: Like in Proof of Work, the block rewards are high enough to allow the participants to make a financial gain profit from minting.
Proof of burn has the advantage over Proof of burn bitcoin minerals of Work that it does consume much less energy. But Proof of Burn has also advantages over Proof of Stake, another consensus method that minimizes energy use. We will cover this point in a later post. Proof of burn proof of burn bitcoin minerals like virtual mining: You buy a virtual mining rig if you burn coins.
The more coins you burn, the more powerful the mining rig. Every virtual mining rig gives you the right to mine for a long time, just like real mining rigs. Why a consensus method is necessary? Proof of work without energy waste The important thing to understand is that the raw computing power is not important to prevent manipulation by double spending.
But what if we can have the same effect in a more direct way?
Proof of burn is a method for distributed proof of burn bitcoin minerals and proof of burn bitcoin minerals alternative to Proof of Work and Proof of Stake. It can also be used for bootstrapping one cryptocurrency off of another. The idea is that miners should show proof that they burned proof of burn bitcoin minerals coins - that is, sent them to a verifiably unspendable address.
This is expensive from their individual proof of burn bitcoin minerals of view, just like proof of work; but it consumes no resources other than the burned underlying asset.
To date, all proof of burn cryptocurrencies work by burning proof-of-work-mined cryptocurrencies, so the ultimate source of scarcity remains the proof-of-work-mined "fuel". There are likely many possible variants of proof of burn. This page currently describes Iain Stewart 's version. Other people can add variant versions that still belong to the broad proof of burn idea. Iain Stewart's version of proof of burn is an attempt at a protocol which could be used within proof of burn bitcoin minerals cryptocurrency for ongoing generation of its blockchain i.
For the much simpler task of burning one currency to create another, any reasonable algorithm for creating units of the second currency upon detection of fresh burns of the first will suffice. The subtleties of this version - in particular, the simulation of mining rigs, and the reliance on low-bit-rate external randomness - will not be necessary. The key proof of burn bitcoin minerals of proof-of-burn this would also apply to proof-of-stake, by the way is that when choosing the thing which is to qualify as a "difficulty", i.
It doesn't need to be the case that real resources are consumed in the real economy. With proof-of-work, it so happens that real resources are indeed consumed - mining rigs are produced, with human labour and materials as input, electricity is used, and all these things have to be bid away from their real-economy best alternative uses.
Or, if they're produced in addition to what would have been produced, the total of leisure time is less than it could have been. Something real is grabbed as input. And while a cryptocurrency is being set up i.
And I'm not proposing one. But proof of burn bitcoin minerals a cryptocurrency is up and running, with its initial distribution close to completed, new possibilities arise, for tasks to "feel expensive" to a miner but not actually "be expensive" from a god-like whole-economy perspective.
Proof-of-stake of the "Cunicula variety", I mean is in fact arguably already an example of such a task. It feels awfully expensive, to a miner, to save up a lot of bitcoins and become a big stakeholder; but from a whole-economy viewpoint, this is a swapping of assets' ownership labels around, it's not a burning of electricity or the like.
However, I thought it would be interesting to invent a task that is absolutely, nakedly, unambiguously an example of the contrast between the two viewpoints. And yes, there is one: By "burning" a tranche of bitcoins I just mean sending them to an address which is unspendable. The precise technical details of this will vary from cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency. So, the script should do a "deliberately silly" thing - instead of things like "check such-and-such signature, and put the validity result on the stack", it should do something like "add 2 and 2, and now check if what's on top of the stack is equal to 5".
Or just "push 4, and check if it's equal to 5". Anything of that sort. There are thus an unbounded number of such scripts, with entropy saturating RIPEMD since you can choose big numbers to taste.
So, bitcoins sent to such a txout can never be redeemed on a future txin. If that happens, the cryptocurrency is in big trouble anyway!
With this definition of burning, it's not obvious to blockchain-watchers that some bitcoins have been burnt, at the time of burning. They've been sent to an address which doesn't stand out from any other. It's only later, when a miner who burned them earlier now wants to exhibit proof that "yes, these proof of burn bitcoin minerals are burnt", that blockchain-watchers get their proof. Which basically consists of exhibiting the script that manifestly always evaluates to false, and hashes to the address.
If proof of burn bitcoin minerals thought desirable that the act of burning should be obvious right away, rather than later, then this can be achieved: So, miners are creating candidate winning blocks by saying to the listening world, not "Look!
I've done this many trillion hashes! Two months ago I burned this many bitcoins! In both cases, "this many" means an adjustable difficulty parameter, which the network adjusts from time to time fortnightly, in today's Bitcoin to squeeze out marginal miners and keep more-efficient-than-marginal ones in profit to just the extent needed to regulate block creation to a preferred pace one per 10 minutes, in today's Bitcoin.
Why that phrase "Two months ago"? The broad principle is as follows. A miner mustn't be able to just burn some bitcoins right now and say "OK, I've burned them! Now let me have all those latest juicy transaction fees that have arrived in the past few minutes! That would constitute a breakdown in the analogy of burning with proof-of-work hashing.
