7 ms·
If bitcoin used a facet of primality in its Proof-of-Work, that would nearly needlessly gloating. But it doesn't, and unfortunately even worse, it wasn't ASIC-
by Jerrrrrrry 2y ago
If bitcoin used a facet of primality in its Proof-of-Work, that would nearly needlessly gloating.
But it doesn't, and unfortunately even worse, it wasn't ASIC-resistant, which had second-order effects that Intel could had actually taken advantage of if they werent sleeping from being too comfortable.
- freeqaz 2y agoIs there a good POW mechanism that would test primes? I found this but curious what else exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoThats it (afaik), and it could be for the usual, dismissive reasons, but its easy to hand-waive the "make primality a part of the work" part but it also comes down to the properties of the work that require it to be useful: the difficulty of the work must be adjustable, the difficulty/reward ratio must scale to the polynomial of users/work-rate to avoid sybil/"51% (31%)" attacks, and dissuade volatility during transitions must be easily verifiable, Primecoin uses Cunningham Chain primes - basically sequences of primes where 2x+1 is prime. They are marginally useful with other applications on the horizon. I could see adjusting the arbitrary rule-set - similar to the varying rulesets of cellular automata, like Conways - to further Number Theory/Game Theory/Swarm Economics at a general interdisciplinary level to be the most potentially rewarding, covering a larger swath of unknown unknowns.
- aphantastic 2y agoMy favorite “Practical POW” remains komoglorav complexity computation. The reward would likely scale with the runtime needed to verify a complexity, but there’s plenty of room for subtleties in the implementation. (for instance what happens when you prove a prior established complexity wrong?)
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago>(for instance what happens when you prove a prior established complexity wrong?) what do you mean? you run their wallets, pun intended! No stakes, no steaks! But it does seem interesting - counterintuitive really, but a "Busy Beaver" / proof of work verifying mechanism enumerating inputs/instructions/outputs randomly (or whatever the nodes think they know best at ) while rewarding (only? why not top 3?) the shortest, most efficient block...could be tweaked to crunch ETH contracts like gas, brute-force fuzz-test legacy unsafe sourcecode...literally a foundation for further distributed computation. There are languages like it - Dennis and his Bubblegum - that have generative, selective, and compressive patterns interned already. https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bubblegum https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bubblegum
- tromp 2y agoYou forgot one important property: it must commit to the new block(header).
- tromp 2y agoThere's also https://gapcoin.org/ https://gapcoin.org/ for searching prime number gaps (mine the gap).
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoI knew I forgot something, thank you! 10 years!
- tromp 2y agoThere's also https://riecoin.xyz/ https://riecoin.xyz/ searching prime constellations.
- dgacmu 2y agoPrimecoin (Cunningham chains) Gapcoin (finding large gaps between successive primes) Riecoin (finding maximally dense prime clusters of size 6) Nexus (finding almost-dense clusters with a maximum spacing between successive primes) As an aside, picking a mathematically interesting and intricate proof of work function is probably a bad idea, because someone like me will come along and optimize the miner and mine privately at a large profit margin, as I did with two of these coins.
- einpoklum 2y agoDon't forget: Primemarkcoin Perceptiongapcoin Liecoin epiplexiscoin and of course, the every useful pyramidcoin and scamcoin.
- zeven7 2y agoThis reminded me that I used to leave my computer running Folding@home or similar projects around 2010-2011. Not sure if it ever contributed to anything. If only I had known to run a Bitcoin miner instead!
- tirant 2y agoBack in 2009-2010 I was responsible for deploying 8-16 core servers to customers to run large databases and ERPs. I had the idea of doing some burn in testing to stress the components for around a week for each server. Back then I was aware of bitcoin but also SETI@home. Obviously I chose the second option as I believed it was probable my a better choice for humans kind. It obviously was, but bitcoin mining would have been a better one for me.
- omgwtfbyobbq 2y agoI remember some rough calculations suggested I needed to upgrade from agp to pcie to make bitcoin mining worth it financially. I went with boinc instead.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoMaxim 19: The world is richer when you turn enemies into friends, but that's not the same as you being richer.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
- shawnz 2y agoThe work in a PoW algorithm has to be otherwise useless in order for it to most effectively deter abuse, or else you'd still be able to get value out of failed attack attempts
- loup-vaillant 2y agoWhat second order effect are you referring to? Stuff like manufacturing, or fab availability perhaps?