This protocol extends on the idea by @cm-steem to transfer Gridcoin to new codebase and blockchain. It has been show by Martin Grothe that some private information can be recovered from the blockchain and since we can't just change a data in a blockchain (a Hash List) we need to somewhat transfer the account balances to new chain. This protocol aims to do this process securely, that is without a single entity governing the process. Instead, the users of Gridcoin will have a share on validating the whole transition.
Edit: This is an developer note, an Idea for discussion. Not something to be promoted to top of Gridcoin feed.
From some block, two chains will run in parallel. The new chain will start with genesis as normal coins do. But the mint mechanism on the new chain will be absolutely new thing. No PoW not PoS, but blocks on the new cahin will be secured by blocks from the old. Blocks on the old chain are signed by the same key as coinstake kernel input. How the new blocks will be created:
User A founds a kernel on the old chain, he will:
create empty block Bold for the old chain and Bnew for the new
include transactions from mempool into BOld using standard mechanism
copy and transcode transactions from BOld into BNew using Sharedrop method
add and transcode more unspent transactions from old chain to BNew
put height of BOld in BNew
sign BNew by the kernel key
put height and hash of BNew in BOld
sign BOld with the kernel key
publish both blocks
Conflict resolution:
blocks on new chain that don't satisfy rules are rejected
if hash of this bad block ends up in block on old chain, it is ignored, but the block is still let in the old chain (as nodes that don't run this dual-chain would fork with higher weight)
if block on new chain is signed by different key than corresponding block (by heigh) on the old chain, then it is rejected
Rule 2 must be enforced even for existing blocks on new chain, as the old can experience reorganizing
Sharedrop is a process of translating unspent transactions from the old chain in the new blocks. Since the old chain continues to run, this new transactions must be translated too. Transactios on new chain have different hash than on old, some lookup table must be used.
When transcoding a new transaction:
it's hashboinc is cleared
for each input:
if corresponding transaction is in the new chain, the input hash is replaced by corresponding new transaction hash
othervise the input is marked as generated
output scripts are unchanged
the old_trxid is blacklisted from future transcoding
the new-old, old-new mapping is recored into lookup table
For sharedropping old UTXOs:
Miner can select any transaction from the old chain that is
not blacklisted from prefious transcoding
has at least one, nonzero onspent output
the transaction is transcoded as described above
this process repeats until the block size limit is reached or the
transaction pool was exhausted
When all the transactions from old chain will be transcoded, both chains will continue running for a while. By some event the new chain will switch from this sharedrop minting protocol to classic PoS protocol and transaction transcoding will be disabled. At this point the old chain will become independent and should be abandoned.
