4 ms·

I would argue against the PoW having to be wasteful. It has to be difficult (in terms of compute power and time) but not wasteful. I'm not affiliated in any way

by tzumby 7y ago

I would argue against the PoW having to be wasteful. It has to be difficult (in terms of compute power and time) but not wasteful. I'm not affiliated in any way with this, but there is one project that uses PoW to search for large primes.

garmaine 7y ago
Which only works because there those primes have no economic value. The issue is economic, not technical. If I can sell the “useful” side effect of mining, then I can subsidize any attack I perform. The actual security of the network is only the work that has non-reimburseable costs.
- tzumby 7y ago
  Agreed, the issue is economic. That's one of the things that I find fascinating about Byzantine Fault Tolerant state machine replication. You can view cryptocurrencies as a method of payment for the economic incentive of playing fair. I think the big story here is that we can have a BFT distributed consensus! Also, I think those large primes do have economic value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_known_prime_number#Prizes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_known_prime_number#Pri...). I'm not sure if that's the purpose of PrimeCoin or who would get the prize, but they nonetheless have some economic value.
- Double_a_92 7y ago
  It could work if you can't decide who the benefited person is. I.e. solving problems out of a random pool of them or so.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    Do people pay for their problems to be solved in such a way? As long as I can translate PoW into cash, it stops providing benefit as PoW.
    - drdeca 7y ago
      The important things are that: a) it is economically rational to mine on the correct chain b) there are substantial economic net costs to mining on a wrong fork of the chain (and these are high enough that it is prohibitively expensive to mount an attack which would fool people as to what chain is correct) Right?
- koheripbal 7y ago
  It doesnt matter. As long as the value is Equal for everyone, it doesn't benefit that specific miner more than everyone else who didnt mine, then it still works because everyone has the same incentive and same immediate benefit. Finding primes aren't a great example. ... but unfortunately, they are the best example we have so far.
trevelyan 7y ago
It actually has to be costly, not difficult. And not wasteful. To see this, note that all POW and POS chains have "difficulty" functions that are actually just cost functions in external markets (hashpower or capital). What secures the difficulty of the attack in all casds is the supply curve of some block production factor in an external market.

by tzumby 7y ago

garmaine 7y ago

Which only works because there those primes have no economic value. The issue is economic, not technical. If I can sell the “useful” side effect of mining, then I can subsidize any attack I perform. The actual security of the network is only the work that has non-reimburseable costs.

tzumby 7y ago
Agreed, the issue is economic. That's one of the things that I find fascinating about Byzantine Fault Tolerant state machine replication. You can view cryptocurrencies as a method of payment for the economic incentive of playing fair. I think the big story here is that we can have a BFT distributed consensus! Also, I think those large primes do have economic value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_known_prime_number#Prizes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_known_prime_number#Pri...). I'm not sure if that's the purpose of PrimeCoin or who would get the prize, but they nonetheless have some economic value.
Double_a_92 7y ago
It could work if you can't decide who the benefited person is. I.e. solving problems out of a random pool of them or so.
- garmaine 7y ago
  Do people pay for their problems to be solved in such a way? As long as I can translate PoW into cash, it stops providing benefit as PoW.
  - drdeca 7y ago
    The important things are that: a) it is economically rational to mine on the correct chain b) there are substantial economic net costs to mining on a wrong fork of the chain (and these are high enough that it is prohibitively expensive to mount an attack which would fool people as to what chain is correct) Right?
koheripbal 7y ago
It doesnt matter. As long as the value is Equal for everyone, it doesn't benefit that specific miner more than everyone else who didnt mine, then it still works because everyone has the same incentive and same immediate benefit. Finding primes aren't a great example. ... but unfortunately, they are the best example we have so far.

trevelyan 7y ago

It actually has to be costly, not difficult. And not wasteful. To see this, note that all POW and POS chains have "difficulty" functions that are actually just cost functions in external markets (hashpower or capital). What secures the difficulty of the attack in all casds is the supply curve of some block production factor in an external market.