III. SOLVING THE CHALLENGES
A. Overcoming Coin Age
In the Proof of Stake system, the weight of unspent coins and the time they have been idle is used to calculate Coin Age. The calculation involves proofhash, coins, age, and target. While the Coin Age mechanism was initially designed to reward long-term holders, it has some drawbacks that can make the network vulnerable to attacks.
One issue with Coin Age is that it incentivizes nodes to disconnect from the network and wait for the reward to increase. Additionally, shareholders can disconnect from the network for extended periods of time and still win enough blocks to attempt a 50% attack on the network. Furthermore, the fewer nodes that are connected, the easier it is to gain a majority of the blocks and forge a consensus, and stakes can be calculated in advance to make the attack more effective.
However, there is a solution. In Proof of Stake 2.0, Coin Age is removed from the equation. The new calculation is simply "proofhash < coins · target". By eliminating Coin Age, the system no longer incentivizes nodes to disconnect, and this increases the number of nodes connected to the network, thus making it more secure.
B. Preventing Blockchain Precomputation
The Proof of Stake system relies on the block timestamp to prevent attacks. An attacker can attempt to fork a coin by changing previous timestamps, and the stake modifier does not obfuscate the hash of sufficiently to prevent knowing future proofs. This means that an attacker can compute all the blocks in advance and forge multiple consecutive blocks with a higher probability.
To address this problem, Proof of Stake 2.0 uses a new solution. The stake modifier is changed at every modifier interval to better obfuscate any calculations that would be made to pinpoint the time for the next proof-of-stake. Additionally, the expected block time was increased from the original 60 seconds to match the granularity, making it harder to compute future blocks. By doing so, the network becomes more secure and resilient to attacks.
etwork.