Topic: Proof of Thought (PoT): The Holy Grail has arrived! Only Humans can mine - page 2. (Read 836 times)

I guess I get the idea and i know it is Proof of Work, actually op has termed his proposal as Proof of Human work already, never said otherwise.

Imo, it is of vital importance to be more specific when it comes to discussing such ideas. Accusing me of not getting the idea (implying kinda ingenuity)  won't void my technical objection above.

As of similarities between this idea and PoS, I can confirm that I think there is a similarity between the two as they in share a  same vulnerability to zero cost attack.

Anyway, if you can show me how this proposed algorithm could mitigate the attack I described in my reply, I would be fine with dropping my objection.

You really, really, don't get this idea at all do you? Its not PoS, it's PoW.

I am against this proposal as a framework for blockchain technology. But I do appreciate, op's dedication and the motivations behind this, kudos!

As I've briefly discussed this subject before (in the thread which has inspired @ir.hn for  starting this topic), the problem of one-human-one-vote approach to blockchains, besides the slavery threat, is its political nature in the extent that can't be applied to socioeconomic games directly.

IOW, you can not fetch/change the ledger's state by means of a nothing at stake, voting system, because voters can easily commit to a zero cost attack and confirm illegal double spend transactions.

This proposal is mostly focused on normalizing the distribution of wealth (generation of money/block reward) and not exchanging it (cash transfer).

Op has missed the simple fact that the blocks to be generated by the person (being either a freelance/solo participant or a pool/slavery center) does not only encompass a coinbase transaction (that specifies who has won the reward and its amount) but also a set of ordinary transactions that the miner asserts they are valid.

The problem begins here, suppose Alice transfers all of her wallet balance to Bob via tr1 which is normally confirmed,  then she attempts a double spend by means of a new transaction that sends the already spent money to another person or another wallet of her.

Alice is a celebrity and Bob is an infamous Wall Street broker, hated by 99% of people. Alice asks help from her followers to rewrite the blockchain and confirm the double spend transaction because 'Bob is fraud and has done something bad to me' , she asserts. When it comes to voting for this rewrite (being of any range) Alice has a good chance to revoke her funds because of the public opinion being biased  in favor of her.

It could be even worse if it was about a national crisis and financial disaster where populists can easily manipulate public opinions.

Such a monetary system, could hardly be called a monetary system. Money is a privilege people hold in their deposits/accounts against the public interest and in favor of their personal interests, it can not be put under the influence of public by letting them to 'vote' about it.

So, the main problem of this proposal, would be the lack of support by game theory, instead op tries to fill the gap with computing theory, I'm a fan of the latter (having educational back ground in computer science) but, this is an unfortunate, money and monetary systems are territories being ruled by the first one,  I can't imagine how without game theory, approaching to a blockchain based public ledger  would be possible.

As I said, it is totally an unfortunate for me, not just because of my passion for computing theory but also because I love decentralization and distribution of power and hate Wall Street, belonging to 99%  

An approach I've proposed in another posting was to have a distributed application that gives people 'tasks'. 

A task would be to walk a few minutes to meet another randomly selected person at a specific nearby location (GPS or land-mark based, so you can find each other) within a certain time limit, and exchange keys you were given to prove that you met that person at that time and place.

After meeting maybe 3 people (with a few fall-back opportunities if the person you were supposed to meet is a no-show), your task is complete and a solution can be generated that includes the collected keys and other information needed to verify that the work was done.

It reminds me captcha at some point. Overally like the idea but I can't imagine how your PoHW will work, I mean what kins of job will we have to do.
Looks things differently, computer does job automatically but at the same time human made this computer and tries his/her best to develop it, it's again PoHW for me.
Also when you do something, you get reward. What you say is just something like blockchain system of our work/reward, that's how I understood it.

This was the point I brought up earlier - a computer will always be able to outperform a human by sheer brute force guessing. It may not have happened with the example I used (Nano) but if we're talking about a blockchain that could get popular and more valuable with time, you bet the computer arms race would win against normal human adopters. If all the NLP AI being developed have even a fraction of the capabilities they're touted to have, we'd see NP quickly becoming obsolete.

Also, Nano was entirely pre-mined by captcha (it doesn't use blockchain, but DAG) and that itself was also a recognition of limitations in Proof of Human algo in terms of consistent and predictable block times.

So I'd agree. Finding a task a computer simply cannot do is STILL the holy grail of Proof of Human.

