@gnasirator: your ideas are interesting, but to create a block you will still need to solve some kind of "problem", otherwise you would have a lot of blocks created together and no way to tell which one to keep. Also every time a transaction is made, the nodes would generate a block, making too many of them.
Interesting ideas indeed, but wrong solution to the problems, which are, as Gnasirator says:
1 Energy consumption
2 Poor distribution
The best solution which I have discovered so far appears to be
Proof of Capacity, as implemented in
Burstcoin.
I'd be genuinely interested to know what you think of that protocol, and whether or not it may be technically feasible to incorporate it into a mini-blockchain coin.
Hmm, PoC is interesting, too. But it fails to address the problem I'm trying to solve:
Whatever scarce resource we take for mining, sooner or later there will be one entity having most of it and therefore dominating the whole mining scene. PoC will lead to someone having MASSIVE datacenters full of old-fashioned mechanical hard drives - well at least it wouldn't use as much energy as PoW.
PoS is the same - whoever has the biggest share of money at one point generates most income. It's actually even worse because the rewards are completely independent of any contribution to the network (transaction processing).
My point was that instead of searching for a better scarce resource, we should take the incentive away which is leading to this concentration of resources in the first place, by changing the reward system. As long as there are rewards encouraging people to somehow get more of a share than others, there will be someone figuring out a way how to do it.
So instead, the new reward system would have to pay all participants in a predictable way based on
useful contribution to the network. And the only actually useful contribution to the network is processing of new transactions, managing account databases and maybe acting as a block explorer - all of which doesn't use much resources at all. That's what it's about and that's what should be rewarded. So whoever helps with that processing, gets a reward proportional to created value in the network. And that proportion could just as well be the same number as every other participant gets, because just by being online and forwarding/processing transactions, he's helping the network.
This way, there will be no incentive for anyone to throw more resources into the game because
there's nothing to gain for him - just as there wouldn't be any benefit for the network! Still, he would have an incentive to stay online and contribute because otherwise, he'll get nothing. This sort of mining should easily run in the background, using 1-2% of cpu time max. Same goes for network usage because there would suddenly be a lot more miners as there are now, simply because it has suddenly become
cheap to run a miner. This would allow the network to grow and make the coin actually useable as real money.
I'm convinced that whichever coin ends up being "the one coin" for everybody to use, it would have to use a mining approach that somewhat resembles these ideas.
There is one downside to this approach though:
It wouldn't be possible any more to jump at a fresh alt coin and generate some quick buck with your high-spec mining gear. But for that, we have plenty of regular coins out there
edit: I might add that a hybrid PoS / Proof-of-Contribution (above) might also be good. I do like the idea of stakeholders being vested in the currency and therefore trying to keep harm from the system.
