Cyber Republic Weekly Update 20

Layman’s definition:
Proof of Work is notoriously inefficient. Mining difficulty increases or decreased to average
a certain block generation rate, no matter how many miners are working. Thus, that extra
mining work (electricity and computing power) is being “wasted”, anyway. Merged Mining
allows the work being done to apply to more than one chain, and thus, secure more than one
chain without extra cost of power or electricity.
A 51% attack is when someone buys enough machines to take over a network--kind of like a
corrupted democratic election. With less miner hash power (in less-popular blockchains), it
is easier to corrupt the system. Merged mining takes advantage of a larger network, like
Bitcoin’s network in Elastos’ case, and teams up with it so that it’s harder to take over the
blockchain.
The benefits are that Elastos becomes much safer to 51% attacks, as safe as Bitcoin’s
network, computing power and electricity is better utilized, profitability for miners is
increased, there’s no disadvantage to the parent chain (Bitcoin) as there’s no extra work
added, and there’s less competition in having to choose to mine one blockchain vs another.
The negatives are that it helps major mining pools get even stronger and increasing
centralization because regular people or smaller mining pools can’t compete with the larger
mining pools’ hardware.
Elastos doesn’t suffer from these negatives because it has created a hybrid model of
AuxPoW+DPoS, which was covered in last week’s Technical Terminology and makes the
Consensus Supernodes finalize blocks.
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