4 ms·
It is impossible to create a "useful" PoW. The issue comes down to incentives. As bitcoin is a decentralized, trust-less system, there needs to be constant and
by lalaland1125 9y ago
It is impossible to create a "useful" PoW. The issue comes down to incentives. As bitcoin is a decentralized, trust-less system, there needs to be constant and powerful incentives to prevent miners from cheating (by creating forks, or executing any number of other attacks).
The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their block thrown out. However, with a useful PoW, this calculus changes. Now, the PoW is no longer "wasted" when the miner cheats and gets caught as the PoW is now useful for something besides mining. This means that attacks are much cheaper and much more likely to happen.
One interesting part about this is that you can consider PoW usefulness on a sliding scale. The more useful the PoW, the more vulnerable your coin is to attack. Thus, you can probably get away with a "useful" PoW if it isn't actually very useful. This is one of the reasons why most "useful" PoW schemes focus on something which is pretty much useless (such as finding weird primes and whatnot).
- whatshisface 9y agoIn that case, you'd want everybody running profitless basic research scientific computations for other people's research teams. Eventually we may be able to buy cloud compute by inventing a new coin with a proof of work useful only to us, buying some Etherium to back it with (so that there's some initial value to mining it), and then letting speculators put it in there currency baskets to give it long-term value.
- alphydan 9y ago> profitless basic research May not scale in 20 years. Useless research can become very valuable in a decade or two.
- whatshisface 9y agoThat's true, but nobody would be able to bet on it being useful specifically to them. (I'm thinking about simulating LHC stuff, searching astronomical data, the sorts of things where at the time of computation nobody has a clue who will end up benefiting. Protein folding might be off-limits depending on who wants to know how it folds, and why.)
- yorwba 9y ago> The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their block thrown out. However, with a useful PoW, this calculus changes. Now, the PoW is no longer "wasted" when the miner cheats and gets caught as the PoW is now useful for something besides mining. So you spend $x on (compute time + electricity) to mine a useful PoW worth $y outside the blockchain and an additional mining reward of $z. If you cheat, you don't get to collect the $z reward. Although your original $x are not completely wasted, you still only have $y instead of the $y + $z you could have had. How is that not incentive enough?
- beaner 9y ago$y + $z must be greater than $x. If $y is money and $z is scientific contributions... $y is most likely not something people are offering money for. So in an open market its value is at or near $0. So $z by itself must exceed $x. To not care about the $z, $y must exceed $x by itself and that seems really unlikely for the types of things that OP suggested instead of proof-of-work.
- mygo 9y ago>If $y is money ... $y is most likely not something people are offering money for. scrathes head
- maldeh 9y agoIf $y is the useful PoW, would that not make $y the scientific reward while $z is the (monetary) token reward by way of mining? Edit: silly question on my part. y and z should be trivially interchangeable. Your argument appears to rest on the idea that the monetizeable scientific worth of the work would dominate the worth of the crypto token itself, since there would be limited value in an already-mined result beyond standard blockchain speculation - is that the case?
- jiggunjer 9y agoOne could structure it such that a single PoW is useless, yet multiple aren't? Like pieces of a puzzle that only make sense once you collect many of them.
- hellbanner 9y agoHow about folding @ home? https://curecoin.net/ https://curecoin.net/
- jandrese 9y agoSeems like it would be perfect for SETI.