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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