progress is not useless work, it *is* useful work in this context. you have committed to some subset of data that you requested -- if it was 'useless', why did you *ever* bother to commit it in the first place? However, it is not 'maximally useful' in some sense. However, progress is progress -- suppose you only confirmed 50% of the commitments, is that not progress? If you just happened to observe 50% of the commitments commit because of proximity to the time a block was mined and tx propagation naturally would you call it useless?
> Remember that OTS simply proves data in the past. Nothing more.
> OTS doesn't have a chain of transactions
Gotcha -- I've not been able to find an actual spec of Open Time Stamps anywhere, so I suppose I just assumed based on how I think it *should* work. Having a chain of transactions would serve to linearize history of OTS commitments which would let you prove, given reorgs, that knowledge of commit A was before B a bit more robustly.
> I'd rather do one transaction with all pending commitments at a particular time
rather than waste money on mining two transactions for a given set of
commitments
This sounds like a personal preference v.s. a technical requirement.
You aren't doing any extra transactions in the model i showed, what you're doing is selecting the window for the next based on the prior conf.
See the diagram below, you would have to (if OTS is correct) support this sort of 'attempt/confirm' head that tracks attempted commitments and confirmed ones and 'rewinds' after a confirm to make the next commit contain the prior attempts that didn't make it.
[.........................................................................]
------^ confirm head tx 0 at height 34
------------------------^ attempt head after tx 0
-----------^ confirm head tx 1 at height 35