Mining Diversity & Proof of Work

+1 vote

Dear MultiChain Team

According to your white paper, mining diversity ensures that there is a round robin mining. To my understanding it means that, if set to 1.0 we have a fixed order who is next in line to validate a block. 

My question is if once you are next to validate a block, do you have to do proof of work to amend a block to the chain? 

The reason I am asking is that according to the parameters, you have to show pow by default (see below). Furthermore, in the white paper it says the first version of MultiChain still uses a bitcoin­style proof of work to regulate and randomize each node’s rate of block production. Hence I would assume proof of work has to be done. At the same time, the target-adjust-freq is by default a negative number which deactivates proof of work.

Is multichain therefore using a hybrid solution where you have a fixed order of miners (if mining diversity = 1) but the miners that are in charge for the validation for the next block still have to do proof of work?

 

ParameterDescriptionDefault
skip-pow-checkSkip checking whether block hashes demonstrate sufficient proof-of-work.false
   
target-adjust-freqFrequency of recalculating proof-of-work difficulty level, measured in seconds. For blockchains which don’t require proof-of-work, use a negative value to prevent recalculation.-1
   
asked May 24, 2018 by Fabrice

1 Answer

0 votes
Thanks – the white paper is indeed a little out of date on this question.

In the default setup, miners don't use proof-of-work to regulate the rate of block production. They regulate the rate using deliberate delays (with some randomness). With the default parameters, proof-of-work is now only used in the most symbolic way, to ensure that block hashes begin with two hexadecimal zeroes. On average, this means trying 128 different nonces to get a suitable hash, which has trivial computational cost. We did this purely to help developers distinguish visually between block and transaction hashes and it serves no security purpose.
answered May 25, 2018 by MultiChain
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