Topic: Proof of Thought (PoT): The Holy Grail has arrived! Only Humans can mine (Read 810 times)

not yet, but close  


if I get it correctly, I should say in my point of view, the PoT (which represents the topic) or any other proof model that try to get humans directly involve in the process, should design based on the principles of freelancing.. freelancing is also welcome by the governments and tax laws.

P.S.:
so, as you noticed about getting off the topic, I think we need to find enough time to have this business aspect of the idea (getting humans directly involve) in other section of the bitcointalk that is dedicated for economical angles of proof models.

@mixoftix

I'm pretty sure we are both getting off-topic and I hate it. I made my point about your idea being sort of institutional investment and not what OP is trying to achieve, this is it.

I'll come to your thread and discuss it and other points in details asap, as I've promised. I need to free like a full working day to review your work and it is your fault, you make everything more complicated with each post. 

this is not necessarily about human characteristics, it is about getting humans involve in the process. and I mean Marketing as a knowledge in this post, because there are several point of views in bringing a definition for marketing - but this is what I use in this idea, from wikipedia:

"Marketing practice tended to be seen as a creative industry in the past, which included advertising, distribution and selling. However, because the academic study of marketing makes extensive use of social sciences, psychology, sociology, mathematics, economics, anthropology and neuroscience, the profession is now widely recognized as a science.."


in the future, I really need people do not TURN-OFF their mining hardware just because of prices, instead think about the benefits that they could bring to the society.. anyways we all are doing investment in this ecosystem. even we both by discussing these ideas are spending our invested-time for it..


on contrary, this is exactly what I try to break down by this idea. sales-orientation marketing approach is harmful for the ecosystem. entities just involve in activities that bring them short-term profits, and sacrifice the long-term benefits for the customers and the whole society. pools already do that. they also do marketing for their nodes too, so this is not a weird subject to the crypto.

BUT, all we need now is a transformation from sales-orientation to market-orientation model, which sacrifices short-term profits in order to build a lasting relationship with customers. from study.com:

"Companies that use a sales-oriented marketing strategy focus on selling what the company makes, not necessarily what the customer wants. Companies that use a sales-oriented marketing strategy also pay very little attention to the changing needs of their customers or to the changes that take place in the marketplace."

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by bringing and change the sales-orientation marketing from pools level to the miners level (market-orientation), now we have a dynamic puzzle of "how do I market for my mining hardware?" for each transaction, that only humans could solve it - and once solved, computers could check the miners Proof-of-Work_after_Marketing.. (I need to stop myself to call it Proof-of-Marketing, but if this could help to express the meaning, why not!?)


UPDATE:

you know, I really believe in Hobby Miners. these guys finally support the ecosystem through in its all good and bad days.. so this should be their right to benefit from the process, not those rich owners of industrial farms. if in PoW this is all about "who is rich, has the priority", then what is the difference with PoS?

By Marketing Knowledge you mean marketing and sales power which is a matter of investment, how is it related to any human characteristics?

Miners engaged in marketing their services, is not a good idea. I'm afraid that you are somehow poisoned by corporate oriented sales discourses that are not adequate for crypto ecosystem.

the idea is amazing, not applicable, not applied..


at first, you may need to check the good ability of Genetic Algorithm in solving TSP.. this could entirely fail the idea in utilizing human brain as a source for PoW with NP-Hard problems:

https://medium.com/@becmjo/genetic-algorithms-and-the-travelling-salesman-problem-d10d1daf96a1

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introducing the idea as another version of PoW has a major flaw in event of "flood of common optimized answers get broadcast to the network".. this may be another kind of sibyl attack, or others hijack of the best answer.. this happens because TIMESTAMPING has missed in this proof model.

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and getting back to the main idea, I could say, the common problem around these sort of ideas is that the algorithm dose not involve in CHAINING process of BLOCKS - they do not work on data of block header, so relationship among blocks remains unproved..

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BUT, getting humans involve in the PoW is valuable and needs to be something close to the nature of human commerce..  I personally have chosen Marketing Knowledge for mining. in my model miners need to market their ability of mining and then accept job from users. now miners could improve their marketing skills to receive more job, then do mine transactions the way that PoW shows us. as we could see, now relationship among blocks and getting humans involve in the process, both satisfies.

You know, we started with CPU/GPU mining and then some clever people designed ASIC chips and this completely changed the

mining scene, because only a selective few people with enough capital to invest, was able to afford these chips and they

started to dominate the mining scene. Now you want to introduce something that only a few people would be able to do and

they will once again dominate and centralize this scene.    Rather develop something that more people will be able to do.

The fatal flaw is this.

HUMANS DO NOT THINK...THEY CAN NOT THINK. THEY HAVE NEVER THOUGHT...THEY WILL NEVER THINK.

Most of mankind has no idea what thinking is.
What Mankind calls thought is but "Sense Based Reasoning" This is not thinking..it is simple plagiarism from programming of the SENSES.
For further reading on the topic READ Mark Twain's Essay, "What is Man".

Mankind is infantile,ignorant,arrogant and negligent.

MIND alone thinks.
MIND ALONE IS.
MIND ALONE KNOWS.

MIND KNOWING is NOT SENSE BASED REASONING.
For further illumination on this concept.
Read "A New Concept of The Universe" By Walter Russell

And remember... comment without investigation is the epitome of ignorance..self imposed and self deceived.

