Hi all, I am sharing a draft BIP for feedback before submitting it to the bips repository. It is classified as Informational: it documents a consensus-design pattern and its security analysis. It does NOT recommend activating a hard fork on the Bitcoin main chain.
WHAT THE PROPOSAL IS Time-Shifted Proof of Work (TSPOW) separates the three roles Bitcoin binds into a single event — finding a hash below target, earning the block reward, and authoring the block — into two stages: 1) Stage 1 (warrant issuance): miners produce a valid initial-hash warrant H_n (H(header, nonce) < D1), which carries the right to the new-coin reward. Rewards are deferred and warrants expire. 2) Stage 2 (selection): once k warrants accumulate (an adaptive Gamma batch), the protocol elects a block producer from the candidate pool via argmin H(h, R, PrevBlockHash), where R is an external-beacon output (with the previous block hash as the chain-derived fallback seed). Two claimed properties, both backed by the whitepaper and by cross-checked simulation (Rust / C++ / Python; see the repository): - Block-time stability: the block interval becomes a Gamma(k, lambda) sum instead of a single exponential arrival, dividing block-time variance by 1/k. - Withholding economics: warrant expiry plus deferred reward make privately mining / withholding a warrant strictly suboptimal (expected payoff strictly decreasing in delay). WHAT THE PROPOSAL HONESTLY DOES NOT CHANGE - A >50% adversary still dominates warrant generation and thus pool composition; 51%-attack security is unchanged natively. - Without the external beacon, the long-run double-spend probability remains (q/p)^z, identical to traditional PoW. KNOWN COSTS / RISKS (TO BE TRANSPARENT) - External beacon = a new trust assumption. The election only fully eliminates private mining when an honest beacon is present; a compromised or censored beacon degenerates to the weaker chain-derived seed. - Hard fork. Adopting TSPOW changes the block header, replaces direct block authorship with pool-based selection, and reallocates rewards. This is by construction a severe backward-incompatible change — another reason this is an informational document, not an activation proposal. - Pool-flooding within a window is mitigated (chained FIFO, per-owner caps) but not eliminated; residual risk should be stress-tested. MATERIALS - BIP draft: bip-corepool-timeshiftpow (source in the repository below) - Reference implementations, verification scripts, and numerical checks: https://github.com/corepool/timeshiftpow - Whitepapers (CN + EN) and formal security analysis in the same repository. I would welcome scrutiny of the Gamma block-time argument, the withholding-economics model, and the beacon trust model in particular, both on this list and in the BIP's security-considerations section. Comments-Summary: No comments yet. Thanks, corepool -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/4bbb1017-8080-4916-8f85-082d2ebf5eacn%40googlegroups.com.
