What happened to MicroPow/FASTER

Merge-mining
1

I thought MicroPow discussed 4 years ago was abandoned, but then I found the same concept, or a simplification of it published last year as FASTER.. but I can’t find an RSKIP, or a post here, or any other writeup anywhere.

My questions are:

  1. What is the status of this line of research?
  2. If this is a valid direction, why not put the entire PoW headers in the bitcoin Coinbase? It shouldn’t matter if PoW blocks are produced every 30s or 10 minutes, if PoS blocks are produced every 5 seconds.. right? It should simplify the security of Rootstock significantly as @SergioDemianLerner mentioned many times that having the same blocktime as Bitcoin makes securing sidechains much easier.
2

Thanks for asking!

FASTER was explored as a research project to investigate alternative ways of achieving faster block times while preserving Rootstock’s security properties.

At this point, we don’t plan to move forward with an implementation. The approach introduces significant complexity, and the trade-offs involved don’t currently justify that complexity.

That said, the research was still valuable: it helped us better understand the design space and the trade-offs between faster block production, merge-mining, and security.

So, for now, FASTER should be considered a research exploration rather than a feature planned for implementation.

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