This is basically the concept of mining through 'proof-of-stake' rather than 'proof-of-work'. I think 'proof-of-stake' would be superior to 'proof-of-work'.
I have some posts about it. Try searching for 'stake'. I suggested a deterministic system rather than a lottery system. I don't think a lottery is any better or worse than a deterministic system.
Most people don't care about this or are too busy with other things. Other forum members are not capable of offering intelligent comments.
Is there something to be gained from re-opening a discussion with them?
What is really needed is for someone with serious programming skills to create the improved system.
I would be delighted to offer some input to this individual. However, if a willing programmer exists, then he will probably be too much of a neckbeard megalomaniac to accept my input.
Topic: Proposal: An Alternative Currency that doesn't "waste" energy - page 4. (Read 4877 times)
I think it's a non issue. By the time Bitcoin has a substantial user base, there will be technological solutions to energy efficiency.
Isn't the the subsidy is a useful incentive for managing/securing the block chain?
It is, but having everyone play the lotto doesn't manage or secure anything.
I've seen similar proposals, but none with the lottery ticket idea. Two main concerns:
1) Currently the "wasted" electricity helps secure the network by making it equally expensive to brute force attack. You touched on this with your second bullet point, it's a biggie.
2) New users would need to buy coins from existing users. Since one on average would profit everyone would play this lottery in pools, it basically accomplishes the same thing as pure deflation but with more risk and complexity. We might as well just stop subsidizing coin generation.
1) Currently the "wasted" electricity helps secure the network by making it equally expensive to brute force attack. You touched on this with your second bullet point, it's a biggie.
2) New users would need to buy coins from existing users. Since one on average would profit everyone would play this lottery in pools, it basically accomplishes the same thing as pure deflation but with more risk and complexity. We might as well just stop subsidizing coin generation.
Isn't the the subsidy is a useful incentive for managing/securing the block chain?
And yes, there's a big hole in the scheme until 2 is solved. There has to be an unbiased way to decide between competing block chains (perhaps by preferring chains that have the most ticket value spent in them). But we need the equivalent of the secure timestamping service that Bitcoin includes.
I've seen similar proposals, but none with the lottery ticket idea. Two main concerns:
1) Currently the "wasted" electricity helps secure the network by making it equally expensive to brute force attack. You touched on this with your second bullet point, it's a biggie.
2) New users would need to buy coins from existing users. Since one on average would profit everyone would play this lottery in pools, it basically accomplishes the same thing as pure deflation but with more risk and complexity. We might as well just stop subsidizing coin generation.
1) Currently the "wasted" electricity helps secure the network by making it equally expensive to brute force attack. You touched on this with your second bullet point, it's a biggie.
2) New users would need to buy coins from existing users. Since one on average would profit everyone would play this lottery in pools, it basically accomplishes the same thing as pure deflation but with more risk and complexity. We might as well just stop subsidizing coin generation.
solidcoin alrwady figurd this out mostly, CoinHunter mining
FTFY
solidcoin already figured this out mostly, cpu mining
Though I love the Bitcoin protocol, and it's elegant solutions to double-spending and cheating, it still bothers me that it takes a prodigious amount of energy to mine for new currency (something like 25 Megawatts are being consumed by miners right now). So I've been trying to think of ways to substitute a less costly process for the current hashing problems required by BitCoin.
If you think of mining as a form of lottery, each computation of a nonce hash is like buying one "ticket" - the more tickets you buy, the higher the probability of your winning the 50 BTC+ prize. Why don't we replace mining with a more DIRECT lottery?
Every 10 minutes, say, each person that wants to participate buys how every many tickets they want (using the same currency), and then the winner is chosen randomly such that your odds of winning are proportional to your ticket purchases. The winner not only receives the 50 coin bounty in the block, but also all the tickets purchased in the block.
This has the same incentives and rewards as Bitcoin, but reduces the net cost of "mining" to near zero (all the "costs" of mining are returned to the winner of the block). It's "fair" since your chance of winning is proportional to the amount of coin you risk in each auction. A simplification is to treat the amount of "tip" included in each transaction as the "ticket purchase" amount (you can enter a NULL transaction with a tip in any block when you want to mine, but not sending a real transaction).
The remaining problems to solve are:
The first problem can be solved by hashing all the user addresses of the ticket purchases in the block, and using that as a seed to a cryptographically secure random number generator.
The second problem feels non-trivial to me and still a source of possible cheating. Any ideas?
Has this all been discussed before???
If you think of mining as a form of lottery, each computation of a nonce hash is like buying one "ticket" - the more tickets you buy, the higher the probability of your winning the 50 BTC+ prize. Why don't we replace mining with a more DIRECT lottery?
Every 10 minutes, say, each person that wants to participate buys how every many tickets they want (using the same currency), and then the winner is chosen randomly such that your odds of winning are proportional to your ticket purchases. The winner not only receives the 50 coin bounty in the block, but also all the tickets purchased in the block.
This has the same incentives and rewards as Bitcoin, but reduces the net cost of "mining" to near zero (all the "costs" of mining are returned to the winner of the block). It's "fair" since your chance of winning is proportional to the amount of coin you risk in each auction. A simplification is to treat the amount of "tip" included in each transaction as the "ticket purchase" amount (you can enter a NULL transaction with a tip in any block when you want to mine, but not sending a real transaction).
The remaining problems to solve are:
- How to fairly decide the winner of the lottery (without relying on trusted 3rd party).
- How to decide that an accepted block is "canonical".
The first problem can be solved by hashing all the user addresses of the ticket purchases in the block, and using that as a seed to a cryptographically secure random number generator.
The second problem feels non-trivial to me and still a source of possible cheating. Any ideas?
Has this all been discussed before???
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