Ok I read the white paper, it doesn't seem to tackle the actual limit on Blockchains scalability which is that you can't start building work on top of...
Ok I read the white paper, it doesn't seem to tackle the actual limit on Blockchains scalability which is that you can't start building work on top of stuff unless you have validated all that stuff first, otherwise you are risking all your work being invalidated.
Block producers in Hathor still have to validate the entire DAG, so transactions creating PoW only works if all transaction producers are also full validating nodes.
In the paper it suggests that PoW can be delegated with paying fees to others, and the justification is that PoW energy consumption is high, but actually for one transaction, most of the cost is in actually checking that previous DAG is valid... So this whole concept is wrong.
Of course you could say, instead of validating you can just trust PoW and then do fraud detection later, and that is what Floresta does.
So how is Hathrow any different from just big blocks + fraud proof? I think it is not different or offering any advantage, the paper itself says that it is not trying to solve initial block download but just spam, but they only do so because they assume that normal users will verify the DAG they are building on top.... Is that realistic? I don't think so.
Let's assume that you are trying to make a transaction between two bitcoin blocks, and Hathrow has only 10x more TPS than bitcoin, well, that means you need to validate at worst 40,000 transaction in order to be building work on top of a valid block.
But then everyone who receives this block eventually will have to do the same unless they already validated most of these txns... The memory needs and CPU needs are just insane for your phone.
So that basically boils down to only full nodes can participate in mining, but... That is already the case in all Blockchains. While phones and laptops are just using light clients that are less trustless than full nodes, but assume that at least 1% of the full nodes are honest and can notify them for invalid chains, and they are incentivized to do so .
So no, I don't think this is valid Innovation