Clarify the distinctions between pure PoW, the PoW subprotocol, NU5, and fork-choice vs all of transaction semantics.

Electric-Coin-Company / tfl-book

A Trailing Finality Layer book for a proposed Zcash protocol change.

MIT License

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Clarify the distinctions between pure PoW, the PoW subprotocol, NU5, and fork-choice vs all of transaction semantics. #119

Open nathan-at-least opened 8 months ago

nathan-at-least commented 8 months ago

Suggested Improvement

These distinctions deserve unique terms.

The Crosslink docs already distinguish between $\Pi{\mathrm{origbc}}$ and $\Pi{\mathrm{bc}}$, but the book content does not.

Furthermore, it conflates NU5 with both uses of PoW above, and it conflates the fork-choice and PoW scoring vs transaction semantics.

I believe we can address this issue when we do #85.

nathan-at-least commented 8 months ago

Moving some todo comments from the mdbook into this ticket:

TODO: Find a more precise name for the PoW subprotocol, because this subprotocol is responsible for:

Proof-of-Work proving/validation (unmodified)

Nakamoto Best-chain Fork Choice rule (potentially modified by the hybrid construction)

Transaction Validity Rules (with a transaction context potentially modified by hybrid construction)