{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","title":"Bastien TEINTURIER [ARCHIVE] wrote","author_name":"Bastien TEINTURIER [ARCHIVE] (npub17f…ntr0s)","author_url":"https://yabu.me/npub17fjkngg0s0mfx4uhhz6n4puhflwvrhn2h5c78vdr5xda4mvqx89swntr0s","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://yabu.me","html":"📅 Original date posted:2019-11-22\n📝 Original message:\nWhile I agree with most of your points, I think there are subtleties to\nexplore before\ncompletely rejecting the idea.\n\nevery use of proof-of-work today (other than to power Bitcoin itself, as\n\u003e Bitcoin cannot support itself) can instead be done by using Bitcoins to\n\u003e impose this economic cost.\n\u003e\n\nThat is philosophically true, but the complexity of integrating that small\nPoW into Lightning\nis much lower than the complexity of integrating **fair, un-gameable**\nupfront payments.\nAnd not all PoW is born equal: there are a lot of PoW schemes that have\ndifferent trade-offs\nthan Bitcoin mining (think ASIC-resistance such as variants of Cuckoo\nCycle).\n\nAnother key point is that creating ASICs for this PoW is fundamentally\ndifferent from creating\nASICs for mining a crypto-currency. Solving this PoW doesn't earn you any\nmoney: it merely\nallows you to spam to temporarily disrupt the network.\nSince this PoW isn't used in any consensus, we can change the spam PoW\nalgorithm anytime\nwe want, making all previous ASICs obsolete.\nSo it's not obvious to me that anyone would find it viable to invest in\ncreating such ASICs.\n\nAs hardware specialization for the specific Lightning-Network-proof-of-work\n\u003e arises, we will find that to practically limit spam, intermediate nodes\n\u003e will have to increase and increase the threshold for accepting\n\u003e proof-of-work, as spammers are going to switch to the more-specialized\n\u003e hardware.\n\u003e\n\nThat's where I think it can be more subtle than what you describe (I may be\nwrong though as\npredicting future behavior is hard).\n\nSince I'm ruling out ASICs, we're only dealing with \"normal\" hardware\nbottlenecks (cpu/ram).\nThat means attackers are not playing at a completely different scale than\nnormal users.\nThe cost for attackers to generate an amount of spam mimicking N normal\nusers will then be\nsomewhat linear in N (to be investigated further).\nThat's exactly the same result as upfront payments, where an attacker can\nstill spam like\nhe's N users if he's ready to pay a cost linear in N.\n\nI'm slightly playing devil's advocate for the PoW proposal because I think\nit's worth exploring\nmore, even if we eventually abandon it. Maybe you're right and it won't be\nas effective to\nfight spam as upfront payments: but right now with the arguments I've seen\non this thread,\nI'm not yet convinced of that.\n\nCheers,\nBastien\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/attachments/20191122/32cc41a8/attachment.html\u003e"}