Cold mint, how far from us?

[Sabreiib]

Any news on cold mint? Nu and B&C. It’s said that SK wanna rethink the cold mint, is it true?

@sigmike

[Nagalim]

I’m sure we’re going to wait for ppc 6.0 (the cold mint update) before we tackle that. And ppc 5.0 isn’t even out yet.

[Sentinelrv]

It’s not that Sunny is rethinking cold minting. He has been focusing on v0.5. Only now that v0.5 is in review and about to release will he have the time to review @sigmike’s solution. He will then make the decision whether to include cold minting in Peercoin as is, modify it somehow or abandon it for a different approach. He told me it’s entirely possible that Sigmike’s solution will be accepted as is, but we just won’t know which way he’ll go until he takes the time to contemplate its potential effects in the future.

[sigmike]

Any news on cold mint? Nu and B&C.

For Nu and B&C Jordan does not want to include it (I think he explained why here or on peercointalk). Personnally I think it would be good. There may be a motion one day, but it’s not a priority.

[Sentinelrv]

This is the only time I’ve ever seen Jordan mention cold minting…

More minting needed

Cold locked minting is not currently planned for NuShares. While I understand the demand for it, I have not yet seen a design that does not pose unacceptable risks to network security. I’m in favor of developing inexpensible dedicated hardware for minting along the lines of what peerchemist is doing (though additional refinement is certainly possible) as an alternative. It is still possible a design could be discovered that would not compromise security, but I haven’t seen it yet.

He doesn’t explain what his actual problem is with your design though. Maybe it can still happen, but probably later after Sunny implements it in Peercoin (if he does). Peercoin would be the testbed I guess. If it works there, then maybe shareholders will vote to include it in Nu and B&C.

[sigmike]

He gave more explanations in the peercointalk thread (which was by the way part of my work on Nu when Jordan was still considering including it).

[Sabreiib]

I am minting and worried about the security of my shares because my machine is online and every OS has flaws/bugs, hackers everywhere, if they find you are deserved to be attacked.

[cryptog]

use tor.

[Sabreiib]

@sigmike, would you explain in a simple way to us what’s the pros and cons of cold minting?

We should encourage the PoS minting but keeping the private key in memory is a worrying issue for many potential miners.

[sigmike]

The obvious pro is you can mint while keeping your spending private keys offline.

Most cons are speculative:

It introduces a change in the protocol that we would have to support forever. It may add development work if it’s broken or during other changes like bitcoin merges. It adds a new script opcode for which I had to pick a number, and this number may conflict with a future feature in bitcoin. I think that’s the reason it hasn’t been merged into Peercoin yet. The problem is less important for Nu and B&C where we already made a lot of changes in the protocol.

It may increase centralization because some people may pay service providers to mint for them to a point where a few important actors mint most of the shares like Bitcoin pools. I think that’s the reason why Jordan didn’t want to include it in Nu. I don’t think this will happen though, because it will be easy to set up your own cold minter and because contrary to bitcoin you can’t reduce the reward variance by pooling your shares. (That’s what I chose in my implementation at least, it’s also possible to make a version that makes variance reduction possible). And in Nu and B&C that would also mean giving your votes to the provider.

Some people think careless users will just publicly release their minting key hoping someone will mint them. But it would not work with my implementation because the person minting could burn the reward, and if more than 1 person is minting the same shares the resulting blocks will be rejected.

I also made some technical choices during implementation that may have pros and cons (and alternatives with different pros and cons), but that’s probably out of the scope of your question.

It’s also not finished yet. The Peercoin version lacks the GUI changes to handles cold minting addresses, and it would require some changes to be implemented in Nu and B&C. There was also a suggestion on the Peercoin forum to add support for multisig spending keys. I think it’s a good idea and the implementation should be changed to support that (it’s not a big change).

If you want the full story you can read the long peercointalk thread here: https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2783.0

[Sabreiib]

It may increase centralization because some people may pay service providers to mint for them to a point where a few important actors mint most of the shares like Bitcoin pools

PoS minting demands quite low hardware, and I don’t believe most miners will let service providers mint for them.

Some people think careless users will just publicly release their minting key hoping someone will mint them. But it would not work with my implementation because the person minting could burn the reward, and if more than 1 person is minting the same shares the resulting blocks will be rejected.

That’s good.

I support cold minting feature, and want to know how much work do you need to finish (GUI?), perhaps you are too busy to release it.

I’ll draft a motion to vote.

[Sentinelrv]

I support cold minting feature, and want to know how much work do you need to finish (GUI?), perhaps you are too busy to release it.

I’ll draft a motion to vote.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to skip over non-mandatory features until B&C is actually released? Then we can use any profit gained to implement extra features like this.

[Sabreiib]

Agree, we’d better wait for B&C actual release. But I am really interested in cold minting, hope use it in future.