MIT's Bitcoin-Inspired 'Enigma' Lets Computers Mine Encrypted Data

The second point is something I've asked myself without any clear answer. Interested too learning more about this.

A better response than mine had already been posted by the time I finished writing mine. As such you may wish to skip reading my response. However, I'll let my response remain here anyway. /EDIT

1)

I'm not sure why this would have a power cost significantly comparable to bitcoin. This seems like the power use would be akin to using a computer which uses power inefficiently, which doesn't seem terrible.

It seems inevitable that a system that serves the same purpose would take more resources, seeing as the computation has to be done in multiple places, and as such, a relatively small constant factor doesn't sound terrible (not sure how one could hope for better. ).

It is not as if the programs which are written to run in web browsers now would have been written to allow as much inefficiency in equivalent desktop programs 14 years ago, right?

Does not sending an encrypted message to someone take a constant factor more time to send than it would to send it plaintext? (referring to time it takes to send and receive, not the time during actual transit)

2)

It uses a blockchain (bitcoin's) to store some data, but that would just store some transactions, and from what I can tell it shouldn't significantly increase the electricity required by the bitcoin network?

I guess it could contribute to blockchain size (I'm not sure how much data needs to be stored for the commitments.

re: "one true blockchain" :

I assume that if this were to be adopted in such numbers, either some scalability things would be added to bitcoin, or this or something like this would be transferred to some other more scalable blockchain, using something like hypercube chains or something like that. A program running using a system like this would be fine using just one of the subchains, and the people using it would mostly only have to keep track of that subchain (and I guess the chain that ties the subchains together), so because more subchains can be added whenever they are needed, the size of the subchain being used would presumably not grow at unacceptable rates.

notes:

I do not own any bitcoin. The only cryptocurrency I own any of is testnet ether, which is for a testnet. Additionally I have not made any wagers about the success of any cryptography technologies, and am not employed in any cryptography related field. I don't think I have any financial incentives to promote any particular view about any given cryptography technology.

You are correct about using stored work to pay for other compute being interesting. I believe this is actually the nature of reality, not just some new fangled thing we're getting around to 'inventing'. I will note this is an opinion of a futurist, so it is what it is.

At the least, compute federation is enabled with cryptocurrencies. They give you a way to pay for use (payments), identify with them (identity managment) and a way to standardize the use of the compute (immutable data structures).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bmbi5/mits_bitcoi...

The 100x multiple is to the cost of normal computation. Normal, unsecured, visible to your hosting provider, etc, computation. Companies already pay huge amounts for securing computation so a pure mathematical way to do it that's only 100 times the base cost of the CPU time is actually a huge savings to many.

You don't have to run your whole webserver this way, just the payment processing pieces...

2) What will happen is pure guessing because it depends on the hidden motives of others via market (and other) dynamics.

But the options are roughly,

A) The bitcoin blockchain remains at today's general capacity. In this case the price per blockchain/byte will increase and people will use side-chains and "link" them back in as they feel appropriate. You will have the option of downloading sidechains you care about.

B) The bitcoin users decide on one of the proposals to increase the blockchain capacity dramatically - and all of these offer some form of prunability so you don't need to hold the GBs of stuff you don't care about in order to strongly verify the things you do care about (like the balance of someone who's paying you)...

C) Some other currency which solves these things really is the "one".

But these questions didn't need asking. They're needlessly critical - as if technologies should (or even could) all be invented at greater than 100% ROI just out of thin air, and as if market dynamics wouldn't handle things anyway. If this solution is too expensive, nobody will use it. There are no externalities involved here, nobody is getting a free lunch; they'll only pay for it if it helps them overall.