Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer
The verifier’s dilemma, which remains an open problem is another example of gaps in the current blockchain architecture and the consensus mechanism. There are of course workarounds with Ethereum’s smart contract while bitcoin suffers and continues to fork. However, the problem here is bigger and not just about Turing-complete scripts, increased DoS attacks and fiddling with gas limits. The bigger problem is still the unidirectional computation focus, disconnection of a transaction value from the miner’s fee and the currency which works more as an asset and will continue to oscillate in periods of up and down value. Though probabilistic thinking and approximate verifiability are steps in the right direction they don’t address the bigger problems mentioned above. The odd coincidence is the need of non-transparency. Writing blocks in a sequence which involves non-transparency is a circuitous way of reaching the same goal which AlphaBlock’s predictive transaction offers. We understand that the change can’t happen overnight, but non-transparency and smart contract application are heartening steps.
Seminal paper on ‘Verifier’s dilemma’