Whitepaper Things about sia HOT 7 CLOSED

I realized we may want to make the transaction fee an explicit output for the miner.

Imagine that you're doing the Timmy thing, where we're raising $100. So I have 30 people put in $10 each, who each sign that only Timmy can get the $100 out. I then mine the block, and take a $200 transaction fee.

That's bad.

from sia.

We might want to add some level of type safety, for example the inputs must match the outputs, and we have an explicit field for miner fee, and a different explicit field for funding a contract.

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We should add a naive/example algorithm to the whitepaper that lets clients pick which hosts they upload to.

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We should distinguish between files and data sectors - clients aren't really uploading files, they are uploading data sectors.

Perhaps though that's unncessary.

For some reason I also eliminated the word 'host', instead calling them 'storage providers' and 'providers', which makes me feel better. I really don't like the word host as a noun for some reason.

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maybe because of its association with viruses? :P

I've started using "peer" in the network code for maximum genericness.

I think it's fairly implicit that when we say "file," we mean arbitrary data.

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I'm pretty firmly settled on updating the difficulty every block. There seems to be a handful of upsides and no downsides. These should all be discussed in the whitepaper:

• stronger defense against the difficulty raising attack
• clamp can be made equally strong to Bitcoin's clamp
• substantially stronger defense against the timewarp attack ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43692.msg521772#msg521772 ) ==> it's not even it's own thread? lol I guess it's not that important.
• Protection against difficulty raising attacks is continuous, instead of staggered.
• Smoother difficulty adjustments mean less miners turning off their machines at the same time (miners will traditionally turn off their machines right after a difficulty change, because you'll get +25% all at once sometimes, which means many miners will cross from efficient to inefficient at the same moment. On the other hand if you're biggest change is +0.05%, then it's going to be rare that a bunch of miners become unprofitable at the same moment). Smoother hash rate means more predictable security assumptions.

Unrelated: need to discuss DoS attacks on providers

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Could also talk about soft forking plans.

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