Moat: A next-generation on-chain mining pool

Because Every Castle Needs a Moat . . .

A historic window has opened:

Bitcoin’s Blockchain technology is at the advent of becoming critical infrastructure for the world. Smart contracts are finally unbounded on top of bitcoin. But mining does not reflect the “unbounded” nature of Satoshi’s Vision. The training wheels have been taken off, but mining is still constrained by the thinking of the past era. Our goal is to revitalize and re-innovate mining for this new era with a next generation on-chain mining pool and to fund it by conducting the first true crowdsale for the first true token on top of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin transactions are smart contracts not only in their simplest most fundamnetal and prototypical form but always. But contracts have been limited on top of bitcoin by a bevy of arbitrary constraints. Among them the contract size limit, the opcode number limit, and the AND & OR OPCODES, among many, being turned off. With the locks taken off and general contracting now possible on top of Bitcoin the "work" that a miner does has changed in fundamental ways, it takes significant work to run & validate block of transactions.

This being the case notion of the "work" that a miners does has been wrong-headed just like the locks on Bitcoin were wrong headed. Miners need a way for accounting for the whole work of the mining process now that the relative weight of the first component of the mining process has changed. The nature of the work required to validate a block of transactions and build a block header is very different than the work required to find a winning block header hash. For miners whose endeavours are rapidly commodotized over time the difference between accurately accounting for this work and not accurately accounting for this work can mean the difference between being in the black or in the red.

But there's a problem, how do you accurately account for the work that a miner does at any precision? As previously discussed Bitcoin contracts can now finally be arbitrarily general and the work involved is not merely hashing but the storage, running, validation, and processing of Bitcoin contracts. In order to measure the work that goes into a bitcoin transaction, and thereby the work that goes into a block of transactions, and all the work of mining and Bitcoin altogether we need a way to measure the work that goes into general computation.

There are many possible ways to approach this problem but we propose a novel cryptoeconomic method. There is one way to measure work that is easy to validate and hard to fake: power. Computation, whether hashing, block validation, transaction validation requires energy. Block acceptance requires a dynamically self-adjusting cryptoeconomically enforced amount of work and miners must expend energy to do this work. Due to Bitcon's nature, we can measure this energy with cryptoeconomic guarantees.

We propose a novel protocol consistent way to mine, which brings mining on chain in order to better reward miners for their work through a novel pool payout structure based on the energy necessary to do the computational work of mining.

Mining is the outpoint for all the energy that's goes into Bitcoin and of course it's also how transactions are processed. So it's the outpoint that cointains all the other outpoints. If we are tracking the energetics of mining on chain we are also tracking the energetics of transactions and thereby the energetics of everything happening in the economy creating an energy oracle.