Agenda: Development, Oct 16 2018

Creating a thread to solicit suggestions for agenda items for the Dev meeting to be held on Tuesday Oct 16 @ 3PM UTC in the Gitter/dev channel. Comment in thread and I will update the agenda.

Proposed agenda

  1. Agenda review
  2. Action point follow ups from previous meetings
  3. Testnet4
  4. Security & Code audits
  5. BetterHash Mining Protocol
  6. Other questions
1 Like

I think these are to far in advance. The oct 9th meeting hasnt happened yet and that thread fell off the resent list if you don’t scroll

The oct 9th meeting is a governance meeting; this is a development meeting. Different agendas.Thankfully we’ll keep this high up on the recent list by engaging in these conversations. :slight_smile:

1 Like

It would be nice to collect all forum posts about these meetings in a sticky post so it’s easy to go back and check past meetings. Unfortunately, searching through Gitter history is not that great of an experience.

Yep, I would even suggest moving both agenda and meeting notes to a GitHub repo, I included it for the agenda on Tuesday’s Governance meeting: Agenda: Governance, Oct 9 2018

Hmmm

How long is the cycle I completely missed that there were different types

They alternate; every other week

Bumping tomorrow’s agenda

Heyo!

[cc @lehnberg]

I won’t be able to make the dev meeting, but I wanted to give a brief summary of betterhash: https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/bips/blob/betterhash/bip-XXXX.mediawiki

Betterhash is a proposal by Matt Corallo to modify the way that bitcoin mining pool participants obtain candidate blocks to mine. The proposal is for Bitcoin, but could be adapted for any PoW coin.

The most commonly used mining protocol for Bitcoin is known as Stratum. Under Stratum, mining pool participants receive full candidate block header from their mining pool to mine. This means that mining pools themselves control:

  • Version bits, allowing them to signal readiness, or not, for protocol upgrades
    – The transaction tree root hash, allowing them to select which transactions to include

Arguably, this decreases decentralization by putting these choices in the hands of the mining pool administrators, and not the mining pool participants.

Betterhash is a protocol to allow mining pool participants to make these choices, while still retaining the other benefits of pooled mining, namely decreased reward variability.

In short, betterhash allows pool participants to both select which transactions to include in a block as well as which protocol upgrades to signal readiness for.

This means that large mining pools will be less of a centralizing factor, and won’t be able to single-handedly block protocol upgrades, nor censor transactions from being mined.

I talked to Matt Corallo a few days ago, and had some concerns. Namely, could pool participants abuse tx selection or header construction by mining invalid blocks. However, this behavior essentially amounts to block-withholding, which is already possible with Stratum.

If grin were to adopt betterhash (or likely something like it) from the beginning, it might go a long way towards improving the ecosystem. Miners would have less of an incentive to accumulate hash rate, since it would not provide political power and leverage, as it does with bitcoin. Decreased ability to censor and block upgrades is of course an additional benefit.

Anyway, that’s all from me! Sorry I couldn’t attend the meeting.

Best,
Casey Rodarmor