Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
eprint.iacr.org
Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#2I love it when a plan comes together.
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#3Useful work is not actually a good foundation for securing a decentralized cryptocurrency.
The value of PoW in cryptocurrency is that I know for a fact that you have to burn $X million dollars if you want to double-spend my cryptocurrency. That has to be burned in electricity, and that burn can't be used for anything else. It's expensive for you to attack me.
If suddenly we've got useful works, such that you can apply that $X million in electricity to solve problems that are actually not wasteful, and worth perhaps $X million dollars in solutions, then I don't actually have confidence that it costs you money to double-spend my transaction. You might be able to double-spend my transaction as a by-product of computation that you were going to do already.
Further, useful PoW is a centralizing pressure, because not everyone is going to have equal access to people who are willing to pay for solutions of useful work. This unequal access to revenue means unequal ability to compete, favoring people who are able to sell solutions more effectively. For cryptocurrency, we like to remove these advantages as much as possible (granted, the existing system has a lot of room for improvement, but useful work moves things in the wrong direction).
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#4Useful work is not actually a good foundation for securing a decentralized cryptocurrency. The value of PoW in cryptocurrency is that I know for a fact that you have to burn $X million dollars if you want to double-spend my cryptocurrency. That has to be burned in electricity, and that burn can't be used for anything else. It's expensive for you to attack me. If suddenly we've got useful works, such that you can appl…
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#5Useful work is not actually a good foundation for securing a decentralized cryptocurrency. The value of PoW in cryptocurrency is that I know for a fact that you have to burn $X million dollars if you want to double-spend my cryptocurrency. That has to be burned in electricity, and that burn can't be used for anything else. It's expensive for you to attack me. If suddenly we've got useful works, such that you can appl…
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
Like carbon sequestration?
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#6Useful work is not actually a good foundation for securing a decentralized cryptocurrency. The value of PoW in cryptocurrency is that I know for a fact that you have to burn $X million dollars if you want to double-spend my cryptocurrency. That has to be burned in electricity, and that burn can't be used for anything else. It's expensive for you to attack me. If suddenly we've got useful works, such that you can appl…
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
That's a really interesting thought. Would you consider public information (e.g. the result of a mining computation) to already be a public good?
E.g. see discussion of information goods here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Challenges_in_iden...
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
Like carbon sequestration?
That's an interesting idea, but is there a way to prove carbon sequestration, except by providing me with some physical carbon?
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#8Useful work is not actually a good foundation for securing a decentralized cryptocurrency. The value of PoW in cryptocurrency is that I know for a fact that you have to burn $X million dollars if you want to double-spend my cryptocurrency. That has to be burned in electricity, and that burn can't be used for anything else. It's expensive for you to attack me. If suddenly we've got useful works, such that you can appl…
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
There is a market for public good: charities
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
That's a really interesting thought. Would you consider public information (e.g. the result of a mining computation) to already be a public good? E.g. see discussion of information goods here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Challenges_in_iden...
I wonder about some tasks that people already do for charity with their computers...like protein folding, finding super huge prime numbers. I don't know enough about the algorithms involved though to assert they satisfy the POW requirements. But some infrastructure already exists to distribute these problems.
Re: Proofs of Useful Work [pdf]
#10Useful work is not actually a good foundation for securing a decentralized cryptocurrency. The value of PoW in cryptocurrency is that I know for a fact that you have to burn $X million dollars if you want to double-spend my cryptocurrency. That has to be burned in electricity, and that burn can't be used for anything else. It's expensive for you to attack me. If suddenly we've got useful works, such that you can appl…
The ideal would be useful work that is a public good - no one can profit from it individually (other than by using it as a PoW), but the world benefits from it in some way.
Like Protein folding, Search for ExtraTerestrials, Asteroids, etc... there are a lot of them, some of which structured properly could provide public benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...