7 ms·
Time, Randomness, and a $100k Prize to Forever Change Blockchain
- devwastaken 7y agoWouldn't this simply be a matter of designing hardware that does these operations on chip as a software accessible operation?
- wmf 7y agoIt sounds like that part is already done; now they're optimizing the hardware design.
- RKearney 7y agoFrom the linked article: > The primary infrastructure for the contest will be Amazon EC2 F1 instances So no, you need to design it on the F1 FPGA instance.
- justindrake 7y agoThe ultimate goal is indeed to build an ultra-fast ASIC. There's a $1M ASIC circuit competition planned for for 2020. This $100K FPGA competition is a "warm up" to the ASIC competition. A bit more information here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-77V1IareQ&feature=youtu.be&t=914 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-77V1IareQ&feature=youtu.be...
- cestith 7y agoIt's a matter of programming an FPGA to be faster than anyone else's FPGA when handed the task from software. So technically, yes, it's simply a matter of designing hardware. The part that's not so simple is designing hardware given the same FPGA as every other competitor and making it faster than all of them while returning only correct answers.
- Supranational 7y agoHey All! We're one of the sponsors of this competition. Please let us know if you have any questions!
- mpreda 7y agoWhat is the algorithm for verifying the VDF output? Specifically, I compute y = x^(2^N) mod M using N modular squarings, how do you verify the result?
- justindrake 7y agoOne efficient verification scheme is by Benjamin Wesolowski (see academic paper [here](https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623.pdf) https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623.pdf)). The scheme is surprisingly simple and fits on just one slide. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI&feature=youtu.be&t=652 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI&feature=youtu.be...
- narush 7y agoHead's up -- your link is broken. I don't think markdown is supported :)
- gchamonlive 7y ago> https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623.pdf
- Veedrac 7y agoHave you considered the impact of superconducting circuitry? They're very niche and few people have heard of them, but they're not science fiction[1] and have a significant speed advantage. [1] https://www.hypres.com/ https://www.hypres.com/ seems to sell them
- marknadal 7y agoDoesn't this assume that Blockchains are useful?
- rolltiide 7y agoIt is sponsored by organizations that have utility for blockchains and believe it can have utility for others
- ForHackernews 7y ago...well, Amazon just likes selling shovels to miners...
- rolltiide 7y agoI'm not sure I really understand that happening in this case, the contest seems to want people to create new hardware, so this wouldn't use Amazon infrastructure. It is a partial subsidy to the winner. So they aren't really selling shovels they're paying people to develop better shovels.
- wmf 7y agoAmazon wants people to create bitstreams that run on FPGAs rented from Amazon. They're paying people to develop more demand for their shovels.
- zaroth 7y agoIf it is embarrassingly parallelizable, then why would the total amount of energy (megawatts) invested in running the function not grow until it equals the economic value of the outputs, regardless of the particulars of the algorithm. And if it's not embarrassingly parallelizable, first, tell me why, and second, what's all this business about optimizing the algorithm in the first place?
- zodiac 7y agoThe computation described (compute x^(2^t) mod N) is designed to not be parallelizable.
- zaroth 7y agoInteresting... so let's assume everyone can compute it in about the same amount of time, how does the "lottery" work? OK, I found this fairly informative [1]. It's designed to be an entropy source feeding into a proof-of-stake algorithm. If you can't run it "that much" faster than everyone else, it's more likely your result is not manipulated to steer an unfair portion of the block reward your way. I haven't read much about any of this. The point that seems to stick out most is the idea that "everyone" submits some amount of data, versus just the first to reach the difficulty target submitting. Once you have that concept, then you need time gates to control how quickly the rounds happen, and VDF can be used to dictate the clock rate. A conceptual piece I must still be missing is how all the submissions are aggregated, and why many/most can't just be ignored. Ah, fucking blockchain catnip. [1] - https://ethresear.ch/t/verifiable-delay-functions-and-attacks/2365 https://ethresear.ch/t/verifiable-delay-functions-and-attack...
- justindrake 7y agoELI5 version: 100 people, one by one, (re)roll dice placed in a dark room. After the last person lights turn on, revealing a fair random number. The Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) ensures lights aren't turned on early. For a video explanation of the randomness mechanism see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI&feature=youtu.be
- brighton36 7y agoWho at amazon promoted this, and does management know that this person is promoting their investment in ethereum, using the company brand and resources...
- drexlspivey 7y agoAmazon already invested in Ethereum https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/ https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/
- kanzure 7y agoI recently typed a transcript of a talk about verifiable delay functions: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/verifiable-delay-functions/vdf-day-2019/dan-boneh/ http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/verifiable-delay-functions...
