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Re:How to create a private Ethereum network by jgord on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @11:54PM (#14853564)
Something that hasn't been done much yet, but probably will as the space matures, is for a blockchain to reuse another blockchain as its "timestamp" generator.

eg. A 'MyCoin' miner grabs the latest 10 blocks off the main, say, Ethereum blockchain, and includes those hashes as proof they began their block mining _after_ those main blocks were mined, then adds their own proof-of-work on top, winning the block-solve lottery to add the next block to the blockchain.

This could potentially reduce the amount of relative advantage a dominant miner has ( others can provide a math analysis )

This approach can also save electricity, as it puts the miners on a mutual 'duty-cycle' where MyCoin miners are only busy running cryptohashes for a fraction of the time between blocks.

Another nice side-effect of this 2-tier mining is that the block generation times are spaced more evenly over time. [ They move towards a normal distribution around the average time, rather than uniformly - a result of the 'law of large number's, which states roughly that the average of uniform 'flat' distributions approaches a normal bell curve around the mean ].

Currently Bitcoin blocks sometimes arrive after 1 minute, other times only after 19 minutes, with mean 10mins maintained by adjusting difficulty. So the bitcoin time between blocks variance is high ( Litecoin adds blocks 4x as often @ 2.5mins, Ethereum ~10secs on average, but all with quite high variance ) which can surprise users.

Re:How to create a private Ethereum network by askmike on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @06:21AM (#14854976)
Proof of existence is a major problem at the moment. Everyone around me (at an EU bank) wants to do this on bitcoin or ethereum main net, but right now banks are not allowed to touch these networks from the regulators (from a "miners are service providers, they need to be KYCed" perspective).