Topic: Hashes (pool shares) as micropayments? (Read 1032 times)

Thank you   

I think it's very important now to come up with some new protocol for enrypted communication. It becomes more and more obvious with each day, just read the news (today two encrypted mail providers closed down due to problems with US authorities). It should be some community effort which will produce a thing appealing to general user not only to crypto geeks. It can be Bitmessage, personally I don't like that it doesn't store messages and spam problem is resolved through direct using of PoW, which makes communication slow. The real alternative to email should have its properties such as constant access to sent and received  messages. Pure instant chat communication won't cut it I fear. So, ideally, it should be a protocol having ability to replace SMTP and POP, being decentralized and encrypted on the low level.

To store messages you need storage capacity, and probably you'll have to pay for it. That's where micropayments come into play.

Tradeaway sure has a lot of pretty interesting (in a good way) ideas.

with altcoins it's feasible to generate about 1 cent a day, for some services you don't need to pay more actually (say file hosting)
Also that's right it doesn't matter how much a user pays for electricity and so on, what matters is he's able to pay without money actually. He doesn't need anything to pay but his PC.

And from general point of view - computing power which home pc provides SHOULD be able to produce several cents per day, several dollars per month
(for example take the price for cloud hosting which is based on CPU usage). So there SHOULD be a way to use this as micropayments. It MIGHT be that straightforward bitcoin mining is not optimal. But there can be something else, let's think altcoins or even special coin for this. The benefits are very obvious.

It takes about half and hour to find a share on a CPU. There is absolutely no revenue that can be made this way by the site owner.

Users will notice that their computer slows down, makes noise and heats up, and the smarter ones will realize power is being consumed. This will drive away all the profitable users, all in the name of "sticking it" to the adblock users and making a millionth of a cent off them.

Profitable mining reqires ASICs, mining itself can be (still) be done easily on general purpose CPUs. Depending on the actual purpose, mining shares might actually be "useful".

Think for example about my fictional website that will disable ads for the next link you click if you submit a valid share. You have a small "account" that can be filled up to a certain limit with "clicks" that you gain via mining. That's ~60 Satoshis per click at diff-1 at the moment. Not a lot but still maybe more than one could get from an adblock user + you can do some interesting things with your website "currency" maybe.

Bitcoin mining requires ASIC devices which a typical user does not have. With a CPU it will take days to generate a single cent (consuming orders of magnitude more than that in electricity). For scrypt-based alts it's better, but not by much.

As soon as it is not JavaScript there is a lot of hassle involved to get users to execute your code/miner. Also I didn't really want to build a whole infrastructure etc. out of nothing.

I still like(d) the idea though, it's just something that I'm not actively pursuing atm. so that's why I posted it, so maybe someone else takes it on.

Edit:
One has to mention by the way, that these systems are NOT trustless. One can minimize the damage by requesting feedback/benefits asap after submitting a share, all in all the person handing you the shares though is someone you need to trust to fulfill a promise.

 Great! why did you ditch the idea?
seems legit

>2 years ago: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/idea-use-mining-shares-instead-of-bitcoins-as-micropayments-19984

Also it can be used to combat spam problem in protocols analogous to Bitmessage - instead of an abstract PoW a client can carry out mining computaions with the  recepient address as the block progenitor address,  so the message recipient in fact gets paid for accepting messages.

working on this https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blockchain-dht-secure-email-like-messaging-247678 some question surfaced, I find this idea worth contemplating.
It seems possible to use solved shares of a pool as a form for micropayment.  For example, let us imagine a file host, to simplify let's suppose that
it just charges a payment for uploaded file. With storage being very cheap these days the payment should be very small. It can be paid through bitcoin. But let's suppose that a user has no idea what bitcoin is. Why can't he just solve a bunch of hashes and send a solved share to the file host?
the file host, in turn, has a bitcoin pool server functionality, and uses the received share to mine a block (not only bitcoin, if altcurrencies are more profitable). This way we let the user forget totally about  payments systems, he just swaps his home pc computing power for a certain service. Naturally we're talking about micropayments, of order of magnitude of 1 cent. The mining functionality can be integrated in the download/upload client (dropbox-like)

Also it can be used for many other services, including simple web-browsing, as a replacement to banner or context ads. Webmaster puts an applet to his website, client launches it, and sends some hashes to the webmaster. In return he can access his content.
Seems to be a viable micropayment solution. The only obvious drawback is the small amount of payments, naturally a home PC can't mine a lot.