Topic: Making PoW usefull - page 3. (Read 6578 times)

1. (See the following quote, noting my red colorization.)

2. Given that passports can be falsified, it would follow that any document representing something so trivial as “serving someone coffee” (ArcticMine) could be as well.

Money is not “a universal transmitter of value” (VectorChief) because it is not “universal[ly]” produced in accordance with the production of “value.”

If you consider money as a universal transmitter of value, which in turn is produced by all kinds of useful work, then you will understand that work that creates money in the first place needs to be neutral (useless). In other words, your jar needs to be empty to serve as a carrier for something of value. Usefulness changes over time as market conditions develop, neutrality of uselessness stays true to itself forever.

Asics, perhaps not.. yet.

But I have been thinking about something similar for all those GPU mining rigs people have stashed in their closets, I mean lets face it -- alt coins introduced a ton of GPU miners early last year.

That said, there is some potential here when you look at some Deep Learning java code, that *already* runs on GPUs... If the next few weeks permit, I might make fork a coin project locally to test how a split of work would be achievable. The main issue I see with this is extending one of the miner programs (cgminer,sgminer,etc) to achieve this double work (Where something like half of cycles run the deep learning code, the other half run the network)

For reference,
https://github.com/ivan-vasilev/neuralnetworks
https://github.com/SkymindIO/nd4j

There is a very important requirement here that is often overlooked. The purpose of proof of work is to enforce decentralization of the network. If the added value work that is performed can be equally performed in a centralized or decentralized fashion then doing useful work actually defeats the use of proof of work for blockchain security. Common examples that are used are distributed computing for example to solve medical problems. The trouble with this, is that this kind of computing can just as well be performed in a centralized location. If the work has value then this defeats the whole point of proof of work.

The idea is to find an application that only has value if it is performed in a decentralized way. In my example the use of electricity to produce heat is a very good example. This has value in a decentralized setting, and is in fact very useful, but it is completely useless and worthless in a centralized setting. Why? Because one can transport the electricity for thousands of km but not the heat.

To consider human work. Typing a document can be done anywhere in the world and the digital document can be transmitted electronically, so this would not work. On the other hand, serving someone coffee only has value if it is done in the presence of the person served. By its very nature this kind of work has to be performed in a decentralized fashion, and could in principle be used to make proof of work useful.

Rather than automate the process for proof of work, why not work on a way to verify actual human work done and credit virtual coins accordingly, like for example data entry jobs, people announce job offering on the blockchain and deposit x amount of coins to do x amount of work by anyone, workers then fetch the job file and start to organize the data on the blockchain, I can see right away that verification would be a pain and cheating would be possible, automation of course could be done giving technical people some edge, but then again that would be the fault of the job offerer for not automating the job himself, but it's just something to ponder about.

Please let us stay on topic which is making POW useful rather attempting to promote yet another alt-coin.

Are you looking for a variation on proof-of-work? As we established, most people aren't going to accept your value proposition as valid. (They're trying to turn the thermostat down---not up.)

Not for me

To the exclusion of transactions? (Remember, new coins are “minted” [i.e., generated via “out-of-block” coinbase transactions], not mined.)

It seemed to me that this would, for starters, favour whoever has the best worldwide Internet peering. This would lead to centralized control.

It takes about six seconds for transactions to fully propagate across these networks, so some will have different transactions in their blocks. The miner or miners that happens to have the right combination of transactions produces an acceptable Merkle root first. That and the lack of block rewards helps to keeps the system heterarchical.

So it is a POW coin after all?

To what do you object? There is still hashing. (That's how the Merkle roots are produced.)

No thanks.

... and the proposal is to replace POW with?

PoW is as useful as it is necessary. When PoW seems to be useless the question one should ask is, “Is it [the PoW schema] necessary?” The necessity of PoW, I have found, is directly proportionate to that of its coin. In light of this and the discussion here, it would follow that Bitcoin might not be necessary and that, because of that, its PoW is widely deemed unnecessary and, thus, “useless.”

Most electronics are not thrown out because they fail. They are thrown out because of planned obsolescence driven by propriety software and DRM. E-waste is one of the fastest growing environmental problems today. As for a "more efficient central heating system" what do you have in mind? We are going in circles here.

That would beget shorter lifespans for one's electronics. As well, someone in that position would likely have access to a more efficient central heating system.

Not necessarily. They work just as well for someone say mining Monero (XMR) using spare CPU / GPU cycles on a PC. The first law of thermodynamics does not change because one is mining XBT on an ASIC, XMR on a PC or some other POW alt-coin.

Edit: It could work just as well with say Freicoin. http://freico.in/ Any loss due to demurrage would be more than compensated by the savings in heating costs.