- nnnnn11111 7y agoIf there’s a reward for computing a VDF faster than everyone else, why won’t the amount of wasted resources, in the the form of e.g. human capital dedicated to computing faster VDFs, not be equivalent to the economic waste if the verification scheme used is proof of work? The article claims that proof of work is costing Ethereum hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but this VDF competition is also wasting millions of dollars in human capital to compute a fast VDF before there’s even a running blockchain using it (ie before there’s even a real non-synthetic incentive to break the system). Given that we need millions of dollars of waste just to launch the system safely, why wouldn’t we expect the wasted human capital dedicated to computing faster vdfs to increase to hundreds of millions once an actual attackable system is out in the wild, same as proof of work. Moreover, it seems very unclear that wasting human capital is less economically bad than wasting the same “valu” in raw energy, particularly if a lot of that energy is from renewable sources anyway.
- H8crilA 7y agoWell, it does not create CO2, for starters. Also several million is less than several hundred million. By 100x
- nnnnn11111 7y agoBut it’s several million just to get it started. If the reward for pulling off an attack is the same as in proof of work systems, why wouldn’t the waste wind up equaling the reward (ie hundreds of millions in waste if it’s used to secure something like Ethereum or Bitcoin)?
- H8crilA 7y agoPossibly. But the CO2 is the big deal. I don't have much issue with "stake"-based mining, i.e. if it's just burning abstract money, instead of burning physical commodities.
- nnnnn11111 7y ago
- ForHackernews 7y agoReally pleased to finally see a possible alternative to the atrociously wasteful proof-of-work algorithms. Here's hoping bitcoin will switch, too.
- ghostpepper 7y agoCan someone explain why proof-of-stake is not inherently monopolistic? It seems like a system where the more of a currency you possess, the more you can obtain, which is obviously unstable, right?
- shagbag 7y agoYou could say the same about any interest or income producing asset. USD, real estate, etc.
- api 7y agoI think there may be a difference of degree here. Combine an interest based monetary system with a high rate of deflation and you will have the fastest most boring game of Monopoly ever.
- narush 7y agoIn current Proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains, the more mining hardware you have, the more coins you get, and the more mining hardware you can buy. In this sense, the same exact monopolistic structure you mention exists in both PoW and Proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains. However, (PoS) is a lot less monopolistic than PoW for other reasons: 1. Massively reduced economies of scale. Pretty much all POW mining happens in mining farms for a reason: it's a lot cheaper, per unit of revenue, to move all your mining to one big warehouse. This makes it pretty much impossible for a normal person to contribute to PoW in any meaningful way -- good luck running a competitive mining farm out of your house. In PoS, however, 10x more coins will get you exactly 10x more rewards, and costs don't fall at all, leading to less economies of scale, and so less pressure towards a monopoly. 2. Ability for the protocol to apply punishments as well as rewards. In PoW, because the miners aren't tied to any address, there is no real mechanism for punishing them. In PoS, because the "mining power" (aka coins) is in the protocol, bad behavior can be punished. This has two benefits from the perspective of monopolistic market structure. First, it makes it so 51% attacks are costly in protocol. If evidence is shown that you 51% attacked, your coins can be "slashed," or taken away. Notably, in PoW, a 51% attack is free to the attacker if successful. Second, collective punishments can be applied to miners (validators in PoS language). This makes it so miners can be punished if they censor other miners -- again leading to less centralization/monopoly pressure. Please do disagree (or make me clarify) with anything that seems stupid/unclear/incorrect in the above. I'd love to engage more!
- devin 7y agoIf the solution could save hundreds of millions of dollars and is of import to Amazon, why would anyone give it away for 100k?
- mangodwango 7y agoBingo. The absurdity of this, let’s create something that by their own admission is worth hundreds of millions for a few thousand dollars and some street cred. Also, VDF is probably worth much more than that if it can be effectively done.
- wmf 7y agoVDFs could save hundreds of millions of dollars (this is exaggerated but let's roll with it) but they have already been invented. It's not clear how much a slightly faster implementation of their VDF is worth; maybe it's less than $100K. The Chia VDF contest had a few entries so this is not a crazy concept.
- iancoleman 7y agochia.net is also running VDF competitions with $100,000 prize. They recently announced the results for round 2. https://www.chia.net/2019/07/18/chia-vdf-competition-round-2-results-and-announcements.en.html https://www.chia.net/2019/07/18/chia-vdf-competition-round-2...
- aey 7y agoThis is rad. You can actually build a fairly secure vdf with a sequential hash function using intel’s sha256 instructions, and verify the output across all the available simd lanes.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]