Not sure of the best place to workshop ideas, so please take this with a grain of salt.
Starting with 3 assumptions: - assume that there exists a proof-of-burn that, for Bitcoin's purposes, accurately-enough models the investment in and development of ASICs to maintain miner incentive. - assume the resulting timing problem "how much burn is enough to keep blocks 10 minutes apart and what does that even mean" is also... perfectly solvable - assume "everyone unanimously loves this idea" The transition *could* look like this: - validating nodes begin to require proof-of-burn, in addition to proof-of-work (soft fork) - the extra expense makes it more expensive for miners, so POW slowly drops - on a predefined schedule, POB required is increased to 100% of the "required work" to mine Given all of that, am I correct in thinking that a hard fork would not be necessary? IE: We could transition to another "required proof" - such as a quantum POW or a POB (above) or something else .... in a back-compat way (existing nodes not aware of the rules would continue to validate). _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev