Network Latency and Fair Mining: Possible Solutions

It's not just about cheap electricity and hash power for miners. Good connectivity with low latency is key. If you're late with blocks, they get rejected. I saw a paper discussing how network delay affects Bitcoin mining. Seems like a technical issue that could be tackled. What if we wait for a few blocks to arrive before confirming? Like, we can give a reward to the first block and also to others somehow.

You mean this paper? I didn’t think it was that great... If miners just switch to mining altcoins with ASICs, energy usage won’t change. There are altcoins making more profit right now. Just check WhatToMine.

Yeah, that's the one. Didn't link it since I was only interested in the conclusion. Good point about altcoins, I totally missed that. If we implement delays, it could lower electricity use across the board. Also, what if we rewarded miners even for partially solved blocks? Like if a hash has 30 zeros instead of the 31 needed? They still burn electricity, so why not give them something for it?

Ever looked into uncle/ommer blocks on ETH back when it was PoW? Some folks aren't fans for reasons like... 1. They inflate ETH supply. 2. They overload ETH nodes due to extra data. But how can we verify actual hashrate? AFAIK average block time is based on poisson/exponential distribution. Adding this could lead to centralization, which doesn't sound good.

You're onto something. I found that big mining pools took advantage of Uncle Blocks for ages. There’s this video by Aviv Yaish that breaks it down. It shows how pools abused the system instead of supporting it. Uncle blocks were meant to help decentralization, but ended up being a tool for the pools. If delays exist, nodes could actually take the time to wait for confirmations.