If the primary purpose of pow is to destroy value, then a masked proof of burn to an expanded address that assigns the private key holder the right to mine only in the next Nth block would be sufficient.  Expanding the address space so that addresses can only be proven invalid only with the private key.  Miners can then not trivially game the system by excluding tx...without killing the entire system.  ( Like POW ... miners lose many burns since only one valid proof is deterministically selected. Difficult adjusted upward based on the number of valid proofs per block.)

The other part of "real POW" is that miners take *time* to mine.  Proof of destroyed value us not sufficient.  Proof of time spent is critical.... something even a masked burn cannot provide.

On Apr 5, 2017 10:49 PM, "Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev" <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 05, 2017 at 07:39:08PM -0700, Bram Cohen wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 7:31 PM, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev <
> > While I'm in favour of blocking covert usage of ASICBOOST, there's every
> > reason
> > to block non-covert usage of it as well. In a low margin business like
> > mining,
> > the advatange it gives is enormous - quite possibly 10x your profit margin
> > -
> > and given that barrier free access to being able to purchase ASICs is
> > already
> > an archilles heal for Bitcoin there is every reason to eliminate this legal
> > vulnerability. Additionally, it's a technical vulnerability as well: we
> > want
> > getting into the ASIC manufacturing and design business to have as low
> > barriers
> > to entry as is feasible, and the ASICBOOST exploit significantly increases
> > the
> > minimum capital requirements to do so.
> >
>
> Asicboost also has the problem that it isn't treating the hashing as a
> black box, and thus has impacts on what gets mined. In particular it
> creates an incentive to make blocks smaller. That's a very unwanted effect,
> and anything like it should be engineered out on principle.

Agreed! There's no benefit to Bitcoin for having it - one way or the other
miners are going to destroy ~12BTC/block worth of energy. Meanwhile it appears
to have lead to something like a year of stupid political bullshit based on a
secret advantage - there's no reason to invite a repeat of this episode.

--
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org

_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev