Motivated by the discussions around dynamic Plasma, I’m coming up with a brand new development that seeks to decentralize the mining pools found in Bitcoin, while enhancing NoM ecosystem creating a symbiotic relationship to strengthen both networks.
Inspired by Braidpool proposal, NoM seems to check all the boxes:
-
A peer to peer network of miners to disseminate shares:
We already have a p2p network of “miners”: they are the users of NoM that generate PoW for Plasma. -
A rewards calculation algorithm that incentivizes miners to disseminate them at the earliest.
Very interesting because we already have this mechanism: you want your transaction to be issued as soon as possible. -
Payment channels to make payouts to miners so that a constant amount of blockspace is required, independent of the number of participating miners.
We can redirect those payouts to a TSS controlled by Pillars/Sentinels. -
An anonymous hub that can’t deny rewards payouts to miners.
Can Pillars be those anonymous hubs? They already issue payouts for hundreds of delegators.
I’m remembering some parts of the whitepaper that compares Pillars to mining pools. Is the whitepaper so forward thinking? The more I read, the more interesting those ideas become… I’m trying to connect some dots here.
How does it work?
Replace SHA-3 with SHA-256d PoW to mine Bitcoin while it is being used for feeless txs. Basically merge-mine Bitcoin while generating Plasma for feeless txs.
Additional resources we would need:
- Bitcoin full nodes or light clients such as Neutrino or nakamoto
- FROST with ROAST wrapper (more about ROAST here, paper here)
Why?
- NoM can become the first decentralized mining pool for Bitcoin, strengthening the hashrate, while increasing the number of mining peers (more users on NoM => more hashrate => more BTC mined => more TVL => more users, positive feedback loop)
- it can become the first network to acquire Bitcoins by mining them in a trustless way
- it can use mined BTC to embed information into the Bitcoin blockchain (tapscripts) by paying fees and unlock a myriad of use cases (including the “Holy Grail” aka Bitcoin DeFi)
- it can become the first decentralized network to simultaneously mine, hold and use on-chain BTC trustlessly, providing added value and acting as a Bitcoin L2
- creates a symbiotic relationship with Bitcoin by providing hashrate in exchange for block space (mine & pay sats/vbyte)
More information here.