Starting a new thread for the question that was eloquently written by Nagalim.
52,560 is the estimated blocks per year on the chain.
I think 52,560 is the correct answer as it stands. Is this thread aimed at ways to increase this number, or debate on the number itself?
For some context, you can reframe this question in other ways. For example, what is the minimum PPC UTXO amount that has a 50% chance of minting within one year? However, this form of the question is tied to variables such as coin supply, PoS difficulty, and average coinweight of stake. The benefit is that you can easily tie this number to something like $USD using a market price, which gives a direct indication of the level at which we call someone âPoorâ. The use of a dust size in Peercoin sets a minimum level of âPoorâ at which the protocol should no longer really care about âpoor get poorerâ. That level is 0.01 PPC.
I would be very careful to tie it to USD because then in that case, the rich do get richer because its no longer tied to the % of the supply being defended or created.
Can you elaborate on this?
This is extremely dangerous from a consensus perspective. For an extreme perspective, look to ETH (15s blocks) and the attempts to make Casper a convergent theorem. This simply cannot scale with the size of the human population.
I donât know that I know enough about ETH to speak to their current scaling model.
The âtieâ is just a point of reference. $USD is a number associated with wealth that modern humans have a conceptualization of. It is therefore useful to map out a path to that unit.
Changing the frequency of blocks is a deeply rooted and important protocol number. Litecoin was the first (still relevant) blockchain to reduce this number below 10 min. For PoW, however, it is a different concern than in PoS. For example, in PPC you are limited to attempting to make a block once per second per UTXO. Far beyond the core PoS mechanism, however, there are block propagation issues, for example, that seriously affect the dynamic of how PPC operates. Ethâs attempt at PoS, called casper, tries to rapidly converge on consensus because of the 15s block time. It has been in development for a long time, with no release date in sight. For billions of people, we would need hundreds of blocks every second. I donât think this is a viable scale-up method.
Can we learn from Sunny kingâs SPOS mechanism?Maybe it can give us some inspiration.
Minting Slot and Minting Right Contention
In order to achieve constant block interval minting, we define a certain entity called minting slot. Each
slot corresponds to an equal share of minting right. Thus for a potential minting participant, one must
acquire the ownership of a slot in order to obtain the minting right.
There are 60 minting slots defined, each corresponding to a specific second within the minute. To
have the minting right at a given second, one must own the corresponding minting slot at the second.
Essentially minters would take turns to mint in this system. The advantage is, should some of the
supernodes stop minting for whatever reason, the impact to both system response and throughput is
minimized.
The local clock of each supernode is synchronized through network time protocol, to ensure the proper
ordering of minting events. Back in 2009, Bitcoin chose not to depend on network time protocol for clock
synchronization, so Bitcoin protocol could forgive a miner with clock-skew up to 2 hours. Generally
speaking network time protocol nowadays can be regarded as essential Internet services like domain
name service, so it can be reasonably assumed a high level of security.
Contention of minting slot is allowed to occur freely at any time, by a challenger to the current minter
on a slot chosen by the challenger. There is a relatively high contention fee as a deterrence to abuse.
When a challenger issues a contention transaction, the stakes of both contenderâs and current minterâs
stakes are examined by the protocol to determine the winner of the contention.
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