You're just providing yet another example of a failed solution to find this Proof of Human holy grail.

As I said above, and as others seem to agree (sorry for speaking for the rest), the basic challenge and the essence of the solution is yet to be overcome: how do we create or find a task that a computer cannot complete, neither by learning nor by brute force?

Puzzles seems to be just the one way but it's always going to end up bot-able. Riddles maybe? Psychic tasks maybe?

Have you looked at Motocoin?  That basically does exactly what you propose - mining through a puzzle game.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be bot-able in the end.

Tyranny of the algorithm? Lol
But algorithm works according to rules. We should rather be worried about very advanced Artificial Intelligence going rogue in the future.

Your idea is very interesting though. But what stops a greedy miner from outsourcing the problems to other people?

I have always wondered whether Mining Centralization can be solved with Biometrics.. . By combining different Biometrics with passwords for every miner. The Biometrics will be hashed/encrypted and stored on Blockchain so that no one (not even "govts") except the owners have access to them.

OK, thanks. I admit I'm not an expert on this topic.

But in this case, is it mandatory that a solution (with a shorter route than the original graph) exists? Can the computer know that before someone submits a possible solution? Because if there doesn't exist a shorter route, then the blockchain would become stuck. You can resolve that with fallback tasks, but a certain probability may exist that none of them has a solution.

And the computer maybe could be at advantage trying to brute-force slight variations from the original route.

But overall, I would love to see a test implementation.

Quoting from that Wikipedia page:

"In the theory of computational complexity, the decision version of the TSP (where, given a length L, the task is to decide whether the graph has any tour shorter than L) belongs to the class of NP-complete problems."

Actually, the travelling salesman problem does indeed ask for the shortest possible (=optimal) route and therefore is an NP-hard problem.

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You seem to missunderstand the idea.
The idea is to have a PoW which can not be performed by a machine. In this case they are not vulnerable the same way. A human is not vulnerable to any kind of digital attacks/spoofing/.. the same way as a machine.

You misunderstood. NP is the class of problems for which one can efficiently verify solutions.
Complete means that a problem is in some sense as hard as any other NP problem.

The Traveling Salesman Problem asks whether there is a route of at most a certain length.
This is clearly in NP.

It does not ask for the optimal route. Such a problem would generally NOT be in NP, precisely because answers cannot be efficiently verified.

If we consider OptimalTSP as the problem whose instances are a pair of a distance matrix and an optimal route, then this problem is in fact in co-NP, complements of NP problems.

I know this is a thought experiment and unlikely to be realized (although ... I would like to see it as a testnet ... as a kind of "gambling" thing ).

Thinking a bit about it, there may be a problem: As far as I understood the posts and the description of NP-complete problems, there is a fast way to prove that a solution fulfills the task, but no way to know in advance which one is the "perfect" one (Correct me if I'm wrong). So, for example, in the problem of the traveling salesman, maybe one human finds a route through the cities which is e.g. 1000 km long but there may exist one with 995 km, but the system can't tell that this route exists.

But wouldn't that mean that the first valid solution would be very likely the one to win? If there is no way to prove that an answer is the "perfect" one, then all valid answers could be used as a starting point for the next block. Obviously it's possible that another human, shortly afterwards, finds a better solution. But it seems that a computer brute-forcing simple valid solutions and then trying instantly to build the next block continuing to brute-forcing would be at advantage. Eventually he would get the longest chain.

I don't know if there is a subset of NP-complete problems where a human can guess a valid, but not near-optimal solution faster than a computer, but I doubt that.

But maybe that problem can be solved? For example, I could imagine an algorithm where a linear increase in "quality" of the solution could exponentially (e.g. quadratically) increase block weight. Then computers with a low-quality solution would have a hard time to compete with a human with a near-optimal solution.

I'm afraid you are utterly incorrect. The only reason PoW exists in the first place is to provide an unforgeable proxy for elapsed time.

Saying that 'time' is valuable or 'the most valuable resource in the universe' the way you put it, as a metaphor is acceptable but it is not concrete.

For example air is one of the most important things ever but it worth nothing in the market and barely can be called a resource.

For a thing to be categorized as a resource, it should be both rare and in demand of work, mostly hard work, to become available.

Time is not a resource, people got  lot of free time and if they could find an incentive tempting enough, they would trade it easily and cheaply.

On the other hand you can't keep people busy solving a NP-Complete problem for hours, this leads to a very unscalable solution unless the solution finding procedure can be spanned in multiple rounds, this will produce new attack vectors and will detach the problem solving procedure from confirming transactions, again money transfer features are missed here, just an alternative system for replacing central banks without interfering with  commercial banks.  

Humans expend the most valuable resource on the planet: time. This is ultimately more valuable than anything else in the universe.

The puzzles are created such than no man/machine can perform them faster than a human, therefore this represents the ultimate PoW.

Well, not exactly true.
Proof of Work, implies consuming a lot of resources. To manage a 50%+1 attack an adversary has trade-offs to make (comparing incentives and costs) as of this proposal , Humans just use their free talent, zero or negligible costs are involved, so voting is free and we are left with only incentives that rule in favor of evil behavior, mostly.

Any attack you can level at this proposal you can level at any PoW blockchain since all miners are controlled by humans - they are vulnerable in exactly the same way, there is nothing special about whether a human or a machine under the control of a human solves a PoW.