How to disable proof-of-work and what are the parameters impacted by this change?

Question

How to completely disable Proof-of-Work in a private chain? And what parameters lose/gain significance upon replacing Proof-of-Work with mining diversity?

Answer 1

The default settings when you create a MultiChain blockchain don't use proof-of-work. For a non proof-of-work chain, these parameter values are crucial:

anyone-can-mine=false
target-adjust-freq=-1
pow-minimum-bits=8 (or other low value)

For a proof-of-work chain:

target-adjust-freq>0
skip-pow-check=false
target-adjust-freq>0

Comments

Thanks. Does it impact target-block-time? Because in proof-of-work, the difficulty is adjusted to achieve target block time. Without pow, what happens to target-block-time?

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Without PoW the miner nodes automatically space out their blocks to match the target block time (with some randomness). If one miner node is dishonest and generates blocks too quickly, there is no significant problem for the rest of the network, since that node still has to wait their turn in the round-robin scheme to generate the next block.