Monero’s PoW mining pool centralization discussions covered problems, principles, PoW improvements, non-PoW alternatives like Trailing Finality Layer, vulnerability of Nakamoto consensus to rented hashrate and balancing decentralization with security. liberachat

Core principles to uphold in solutions: Privacy, decentralization, censorship resistance, accessibility, and permissionlessness, avoiding complexity, monetary policy integrity. a​rticmine: We have to be careful that we do not create a cure that is far worse than the disease

Improvements to Existing PoW: Tevador’s bandwidth-based mining protocol proposal to penalize large pools & encourage decentralization. Sech1’s idea of allocating 1% of rewards directly to miners. Short-term mitigations: Renting hashrate, temp raising tx fees as a relay rule.

Non-PoW Consensus Mechanisms: Trailing Finality Layer as an overlay for finality, potentially using PoS for validators, to prevent deep re-orgs and enable faster unlocks. https://xcancel.com/MoneroResearchL/status/1956119998004384085 TEEs withdrawn due to security issues.

Short-Term vs. Long-Term actions and research needs: Immediate: Rent hashrate during spikes; explore PoW tweaks.
Long-term: Research Trailing Finality Layer, PoS failure modes, hardening PoW.
Calls for CCS proposals and literature reviews.

Broad agreement on the urgency of addressing centralization, support for PoW tweaks as realistic short-term steps, rejection of TEEs, and the need for further research. sgp_: I personally think that on the PoW tweak front, tevador’s proposal is the most realistic, by far.

kayabanerve: I like tevador’s proposal but am concerned about the risk… tevador did respond to this concern though. articmine: I would suggest instead that we focus on hardening our existing POW both at the consensus and node really levels.

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    • ArseneSpeculoos@monero.townOP
      1·
      4 days ago

      If I remember correctly, that’s partly because p2pool requires access to a full node with the whole blockchain, while a lot (or some?) of the current hash rate is not running their own nodes.
      If you somehow force everyone to p2pool we are not sure of the distribution and decentralization of the remaining miners, as some mining will drop out instead of running their own node.
      Sometimes it’s because they don’t have the 200gb available for storing the blockchain. Sometimes they are mining multiple blockchains and requiring a full monero node is too much hassle.

      Granted, with p2pool you can mine using someone else’s full node and let it spy on you a bit. Do we want that?

      The other big issue is that you would have to hard-fork changes to the protocol to impose p2pool and that’s a big change that should be carefully considered, not done in a rush.

      We have to remember that Monero is fine for now (as in not dying right now), we are preparing mitigations for POW centralization issues and the cure should not be more severe than the disease.

      • Wizard@monero.town
        3·
        4 days ago

        That doesn’t sound too bad of a trade off to secure the chain. I mean we already tell people to run their own node, so why not do so when you mine?

        but maybe the finality layer will work just as well…