Викуша Тадукова @vikulk2

🚀 For the first time in 5 years, ETH has surpassed BTC in spot volume share! Stablecoins, tokenization, ETFs & regulation are all leaning on Ethereum. BTC remains a store of value, but liquidity is now flowing into ETH

📌$LINK holding strong after a clean breakout, now around $25.9. Trading above EMA(25) & EMA(99), rising volume, and ~3K new wallets/day → bulls in control. ICE partnership adds momentum, with $24–$25 as key support. 👉 A break and hold above $27 could fast-track $30. 🚀

Morgan Stanley says the Fed won’t cut rates in 2025 — a bearish signal for crypto🥲🥲🥲

but if any party controls that much hashpower the system has other worse problems).

Bitcoin's criteria has always been that each node adopt the first block it sees which meets the target, which creates an incentive to announce (one which breaks down if your share of the hashpower is over a large threshold

The withholding attack also reduces bitcoin's stochastic finality: a tx 6 blocks deep still has about a 1% chance of being reorged. One has to wait much longer before a tx can be considered finalized.

, but if any party controls that much hashpower the system has other worse problems).

Bitcoin's criteria has always been that each node adopt the first block it sees which meets the target, which creates an incentive to announce (one which breaks down if your share of the hashpower is over a large threshold,

The withholding profits are proporitional to your share of hash power (as thats how often your advantage gets you a second block) so it's also a centralization pressure.

If you know your block is unusually good, such that it is likely to win even if announced late, you are better off not announcing it.

Use of the apparent difficult has been proposed many times before-- it and other schemes that result in a unique value for each block which is calcuable by the block finder immediately lead to a withholding attack:

Additionally, the process naturally introduces randomization on each sample (ie block) which prevents profitable withholding attacks. Finally, it shows that the threshold for a Sybil attack can be improved from 33% to 40%.

The guaranteed unique weight prevents the network from mining on competing forks because the likelyhood of having blocks of equal weight is (1/2^256) ~= 0

PoEM uses combinatorics to weigh the dependent block events appropriately. This generates a guaranteed unique weight for each block which is the average number of hashes, in expectation, that would be required to produce a chain of equal weight.

Presently the heaviest chain rule does not treat blocks as being dependent events even though they are dependent because of the hash link to the parent.

Modifications to the current heaviest chain rule are very straight forward. The TL;DR is:

This relatively simple adjustment to the measurement of block weight has been empirically shown to: prevent selfish mining, create faster finalization time, increase throughput, and decrease block times while maintaining safety and liveness of the chain.

There is now formal security proof showing the safety and liveness of Proof-of-Entropy-Minima (PoEM).  eprint.iacr.org/2024/200

BTW, using the hash values rather than the target values to determine the longest chain is not a new idea, though this is the first time I have seen the idea explored in detail. My main criticism is the misapplication of "entropy".

However, I don't see a problem with the distortion in practice, and it does provide the benefits of a reduction in orphaned blocks and a deterrence of selfish mining.