Topic: Brand new kind virtual currency - CAPTCHA coin (Read 7544 times)

Yes, that's the way to go... Satoshi feared megapools, BotNets, clusters, etc = Coin Rapers.

Right now in pre-release there is Hunter Coin which relies on a virtual game space...
And GridCoin which has blocks ranging from 5-175...
Only people running BOINC (integrated with the GridCoin wallet) qualify for the big blocks.

These will be interesting to watch...
Also, the first coin to link a security fob/USB to miner/pc will be non-human-resistant.

https://www.google.ca/search?q=security+fob&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=RoFgUrCxIeTh4APVvYHwAg&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1160&bih=889&dpr=1

Check out http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

So far is has been working pretty well and is surprisingly popular. It does not need powerful expensive machines even, a Raspberry Pi or a Beaglebone could do it nicely...

-MarkM-

This entire discussion is predicated on the Bitcoin Mentality...
That every PC in the fucking world, friendly or malicious...
Is ENTITLED to a connection, ENTITLED to mine, ENTITLED to manipulate.

That will change... there should be at least 2 levels of entitlement:

(1)  Using the wallet = everyone.

(2)  Mining and rewards = some rules apply

There are now 100s of different security devices at trivial cost...
One can use human input + security devices anonymously to enforce #2...
This is all coming, but people have Bitcoin Blinders on.

They are botpools, they have multiple connections, so submission rate limits aren't going to work.
You can't dump anyone who gives a wrong answer, humans frequently fail captcha, and even if you do dump one bot, they can just cycle to a new connection.
The only human element required would be creating new accounts and feeding those details into the botpools.
Even ignoring the answering aspect, the first botpool could create captchas, and feed them in through multiple accounts, far faster than any human could, and just take that part of the payout. The moment your network started, 90%+ of the captchas could be computer generated, in which case the second botpool is almost guaranteed to get a captcha it already knows the answer for.
The system would fail because the human verification step would be orders of magnitude too slow.
To make it work, you would have to make that verification step the key point.
(Although at that point, botpool 3 would step in and do verifications for all those captchas it already knows the answer for)

This can be avoided easily:
1) to submit and answer captchas you need to register and the submission rate is limited
2) coins could vest and if malicious activity is found out then all non-vested coins get confiscated
3) when miner 2 gives a wrong answer the verifiers mark him as untrusted

If every mining rig was using renewable energy ... that is renewable energy that could be used for something else instead, reducing the use of non-renewable energy. The energy wastage is the same either way, as long as there is some other way of using the renewable energy.

1) Botpool 1 generates a huge number of captchas and submits them to the pool server
1a) It also passes all of the generated images and solutions to botpool 2
2) Botpool 2 repeatedly requests captchas from the pool server. If the image matches one it already has from botpool 1, it submits the correct answer, otherwise it just burns it and requests the next.
3) Some poor sods have the job of verifying all this bot generated work for almost no reward

Computers could generate and match these images so fast that no human actors could possibly compete.

I just sort of feel that this is huge waste of human time - which is probably more valuable than any currency. I admit Bitcoin is a colossal waste of electricity - but at least the network can be upheld by machines without a lot of human intervention. (If every mining rig was using renewable energy though - it would be amazing!)

But using my most precious resource - time - as a POS/POW in a cryptocurrency is not going to fly with anyone but slaves/prisoners, or maybe dirt-poor countries where it's a good hourly...

If it were gamified somehow - then you've got an idea. Make it sudoku puzzles or word scrambles. Or why not just make the currency contribute BOINC-style (but with humans) to proof-reading scanned OCR books?

miner ONE submits to the network, he doesn't know who gets this catpcha later.
miner TWO is randomly selected and the protocol doesn't allow it to be the same miner who created the captcha.
The captcha for solving is also randomly selected from a long queue of previously submitted captchas. That means that not every miner who creates a captcha gets a reward, if his captcha will not ever be selected. Its like currently not every miner solves the block. Basically, the more captchas you create the bigger chances you get for your captcha to be selected.

if miner ONE systematically broadcasts his answers he makes the coin worthless, its like currently the pools avoid getting too big, coz they want the coin to be strong. Also, some monitoring can be done by people and if they find malicious activity they get all of the malicious user rewards.

and if only few coins are created with cheating that doesn't stop the system from functioning as the transactions get signed by other p2p nodes, its like in real life some fake money do not mean much

Looks interesting . Watching .

but if miner ONE posts the captcha he just made to a forum, so miner TWO can find it and solve it effortlessly, then modified clients could do this broadcasting of solutions and later submission of answers in an automated way. Notice that these bots do not solve the captcha, they don't need to know how to solve it, just publish and resubmit the solutions. Miner ONE and TWO are the same person, or miner ONE gives the answer to miner TWO for a small % of the $.
One of the strengths of the bitcoin protocol is that an 'evil' modified client (node) has no way to cheat.

