Posts Tagged Mining pools

Blockpad: Improved Proof-of-work function with decentralization incentives

A few posts ago I presented BlockPow, an example of a proof of work function that practically reduces the incentives for users to join mining pools. The shorter the block interval, the best it works. Let’s first summarize the idea behind BlockPow:  if a miner tries to join a pool, then he incur in overhead […]

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Preventing Geographical Centralization of Cryptocurrency Mining with the LIMIO protocol

There has been much discussion recently about how to prevent mining pools. There are theoretical and practical approaches. Nevertheless preventing mining pools is not the same as preventing geographical centralization. Mining pools incentives are: Reduce payoff variance. Reduce resource usage. Normally Bitcoin node would require more resources (memory,disk, bandwidth) than a pooled miner. Reduce exposition to […]

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Theoretical and Practical Nonoutsourceable Puzzles

The fact that GHash.io has reached twice 51% of the Bitcoin hashing power this year has pushed scientist and alt-coin creators to find for other proof-of-work puzzles that discourage mining coalitions. Several months ago I read the foundations of Nonoutsourceable Puzzles as proposed by Andrew Miller, and now his paper (working with Elaine Shi, Jonathan […]

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