A trillion proof-of-work hashes on a pre-reorg block are of no value on the post-reorg chain. And having decided to focus on one, a miner should incur a risk of lost expense if their choice turns out to be "the wrong one" in network consensus terms. The above point makes it clear why the act of burning should be a decent interval earlier than the act of exhibiting proof.
Two months may be overdoing it, but the protocol should require it to be sufficiently far back proof of burn bitcoin minerals there's no practical possibility of it being undone.
There are in fact some further issues, to do with making sure it's not cheap for a miner to re-exhibit their proof of having performed a suitably substantial burn a suitably long time ago on multiple competing chains. How much burning will actually happen, under proof of burn bitcoin minerals protocol? The answer is straightforward enough, though its implications proof of burn bitcoin minerals quite broad and in some ways surprising. Miners will burn bitcoins at an average rate very close to the average rate that ordinary users are sending them fees and any coin-minting still going on too of courseminus the miners' true real-resource costs i.
This follows by the same sort of "approach to equilibrium" reasoning that tells us that miners will expend real resources on proof-of-work to roughly that extent - if they didn't, mining would be supra-normally profitable, and new entrants would be attracted into the trade. If burning coins, rather than buying a lot of kit from a mining rig supplier, is the expense incurred by a miner to compete for the revenue stream, the same economic principles apply.
In this subsection I give a provisional technical sketch of the operational details of the proof-of-burn protocol I've currently settled on. It can be summed up in the following pithy slogan:. What that slogan means will become clear as I go on. Basically, proof-of-work is so elegant, in so many different ways, excepting its high real-resource cost, that I decided my attempt at an alternative to it, avoiding its real-resource cost, should mimic it as faithfully as possible proof of burn bitcoin minerals every other aspect.
Well, only readers can judge whether I've succeeded! The key is to use a stream of true randomness - see below for where that comes from! Now, obviously we don't want to "simulate" every actual hash! A "simulation" of proof-of-work at that level of detail would just be proof-of-work! Chop up time into units considerably shorter than the intended inter-block time, but with no need to go much finer than general network latency. Seconds will do, I think.
For each second, t, we need a uniform random number between 0 and 1 assigned to it, RAND t. This sounds as if we need some awful dependency on a fragile central source - some high-powered laser at NASA pouring out quantum noise every second, or something - with all the trust and failure issues that would imply.
Fortunately, for simulating mining rigs, we don't need anything like that. All that matters is that, to someone "buying a simulated mining rig" burning some bitcoins, that is! See introductory motivating section above. It's basically just a generous waiting period to make sure a burnt coin is truly definitely burnt, and won't have any chance of being "unburnt" in a chain reorg, by the time it comes into use in mining. And we don't mind if the stream is known a "short" time into the future - e.
Such a lesser goal can, I believe, be achieved with just a few tens of bits of true randomness proof of burn bitcoin minerals week. Quality is what matters, not quantity! I suggest tapping into the world's most highly-audited source of low-bit-rate true randomness: These the big reputable ones anyway are already subject to elaborate inspection of the machinery that tosses the balls around and draws some of them out.
And the results are publicised so widely, in so many newspapers, TV channels, proof of burn bitcoin minerals etc, as to make it impossible for anyone to lie about them. Roughly weekly, a config-file lottery-results. There is no hurry about this, it doesn't need to be exactly every week, or even the same lottery every time, it just needs several tens of bits of fresh lottery data added roughly weekly. I believe there would be no trouble propagating this to all nodes, by out-of-band means if necessary.
The format should be utterly simple and transparent, a 1-line plain text description of the results and the timestamp t in RAND t from which they are to be paid attention to, onwards. Obviously the meta-level words "for use from Each line is added in a leisurely, unhurried fashion, at some time it doesn't matter when between the draw and the intended start-paying-attention-to-it date.
Some time between and This gives plenty of time for people to add it themselves, from their favourite news source, and check by out-of-band means that they've added what everybody else has added, right down to spelling and punctuation. Which in practice probably means copying it from somewhere. The point is, the "somewhere" doesn't need to be trusted - a lie, or an unexpected variation in format or spelling or punctuation, would be called out well within the leisurely timescale.
RAND t is then HASH config-file [excluding any lines that are "for use from time later than t onwards" of course], plus t itself [in some standard format, e. Thus RAND t is a bit integer, which we regard conceptually as a real number between 0 and 1 by putting a binary point in front.
I'm aware that people on the forums are coming up with randomness protocols for proof-of-stake, proof-of-activity and the like which proof of burn bitcoin minerals involve external true randomness like lotteries - they just hash the last hundred blocks' hashes together, or something like that.
I don't think this is good enough. However, if I'm wrong about this, and hashing the last hundred blocks is in fact fine, then good! We can drop the proof of burn bitcoin minerals rigmarole! Anyway, for the rest of this description, I'll simply assume that RAND t becomes available for all t, but remains unknown until a week or two before t, and in particular, RAND 2 months or more from now is "massively unknown" right now - unknown with many tens to hundreds proof of burn bitcoin minerals bits of unknowable future entropy.
That's all that matters for turning burnt coins into simulated mining rigs. What do we do with this RAND t stream? We simulate the capricious behaviour of a true proof-of-work mining rig! Now, what does it actually mean for your rig to perform h hashes during 1 second? It means you're producing h uniform random numbers between 0 and 1.
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