Minting pool

General
1

What would be the benefit of a minting pool if they would be already doing what one is already doing in solo-minting?
How would a peercoin minting pool work?
Why would it be useful for someone that has very few peercoins?

2

From what I understand, minting pools would just mint your coins for your. Meaning that once the cold minting feature will be in place, you’d just have to provide them with your minting key (not your private key that you keep secret) and they’ll take care of syncing with the blockchain and “unlocking” your coins for minting.

I can’t imagine the minting pool to provide a feature that would “merge” everyone’s Peercoins in one single big transaction, because it will have severe security impacts (centralized pooling) and more than that they’ll have the possibility to spend those coins (i.e. if they are hacked)…

One part that I’m not sure about is about the security implications to have for example one big and unique centralized pool that mines everyone else coins (still without being able to spend them) but from the same and unique node. The one that I can think of for now is that if this mining node goes down or is being DoS it would drastically drop the PoS difficulty. That’s for example on the the security issues that Bitcoin is facing today while heading towards mining centralization with PoW (you can always DoS the big mining platforms, and that would drastically drop the difficulty). Dropping the difficulty weakens the blockchain’s security.

In short, benefits are to have your coins always unlocked for minting, because the minting pool is taking care of it. But for someone who has very few coins that will definitely not be a good thing to have a pool minting as the PoS difficulty will certainly reach high levels as a lot of Peercoiner will be minting (which is by the way what is going to happen with cold minting :p).

Edit: By the way, several instances (or nodes) can mint the same coins at the same time, because by definition it just requires someone to tell the network that he can “burn” this specific transaction’s coinage using the corresponding minting key (the fastest instance to do so will be the one to generate the next PoS block). For example, you can always spread your minting key on several minting platforms and still keep your Peerunity wallet unlocked for minting for when you are online. This would help against attacks which purpose would be to weaken the blockchain’s security by targeting and shutting down your minting pool, as the nodes that will still be online (you or one of the others to which you provided your minting key) will still be minting the coins.

Edit 2: Wait… this also means that we could implement a feature that could be used/enabled by coin’s owner to spread their minting keys across the network so that everyone can mint everyone else’s coins! Should we call this a decentralized minting pool system, or P2P minting pool? :slight_smile: But that would be unfair to mint someone else coins in case this person is never online… to resolve this, we could choose to timeout those minting keys that are broadcasted across the network, so that when the minting key is provided it automatically times out after a certain delay forcing the owner to resubmit it across the network via its wallet (and sign its minting key + new timeout + challenge response provided by the network with an extra “renew_timeout” key, and in that case he will have three keys instead of two, multisig = “minting” key + “private” key + “renew_timeout private” key) if he still wants its coins to be minted by others. The challenge response still has to be defined though… but it shouldn’t be too hard find something that both cannot be forged independently without being connected to the network and also would prove that this person is actively minting.

Edit 3: Oh and that would also help against the inequality between big and small stake holders. We could think about a solution that would reward those who are minting for others by distributing the rewards more equally across minters (i.e. XX% of the PoS reward would be rewarded to the P2P minters), but for that I don’t really have a solution now. Oh, but that would actually resolve the previous “proof that this person is actively minting”… in short, the more you mint the more you are rewarded (ah but then people would choose high coinage transactions then… or would only mint mature transactions… BUT this can be adjusted in the reward to avoid it! :slight_smile: ).

Edit 4: Maybe I should create a topic regarding this decentralized minting concept.

Edit 5: crypto_coiner, that’s the second time you are driving my thoughts on interesting topics… :slight_smile:

Edit 6: Created the topic here: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=3749

3

First pooled PoS block, no trust Cryptoblog - notícias sobre bitcoin e criptomoedas!

It could be used to optimize minting process by group of owners.
i.e.

  • create optimal „minting schedule” with lot of different coins
  • you have a bunch of coins but no luck so you pay(with part of your coinage) to someone who has more luck to mint a block together

Hmm, I guess different models for different needs.

Hmmm :slight_smile: Hobby? To cover few transaction fees with small reward?

4

Thanks thireus and kac- for your answers.