Good morning Michael, > Nothing in a dynamic system like PoW mining can be 100% anticipated, for > example there might be advanced in manufacturing of chips which are patented > and so on. > > It sounds like your take is that this means no improvements can ever be made > by any mechanism, however conservative.
Not at all. Small-enough improvements over long-enough periods of time are expected and anticipated --- that is why there exists a difficulty adjustment mechanism. What is risky if a large-enough improvement over a short-enough time that overwhelms the difficulty adjustment mechanism. ASICBOOST was a massive enough improvement that it could be argued to potentially overwhelm this mechanism if it was not openly allowed for all miners. > > We do go into a fair amount of detail about Minimum Effective Hardness in our > paper https://assets.pubpub.org/xi9h9rps/01581688887859.pdf , which is > actually a special case of hardness that we invented for the context of > adding an operation to a PoW, and how it applies to random matrix mults. This certainly helps as well. Regards, ZmnSCPxj _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
