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Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

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Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#41

Post by kmeisthax »

skeptrune wrote: post #36
kmeisthax wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No! Absolutely not! Proof of work is a form of money[0], with extraordinarily unequal distribution[1] in people willing to front the cost of spinning custom single-purpose mining silicon. A social media site that uses proof of work is equivalent to a social media site that is explicitly pay-to-play, where ordinary users will be censored for being too hashcash-poor to participate. [0] That's why Bitcoin uses it [1] Th…

I mean you'd expect that the amount of work you'd have to put in to rank would stay quite low. You can also combine it w/ traditional social graph techniques to further prevent the work threshold from going past what you can do on a typical mobile phone. At the very least it seems like it would work to bootstrap discoverabilty before social graphs really start to develop w/ more usership.

The problem is the inequality of specialization. The whole point of proof-of-work is to add costs that are trivial for even the poorest user but add up quickly for someone who wants to sockpuppet, ballot stuff, or otherwise spam the system. This only holds if all users pay relatively the same amount of money for access to compute power. If you can specialize - that is, invest capital into making a more efficient computer that only does proof-of-work, but does it for cheaper - than the system breaks down. Spammers pay less than users.

Yes, there are "ASIC-resistant" proof-of-work systems in the cryptocurrency space. People specialize on them anyway - there's ASIC mining rigs for Monero, for example. Yes, you can fix that with a hard fork, but hard forks take time in decentralized systems, and designing new hash functions also takes time. ASICs aren't even the only way people specialize their mining rigs, just the most blatant, obvious, and most importantly, capital intensive.

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#42

Post by bingogarden »

Retr0id wrote: post #5

The one problem with this approach is that it gives one guy with a big GPU (or even an ASIC) a huge advantage over "casual" users (e.g. mobile web). You could perhaps make the gap smaller by using one of the "ASIC-resistant" mining algorithms? By the way, for making more efficient mining algorithms, it would be nicer if the nonce is on the end of the message, aligned to a sha256 block. As is, it encourages someone to…

It doesn't help to use a fixed nonce and append garbage. The data never exceeds 512 bits (SHA256 block size), because the text has a max length.

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#43

Post by pcfreak30 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #38
mrb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes they did. 200-300 GPUs for about 2-4 months at an average $0.10/kWh has a TCO of $100k-200k. 12.5 BTC was worth $375k back when it was solved. So definitely profitable—they would have made around $175k-275k, and end up with essentially free GPUs at the end. Puzzle #130 requires about 5.7 times more work (2**2.5) than #125, but BTC has doubled since they solved #125. They have the GPUs already, so opex (electr…

Terrible for the environment.

Using energy is not "terrible for the environment". if it was, stop using your computer, Xbox, and phone.

Dictating proper usage of energy is no better than dictating "proper" speech.

Oh, and while I support not completely burning our planet, the idea of "going green" is basically as extreme as BTC Maxis saying the USD is going to end tomorrow.

But for me in the end, I still value my rights and freedoms over the planet.

And... that idea apparently pisses a lot of people off.

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#44

Post by mrb »

kmeisthax wrote: post #41
skeptrune wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you'd expect that the amount of work you'd have to put in to rank would stay quite low. You can also combine it w/ traditional social graph techniques to further prevent the work threshold from going past what you can do on a typical mobile phone. At the very least it seems like it would work to bootstrap discoverabilty before social graphs really start to develop w/ more usership.

The problem is the inequality of specialization. The whole point of proof-of-work is to add costs that are trivial for even the poorest user but add up quickly for someone who wants to sockpuppet, ballot stuff, or otherwise spam the system. This only holds if all users pay relatively the same amount of money for access to compute power. If you can specialize - that is, invest capital into making a more efficient comp…

"If you can specialize [...] then the system breaks down. Spammers pay less than users."

That's not at all what happened in practice. You see, in the Bitcoin industry, those who specialize, those who design and manufacture ASICs, realized that selling them on the open market is equally profitable as mining with them. As a result, even the small miners, the common guys, have access to the same hardware as the large scale miners. That's why today anybody can get, say, an Antminer S19. So spammers do NOT "pay less than users". We all pay the same amount of money for the same compute power. In fact, the cost curve of mining somewhat advantages small miners. The guy with a single Antminer S19 in his garage may not need to have dedicated cooling because cracking open a window may be sufficient. Whereas the large-scale miners definitely have to incur significant cooling costs. However they can cancel out these scale issues by, notably, choosing to set up their mining farm where electricity is cheap.

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#45

Post by quickthrower2 »

pcfreak30 wrote: post #43
quickthrower2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible for the environment.

