Using captcha to democratize mining | Bitcointalksearch.org

ozzymax

full member

Activity: 182

Merit: 100

Quote from: coinwhisperer on January 27, 2014, 05:55:17 AM

What would the objections be to implement a captcha mechanism in the mining process in order to protect the network from centralization of mining power?
We could for instance say that a captcha should be filled out every time a worker produces a week's worth of hashes on a standard AMD GPU. The captcha should be part of the hash challenge mechanism so that pool operators would be excluded from being able to fill in one global captcha only when they find a block. This means that exclusive p2p mining should be inherent to the protocol.

The first thing that comes to mind is that people with big mining operations would just hire cheap labor to fill in the captchas. This, however, would make mining more expensive for big operators. For small operators it would just represent a minor nuisance.

Could this work?

Why don't you buy more GPU's?
You just feel slighted that you can't find a block with your wiener rig
Tongue

tromp

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Quote from: Peter Lambert on January 28, 2014, 12:58:54 PM

Quote from: tromp on January 28, 2014, 12:41:45 PM

There is a simple solution to "democratize" mining;
adopt a PoW that takes at least a GB of memory to solve
(with no time-memory tradeoff) and that depends on latency rather than bandwidth.
That would put an end to specialized mining hardware.

How would that prevent specialized mining hardware? People would just make hardware with huge amounts of memory.

If your PoW is constrained by memory latency, then you can't do much better than using commodity hardware, i.e. high-end PCs (possibly GPUs, although they tend to do worse at memory latency).
You cannot build an ASIC with dozens of GB of memory.

Analyticse

newbie

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Quote from: anti-scam on January 28, 2014, 09:45:25 AM

If you could find out a guaranteed, decentralized way to mandate that one human takes on one identity in a P2P network then you basically will have solved Bitcoin, but CAPTCHAs are not the answer for the reason you stated and the reasons above.

what you think about make this mechanizm fix some automatics? Roll Eyes

how much gigabit energy also etc this eat

Peter Lambert

hero member

Activity: 756

Merit: 500

It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye

Quote from: tromp on January 28, 2014, 12:41:45 PM

There is a simple solution to "democratize" mining;
adopt a PoW that takes at least a GB of memory to solve
(with no time-memory tradeoff) and that depends on latency rather than bandwidth.
That would put an end to specialized mining hardware.

How would that prevent specialized mining hardware? People would just make hardware with huge amounts of memory.

tromp

legendary

Activity: 990

Merit: 1108

Quote from: grue on January 28, 2014, 12:48:02 PM

Quote from: tromp on January 28, 2014, 12:41:45 PM

There is a simple solution to "democratize" mining;
adopt a PoW that takes at least a GB of memory to solve
(with no time-memory tradeoff) and that depends on latency rather than bandwidth.
That would put an end to specialized mining hardware.

scrypt?

No way, scrypt only needs a lousy 128KB, and even with that is very parallellizable.
Technically, it's not even a PoW since verification is a nontrivial computation,
and that only gets worse when you try to increase its memory footprint.

grue

legendary

Activity: 2058

Merit: 1452

Quote from: tromp on January 28, 2014, 12:41:45 PM

There is a simple solution to "democratize" mining;
adopt a PoW that takes at least a GB of memory to solve
(with no time-memory tradeoff) and that depends on latency rather than bandwidth.
That would put an end to specialized mining hardware.

scrypt?

tromp

legendary

Activity: 990

Merit: 1108

There is a simple solution to "democratize" mining;
adopt a PoW that takes at least a GB of memory to solve
(with no time-memory tradeoff) and that depends on latency rather than bandwidth.
That would put an end to specialized mining hardware.

anti-scam

sr. member

Activity: 476

Merit: 251

COINECT

If you could find out a guaranteed, decentralized way to mandate that one human takes on one identity in a P2P network then you basically will have solved Bitcoin, but CAPTCHAs are not the answer for the reason you stated and the reasons above.

michagogo

member

Activity: 80

Merit: 10

You can't possibly have a CAPTCHA in a system like Bitcoin. A CAPTCHA requires, among other things, that there be a computer generating it and keeping the answer to compare to. The question of "is this right?" is asked of whatever generated it and has the answer stored. A decentralized system has, well, no central point that can issue the CAPTCHAs and validate them -- if nodes are generating their own CAPTCHA, you'd be relying on the honor system, and there's nothing to stop modified software from bypassing the CAPTCHA check.

thejepper

full member

Activity: 182

Merit: 100

no, next to the fact that most captcha's can be solved either by a computer or for a very low fraction of the block payout, it's only a nuisance not a protection. The idea is good to prevent large pools from reaching 51% network power but i think p2p pool options are better alternatives

coinwhisperer

newbie

Activity: 4

Merit: 0

What would the objections be to implement a captcha mechanism in the mining process in order to protect the network from centralization of mining power?
We could for instance say that a captcha should be filled out every time a worker produces a week's worth of hashes on a standard AMD GPU. The captcha should be part of the hash challenge mechanism so that pool operators would be excluded from being able to fill in one global captcha only when they find a block. This means that exclusive p2p mining should be inherent to the protocol.

The first thing that comes to mind is that people with big mining operations would just hire cheap labor to fill in the captchas. This, however, would make mining more expensive for big operators. For small operators it would just represent a minor nuisance.

Could this work?

Topic: Using captcha to democratize mining (Read 1214 times)