I now have two reasons why I would like to have a native API to access informations about historical hashrate of both Rootstock and Bitcoin, especially the 200 week moving average hashrate, and even more specifically the current 200 WMA relative to a constant value in a point in time in the past, let’s call that RHR (relative hash rate):
- Using
RHRas an objective -albeit vague- (R)BTC price oracle to be used in stable coins that don’t want to be tethered to one fiat currency or another, nor want to depend on trusted oracles. - Using
RHRas an objective -albeit vague- proxy to the number of Rootstock light clients, and thus the maximum Blobs size that can be safely made available through Data Availability Sampling.
Proof of Work offers Rootstock things that are not available any other way, namely a rough estimate of the demand of BTC, which is not something a proof of stake chain can have. In fact this is the biggest problem to projects like Celestia, since they have to hardcode (through a hardfork) how many light clients are there, which is very political and social consensus to try to reach, whereas Rootstock can use the proof of work as a proxy for that, and it doesn’t matter how many light clients are there exactly, the only thing that matters is how many more there might be now relative to a year ago, or a point in the past where we had a rough idea or an assumption that we are all comfortable with.
The same applies to stable coins contracts, where the goal is just to create a token with a stabilised value, where we don’t actually need exact exchange rate to something else (which is actually theoretically impossible) but instead, we just need to set liquidation targets to a slow and steady drop of demand for the collateral BTC.