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Actually there is a proof of work concept. You have to compute a partial hash collision that is proportional to the size of the message you want to send. The re
by jbackus 13y ago
Actually there is a proof of work concept. You have to compute a partial hash collision that is proportional to the size of the message you want to send. The reason Bitcoin clients hold the full blockchain is to acheive distribution and so that wallet balances can be computed by walking over the entire chain and summing. Bitmessage only needs the distributed aspect so its partial streams are good enough and less expensive for a user to get started.
- kaoD 13y agoI'm aware of BM's POW but it's in no way related to Bitcoin's use of it. Bitmessage's POW is not a way to reach consensus about a chain of events. POW as a means to limit email spam messages was already proposed with Hashcash in 1997. BM just added a P2P distributed message database to provide decentralization. The POW was no breakthrough from Bitcoin either: IMO Bitcoin's core concept (and the real genius) is the distributed agreement protocol, which is nowhere found in Bitmessage. That's what I meant with "POW as an agreement protocol", not just "POW", and why I think Bitmessage does not really benefit from Bitcoin's protocol.