One of the "aims" of Chronokings is for it to be Human Mineable .

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-chrono-kings-a-gameworld-within-the-block-chain-262599

although, maybe eventually, it will be bots against bots ..

I would prefer it to be game coin, play games, kill boss and get coin.

People don't seem to get it...
That if you can make humans solve boring CAPTCHAs to mine...
Well, you can replace that with ANY human computer activity...
The whole idea would be to make it an interesting human activity...
One chess move, one poker hand, interaction with a virtual world, etc...

Why does "mining" have to be 100% auto-pilot experience best done by clusters and botnets...
Because Devs are too lazy to break out of the Bitcoin Mindset.

As for primes, women are hot for primes... check out Girls Gone Prime.

This seems terrible. Isn't this like Primecoin? But instead of the scientific output being mathematically interesting prime number chains, the output is millions of solved CAPTCHAs for spammers to post Viagra links on Wordpress blogs?

The following design is possible:

1) miner ONE (human) makes a captcha and the client app submits it to a pool server
2) miner TWO (human) gets a random captcha from a pool server and submits back the answer
3) random p2p clients (human) get both the original captcha and the answer and verify that the answer is correct

4) if the answer is correct a block is created and miners ONE and TWO get a reward
5) p2p clients also get a small reward but for just verifying (kinda transaction processing), regardless of whether the answer was correct and their intention is to keep the blockchain healthy as only then their earnings make sense

* depending on how many p2p clients verify the answer the number of confirmations limits the coin supply processing speed and security
* pool server is a p2p node in the network
* a captcha can be anything, no software will understand it

the coin should be called HumanCoin

You are missing the point. How would you generate the capthas? The clients or the pool owners need to know the answer in order to generate the captchas. So they could cheat, and tell the answer to a friend and earn $ for nothing.

The problem is not the bots (at least not only the bots). Imagine there was a perfect captcha, with images, sounds, or whatever, that only humans could solve. Who would generate the challenges and then verify the responses?

Are you conflating initial distribution of your currency with the ongoing and very not-profitable business of securing your currency?

Remember that mining is ultimately a race to the bottom, it is, by design, the type of business in which profit will be almost non-existent because if you try to remove something to take as profit you are crippling your own ability to compete with competitors who don't need as much profit or who have cheaper labour/power or whatever.

So first off, totalyl separate the matter of securing the blockchain from the matter of who gets how many of the currency in the first place.

You want something like ASIC for securing the coin, because securing the coin is damn close to zero profit, the only reason there are any transaction fees at all are not so that there will be profit to lure people into mining but more so that there will be a budget out of which people can try to secure the damn coin hopefully without so much parasitical freeloading, also known as profit-taking, that the parasites take so mcuh as what they consider their "entitlement" of "profit" that there is nothing left to actually secure the damn coin.

Mining is not meant to be profitable, it is meant to be feasible, that is, people who can get really good prices on power and parts and support and bandwidth should be able to "afford" to mine, hopefully without having to skip any meals to keep the miners running.

So just totally forget about mining as a source of income for anyone. Focus on who do the coins created originally get given out to originally.

For one thing you can then hopefully see that it would be better to give out actual bitcoins than to make up some new coin, because some new coin is less likely to have enough transaction fees going on to finance the securing of the blockchain. SO ideally you want a coin that, like bitcoin, already has lots of transactions going on, so that there is some hope that securing the chain can be doing not by giving way new coins created out of thin air but, rather, by people who want transactions done paying to have their transactions processed.

Giving away money is a totally separate concern. It should be none of the miners business who you give away your money to, who ever wants to give money to someone should simply pay their transaction fee like anyone else to have some of their money be transferred to someone else.

Maybe you would be best off using Ripple source code instead of Bitcoin as your basis to build from, because with RIpple type approach you do not have that insanely huge expense involved in securing your currency. YOu can simply print a hundred billion coins and give them away to anyone you wish, whether by having them solve captchas or give you blowjobs or however else you'd like to choose who to give the stuff to.

-MarkM-

There are a couple of opensource or free captcha implementations. You can embed it into the client or you can use it on the "pool" servers. The only issue with the second solution is the relative centralized nature as you need the captcha servers to keep the coin working. Writing a distributed solution where everything included in the client would be a lot of work but it could work well.

May be you are right, may be they will make bot for CAPTCHAs, no matter how well protected they are.
If CPU=shares, so the rich can buy thousand of CPU, so this is not a solution.
We must think about "human work = shares".
The CAPTCHA is the best way for now to distinguish human from machine, but it is still not reliable enough.
I have not other idea for the moment.