From: Jack Liao <xiangliao@gmail.com>
To: Bitcoin Development Mailing List <bitcoindev@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [bitcoindev] [bitcoin-dev] Draft BIP for discussion: Time-Shifted Proof of Work (TSPOW) — an informational consensus-design proposal
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:43:18 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4bbb1017-8080-4916-8f85-082d2ebf5eacn@googlegroups.com> (raw)
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Hi all,
I am sharing a draft BIP for feedback before submitting it to the bips
repository. It is classified as Informational: it documents a
consensus-design
pattern and its security analysis. It does NOT recommend activating a hard
fork
on the Bitcoin main chain.
WHAT THE PROPOSAL IS
Time-Shifted Proof of Work (TSPOW) separates the three roles Bitcoin binds
into
a single event — finding a hash below target, earning the block reward, and
authoring the block — into two stages:
1) Stage 1 (warrant issuance): miners produce a valid initial-hash warrant
H_n
(H(header, nonce) < D1), which carries the right to the new-coin reward.
Rewards are deferred and warrants expire.
2) Stage 2 (selection): once k warrants accumulate (an adaptive Gamma
batch),
the protocol elects a block producer from the candidate pool via
argmin H(h, R, PrevBlockHash), where R is an external-beacon output
(with the
previous block hash as the chain-derived fallback seed).
Two claimed properties, both backed by the whitepaper and by cross-checked
simulation (Rust / C++ / Python; see the repository):
- Block-time stability: the block interval becomes a Gamma(k, lambda) sum
instead of a single exponential arrival, dividing block-time variance by
1/k.
- Withholding economics: warrant expiry plus deferred reward make privately
mining / withholding a warrant strictly suboptimal (expected payoff
strictly
decreasing in delay).
WHAT THE PROPOSAL HONESTLY DOES NOT CHANGE
- A >50% adversary still dominates warrant generation and thus pool
composition; 51%-attack security is unchanged natively.
- Without the external beacon, the long-run double-spend probability remains
(q/p)^z, identical to traditional PoW.
KNOWN COSTS / RISKS (TO BE TRANSPARENT)
- External beacon = a new trust assumption. The election only fully
eliminates
private mining when an honest beacon is present; a compromised or censored
beacon degenerates to the weaker chain-derived seed.
- Hard fork. Adopting TSPOW changes the block header, replaces direct block
authorship with pool-based selection, and reallocates rewards. This is by
construction a severe backward-incompatible change — another reason this
is an
informational document, not an activation proposal.
- Pool-flooding within a window is mitigated (chained FIFO, per-owner caps)
but
not eliminated; residual risk should be stress-tested.
MATERIALS
- BIP draft: bip-corepool-timeshiftpow (source in the repository below)
- Reference implementations, verification scripts, and numerical checks:
https://github.com/corepool/timeshiftpow
- Whitepapers (CN + EN) and formal security analysis in the same repository.
I would welcome scrutiny of the Gamma block-time argument, the
withholding-economics model, and the beacon trust model in particular, both
on
this list and in the BIP's security-considerations section.
Comments-Summary: No comments yet.
Thanks,
corepool
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next reply other threads:[~2026-08-27 15:38 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2026-08-27 11:43 Jack Liao [this message]
2026-08-28 9:51 ` [bitcoindev] [bitcoin-dev] Draft BIP for discussion: Time-Shifted Proof of Work (TSPOW) — an informational consensus-design proposal Saint Wenhao
2026-08-28 21:16 ` Jack Liao
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