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> Confirm what security though? For PoW, the important property seems to be that there's no shortcut to doing the hard work e.g. I could ask you to sum all the
by seanwilson 6y ago
> Confirm what security though?
For PoW, the important property seems to be that there's no shortcut to doing the hard work e.g. I could ask you to sum all the numbers from 1 to N for a very high number of N to prove you've done some work, but the flaw there is that a shortcut exists where where you only have to calculate (n(n+1))/2 to get the final answer in a fraction of the time.
> significant amount of complexity is very much needful
I think you're using the word complexity in a different way to the way I was using it. I'm guessing you probably mean "is difficult to calculate the result without taking a shortcut" and not "is conceptually simple to understand and analyse for flaws by a human". Ideally, you want both to be true but that won't be the case for all PoW processes.
- a1369209993 6y ago> that there's no shortcut to doing the hard work Yes, and current proof-of-work schemes allow shortcuts to avoid doing at least the intruction-dispatch portion of said work, by using a GPU or ASIC that shares dispatch work across multiple proofs in parallel. > complexity I meant the latter type ("is difficult to understand or analyse") actually. That is to say, I suspect that trying to achieve the former will necessarily result in the latter, although it would of course be nice if it didn't.