Monero

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 https://xcancel.com/MoneroResearchL/status/1956119998004384085 TEEs withdrawn due to security issues.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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