The poll seems to be heading towards a tail emission in 4-5 years.
It is foreseen that this would require a change in consensus model to ensure the blockchain security is maintained when the block subsidy ends as it is unclear whether a masternode model is sustainable with a 1 FIRO/block emission.
While this is very preliminary, I thought it would be good to open up discussions on potential consensus models such as
a) Merged mining
b) Komodo notarization route (this is what Piratechain uses)
c) Pure PoW with a max reorg length
d) Proof of Stake
Currently Iâm leaning towards a merged mining model to leverage chains with larger networks while remaining lean on infrastructure. Itâs also a relatively proven model with Dogecoin being merge mined with Litecoin.
To me for a consensus model to be considered a viable candidate it should be:
a) Secure even with tail emissions
b) Censorship resistant (shouldnât be dependent on only a handful of nodes)
c) Easy to implement (we donât want to spend years coming up with a new consensus mechanism) (for those who remember the years we spent on MTP)
d) Maintains fast finality
Iâll have to look into option b) before making up my mind.
Right now, option a) seems like the obvious choice. It also may help expose Firo to wider communities.
I am a big fan of Pirate Chain, and I think dPOW is a very strong system. It greatly reduces the possibility of a 51% attack making it almost impossible.
Pirate Chain has also floated the idea of tail emissions to be in a future upgrade.
Iâm not a big fan of DPoW as its security claims arenât what they seem as the weak point is the notary nodes which is what youâre basically trusting the system to. While it is okay for some uses cases it isnât exactly censorship resistant.
For mass adoption, I think the max supply should be around 100 Millions or more. Tail emission 1 per block is too slow. I suggest keeping the status quo until forever, or tail emission up to 4 firo/block.
About concensus, I suggest Byzantine Fault Tolerance for speed and 1 block finality.
1 FIRO/block is less than 1% inflation per year which is generally considered to be the sweet spot for a stable monetary supply.
Altering the supply from 21.4 to 100 million for mass adoption without solid data would be detrimental since Iâm not sure how a higher supply contributes to mass adoption.
100m is way too much. This whole thing about mass adoption bothers me. No one coin needs to be mass adopted nor scale to 6 billion users. The likely outcome is when the time comes that you can pay for your coffee with crypto, youâll have a choice of what crypto to pay with just like a lot of online payment gateways currently offer. As long as the entire industry scales, which it already does, there is no need for one coin to be the de facto means of payment.
Iâve read before that 1% is a sweet spot, you could get a way with a little higher even.
Also, im not well versed on dPoW as i didnt know there was a set of nodes holding the whole chain up. Knowing this, but still being a Pirate Chain supporter, i would try to avoid this architecture at all costs. Beyond censorship reasons, it also makes them a target for attack which would cripple the chain if there is no failsafe mechanism.
BFT because of the need for each validator to communicate with every other validator means that these consensus mechanisms only can support up to a couple of hundred validators at best. This is an issue basically termed as âcommunication complexityâ. There are several variants of BFT such as PBFT (100-200 validators), Tendermint (300-500), Hotstuff (high hundreds), dBFT (~100) but all do not scale well into the thousands.
For a privacy coin, this isnât a really good model despite its performance benefits. Also FYI, we already have single block finality through chainlocks.
Solana has a hybrid consensus that uses Tower BFT with Proof of History can scale to thousands of validators but they do require very high requirements to run. Also because itâs written in a different language, it would be a significant lift to port this over for Firo which I think would be better spent elsewhere.