How about something like a postal service, where the system calculates a reward for the giver relation and when the dispatcher delivers the package, the system pays out a reward.

In this case the dispatchers would be essentially miners.

1. It may not be so simple, I agree.
2. I think this is analogous to how bitcoin works? Miners can generate a 'better' hash of the same block (i.e. hash with lower numerical value). The winner is the one who's block gets built upon.
3. Perhaps. Depends on the solution complexity, though, so with difficulty adjustment, it ought to self regulate.

Very interesting thought experiment. Really like it


One could use a hybrid system: a "less secure, but not-energy-consuming" algorithm like Proof of Stake for "microblocks" with small block intervals - good enough for micropayments, but not secure enough for big ones  - and use the "Proof of Thought" blocks as checkpoints. People or businesses waiting for payments big enough to attack PoS could wait without problems until the first "human" confirmation.

What I wonder is - could an algorithm that creates NP-complete problems create "unsolvable" problems which would stuck the chain forever? Could this be prevented? Or is the "best solution" enough to win a block reward?

Regardless of NP-completeness, a computer will always be able to bruteforce a minesweeper field faster than a human can solve it.
Even without optimized algorithms or logic (which would decrease the time it takes to solve further) a machine will be faster at guessing or calculating.

For your approach to work, you would need to find a task a computer can not accomplish at all.

1. Some randomness is basically all that's required
2. "Although any given solution to an NP-complete problem can be verified quickly (in polynomial time), there is no known efficient way to locate a solution in the first place"*
3. Block generation time would have a variance in a similar way to the bitcoin block time. On average it would even out.


*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-completeness

Just as some food for thought,  I just remembered that I developed an algorithm that may produce near optimal results.  It probably isn't going to give exact solutions all the time but can probably beat nearly any human if in fact it works (hasn't been tested).

https://archive.fo/OGyoH

The cool thing bieng this algorithm may favor CPU mining over GPU's and ASIC's since it uses complex calculations and therefore lots of random memory accesses.

In general I think if we use PoT systems, they will be able to b mined with any hardware, but certain hardware would be optimized for certain algorithms where the more genrral hardware the better guesses they can make but the slower they run.  Therefore humans, cpu's, gpu's and asics can all live together in harmony!

I look forward to reading your conclusion; this line of thinking shows promise.

edit: this paper claims to present an algorithm for computing the optimum route order O(n^3.322) https://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0702/0702133.pdf

Regardless, I will read the full paper, but we can at least conclude for now that humans can complete the task with near optimal solutions quickly.  This is good because humans would be able to guess right answers better than machines presumably in some cases, and therefore a human would have a good chance at winning the block in this sort of proof of work system.

I think you're confusing the meaning of 'efficiency' here. They're talking about solution efficiency, rather than solution speed.

Right from the wiki article on traveling salesman problem:


I was assuming the highlighted sentence implied efficiency versus computers, but I see how that assumption could have been wrong.  Here is the full paper, I don't have time to look through it now but here it is:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2FBF03213088.pdf

Got a reference for the first claim? I can only find a reference for human performance being within 11% of the optimal solution rather than solution time being faster than optimum machine performance.

Yes but this is better than humans not being needed at all - and instead of being slaves - we starve to death.  

Nationalistic countries, if they understood crypto, would fight crypto's adoption.  This is the whole reason we have national currencies...if you have currencies that can cross borders easily and can be earned anywhere equally you will see the result is the destruction of the Nation-State.  This just goes with the territory and PoT is no more or less apt than any crypto to do this.  However PoT is much much less likely to burn out all our natural resources doing so.  Bitcoin, in it's current form, will lead to an "Easter Island" scenario with our planet.

That's true, I failed to connect those dot's initially but another requirement to NP-complete would be that it is able to benefit from heuristics.  Scientific studies have been done with traveling salesman and humans with no practice have an 11% advantage over machines.  Just imagine how it will be when people practice it a lot.

I don't believe Conway's game of life is classified as NP-complete but even so predicting what Conway's game of life will do next would probably be NP-complete and benefited by heuristics so yes that would fit into this definition.

I like that it got you thinking! The trouble is, we need puzzles that are solvable faster by humans than machines. Just because something is NP complete doesn't mean a human can solve it quicker than a machine, it just means it's tough to solve for.

edit: that's not to say this idea itself doesn't have merit. Indeed the finest example of this idea I've seen proposed so far is PoW using conway's game of life: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/conways-game-of-life-as-pow-problem-2977765