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0 pointsrocqua8y ago0 comments

Yeah, but it is quite interesting what the relevant target times are.

Does a 10 minute delay require something like a 10 or 20 minute target time to keep consensus or is it more like 2 hours or even a day? How does is this effected by the ratio of hash-rates over the planets? What happens when you have clusters (say earth - moon and mars - phobos)?

In any case, if the target times need to increase by too much, things become infeasible. And I'd guess that at any given target time, there is distance from earth where computations no longer contribute to the hash-rate on earth. Thus, the claim that 'the hash-rate is universal' would be false.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

icebraining8y ago· 3 in thread

Intuitively, for two planets, I'd say you need the delay to be inside (some percentile of) the variation between the time taken by each block, so that a planet has the chance to "leap ahead" of the other.

So if a block takes X minutes with a 20% variation at, say, 95th percentile, and the inter-planet latency is 10 minutes, then I think the target time (X) must be more than 100 minutes, so that if Earth mined the last block, Mars can receive it 10 minutes late and still have a chance of mining it first and reporting it back before Earth finds it.

But I'm probably totally wrong :)

incompatible8y ago

Earth would presumably still have the majority of the miners, so once they'd found a block they'd have a consensus. They'd ignore a block received from Mars that didn't build on that block. Mars wouldn't be able to do the same to Earth.

icebraining8y ago

Right, the majority of time, that's what would happen. But sometimes, Earth would mine a block, send it to Mars and immediately start working on the next one, and yet Mars would win it simply because they got lucky enough to find the solution first, despite having a 20m handicap. And then Earth would have to get lucky (which would be easier, since they have more miners, but that's OK).

My idea is just that if you increase the target time quite a bit, Mars would get lucky more often.

In fact, this already happens: if an European miner wins a block, then why don't other European miners always win the subsequent blocks, since their latency to the winner is lower than American or Chinese miners? It's because the few miliseconds extra are not relevant when a block takes 10m on average to find.

My idea is just to increase the target time so that the 20mins latency are also not relevant.

jacobush8y ago

If we are going to get this paper clip optimizer really started, Earth is not going to cut it. There is much more mining energy to be tapped closer to the Sun.

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