Using energy is not "terrible for the environment". if it was, stop using your computer, Xbox, and phone. Dictating proper usage of energy is no better than dictating "proper" speech. Oh, and while I support not completely burning our planet, the idea of "going green" is basically as extreme as BTC Maxis saying the USD is going to end tomorrow. But for me in the end, I still value my rights and freedoms over the plan…

That is some mental gymnastics. I turned my air conditioner on today while making a coffee. That is one thing. Rich people puzzle games burning $200k of electricity which is probably like 100 suburban mcmansions use in a year is a another.

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#46

Post by alwayslikethis »

Retr0id wrote: post #5

The one problem with this approach is that it gives one guy with a big GPU (or even an ASIC) a huge advantage over "casual" users (e.g. mobile web). You could perhaps make the gap smaller by using one of the "ASIC-resistant" mining algorithms? By the way, for making more efficient mining algorithms, it would be nicer if the nonce is on the end of the message, aligned to a sha256 block. As is, it encourages someone to…

Monero imo has the best solution for that. Their hashing algorithm RandomX requires a ton of memory access which significantly hampers the possibility of using GPUs or ASICs for mining, favoring CPUs accessible to the common person.

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#47

Post by kmeisthax »

mrb wrote: post #44
kmeisthax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the inequality of specialization. The whole point of proof-of-work is to add costs that are trivial for even the poorest user but add up quickly for someone who wants to sockpuppet, ballot stuff, or otherwise spam the system. This only holds if all users pay relatively the same amount of money for access to compute power. If you can specialize - that is, invest capital into making a more efficient comp…

" If you can specialize [...] then the system breaks down. Spammers pay less than users. " That's not at all what happened in practice. You see, in the Bitcoin industry, those who specialize, those who design and manufacture ASICs, realized that selling them on the open market is equally profitable as mining with them. As a result, even the small miners, the common guys, have access to the same hardware as the large…

If you're even considering buying dedicated mining hardware, you're already way more specialized than the average user of Bitcoin. Diseconomies of scale at the high end don't stop Bitcoin mining from being an extremely unequal gated community relative to the average user with a smartphone in their pocket.

In fact, this is the main reason why the Bitcoin core development team has largely rejected proposals to, say, determine acceptable maximum block size[0] through miner consensus. How much data a miner can process is likely to be far higher than that of casual users, who aren't going to be mining and thus have no franchise.

As for the scale issues you mentioned, wouldn't dedicated cooling be more efficient per hash? That's the metric that matters for Proof of Work.

[0] Either the base block size or SegWit weight units, both of which are locked at 1kb/4kwu forever.

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#48

Post by seletskiy »

mrb wrote: post #39
Retr0id wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, my personal record sha256 computation is only ~2^48, so I'm probably not going to beat this.

Ok this was teasing me too much - I had to go ahead, find an RTX 4090, and whip out some quick code. 48 leading zero bits: 000000000000ff6b402cb2c12d4d5ec33b2d0d3ad8982835ede2dfeb669fc705 "Bonjour from mrb" CUDA is nice. I had only developped for AMD previously. For the record the nonce+data that hashes to the above SHA256 is "000000000000000000003c81587599edBonjour from mrb"

Apparently I was even more obsessed. Wanna "trade" solutions?

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#49

Post by mrb »

seletskiy wrote: post #48
mrb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok this was teasing me too much - I had to go ahead, find an RTX 4090, and whip out some quick code. 48 leading zero bits: 000000000000ff6b402cb2c12d4d5ec33b2d0d3ad8982835ede2dfeb669fc705 "Bonjour from mrb" CUDA is nice. I had only developped for AMD previously. For the record the nonce+data that hashes to the above SHA256 is "000000000000000000003c81587599edBonjour from mrb"

Apparently I was even more obsessed. Wanna "trade" solutions?

Sure, shoot me an email - let's chat gpu tech! m at zorinaq.com

Re: Show HN: Peer-to-peer mini r/place with Proof of Work

#50

Post by mrb »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #45
pcfreak30 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using energy is not "terrible for the environment". if it was, stop using your computer, Xbox, and phone. Dictating proper usage of energy is no better than dictating "proper" speech. Oh, and while I support not completely burning our planet, the idea of "going green" is basically as extreme as BTC Maxis saying the USD is going to end tomorrow. But for me in the end, I still value my rights and freedoms over the plan…

That is some mental gymnastics. I turned my air conditioner on today while making a coffee. That is one thing. Rich people puzzle games burning $200k of electricity which is probably like 100 suburban mcmansions use in a year is a another.

Globally, unnecessary air conditioning use is wasting orders of magnitude more electricity than a few people solving these puzzles.
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