Topic: [XPM] [ANN] Primecoin Prerelease Announcement - Introducing Prime Proof-of-Work - page 18. (Read 71645 times)

Sounds good. Looking forward to it.

Why? You even don't know how and why this coin can work. I am a little bit skeptical

this is that big release we've all been waiting for. the headliner of 2013

Good point. That's makes more sense to common people for they to accept and use cryptocurrency with ease.

IE: the content of the hash is dependent on the content of the block header which (because of the merkle root) ensures the coinbase pays the miner.


EG: k = blockheader (presumably prefixed or something to ensure consistent number of digits; as this will have some effect on the difficulty)

That would be one way because the prime found would depend on (or rather part of it is) the blockheader. Similar to SHA256 you don't know if there's a solution with the particular blockheader you're using (so you have to search the space - well, if things are done 'right').

I was going to say verifying the prime is difficult; but it's not. Verification of primes can be done in polynomial time, so it's not so bad. Factorizing is the hard bit.

So we can have quick to verify, contains the blockheader.

The difficulty is easy to integrate; but unfortunately will have a negative effect on verification time (the only way to make prime generation more difficult is to make the primes bigger, so they take longer to verify). Remember that verification is part of the mining process, so there has to be few enough solutions out there to make looking for them harder to ensure consistent verification times; not sure how this will interact with this PoW style.

So, issues I can see: overcoming the relationship between the difficulty and verification time (if there is one) and ensuring that there are few enough primes out there to find.

The first means the difficulty should shrink the size of the acceptable solution pool (as opposed to making bigger numbers), and the second means arbitrary conditions will need to be chosen by which to define the solution pool.

Anyway, curious to see how the PoW works, and as to why there hasn't been any info made open about it yet.

There's an additional requirement: The POW solution must depend on the contents of the block that it is associated with. Changing the block should require the POW to be redone. Simply computing a big prime number is insufficient, as it is independent of the block contents.

Primecoin Bear anyone?

In response to questions about people able to cheat with the primes... maybe the coin would, for it's 'target', select a ever-decreasing numeric range for the search, placed at some arbitrary, very-high location. Of course, it's possible there would be no prime in that group, so perhaps after x amount of time a new target would be selected?


This does seem like a tricky proof-of-work implementation to create..

nice idea!!

This.

Also any possible exploits that you are not going to mention publicly as you did when launching PPC and failed to mention it for 4 months?

Although I respect your efforts in development, I do look at your track record from your first launch and how you failed to mention important details about an exploit that had not been fixed nor publicly discussed.

I still believe in community development > secret development when it comes to cryptocoin networks. We all don't know it all but when we lean on each other for input we sharpen ourselves and in essence sharpen others.

I just hope this isn't a repeat of PPC checkpoint and exploits.

Edit: after reading the rest of the thread I retract my above statement regarding check pointing. Looks like sunny will allow users enable the check pointing which is an interesting approach.

It could be that the proof of work algorithm is something like:

Generate a prime number in the form:
k * 256 ^ n + b

where k is the merkle root + nonce, etc.

Similar to how a prime number was generated that contains the DeCSS code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime)

for a POW algorithm to be useful for blockchain verification it must be

 - hard to derive (for transaction verifiers)
 - controllable difficulty (so as more nodes are added, the difficulty can rise)
 - easy to prove (for relaying nodes)

hash algorithms are good here.  An algorithm with primes sounds like it would be based around the factorising problem (e.g. as used in RSA) - but the question is how Sunny has designed it to be variable - perhaps the difficulty is set by the length of required prime in bits, and the POW is two primes and a factor that meet the difficulty.  This would be very very ASICable compared with scrypt, but I don't think any off the shelf ASIC cores would exist (unlike with SHA256)

Interested to see what Sunny has come up with here.

Will

hrm just reread the op and glanced through the pages. hopefully i didnt just wreck op's idea with above questions. i dont really see any posted solutions to the usual and already existing ways of cheating research networks for points.

The curecoin team was all ready to release a coin until someone offered up some hard facts about how someone with good programming skills can copy and slightly alter results and resubmit them without doing the work. without any way to stop it there will probably never be a perfect system for a research coin. hopefully that changes soon.

uhg i hope this is not a repeat because i was really bummed out enough when curecoin did not release. at least for prime numbers there is not centralized university creating the work that could be compromised. so even if people are cheating the system at least it wont damage an existing research project. cheating will make the coin near worthess though.

The first research type coin to get released will be a big one. Remember the hype and controversy and log threads of comments when a couple people proposed curecoin and sciencecoin?  this thread is at 2k views a week away from the proposed release date. I have a feeling this coin will actually be released since the basis of prime numbers should make a great proof of work. I know curecoin is in a choke hold for release largely due to the fact folding can be manipulated falsely.

i guess that brings up a good question. since proof of work is based on prime numbers, whos to say i cant just copy the datastream going from someone who is already doing a lot of prime number research and duplicating / slightly altering it? Possibly a common problem in any type of "research coin" since some of the research is already done and can be copied and resubmitted.....

i actually see a really big problem there since prime number work is already in large production... just copy work and resubmit? This has already been done against the folding network at stanford just for people to get points. when there is an incentive in the form of currency the amount of people trying to cheat the system will skyrocket. currently i doubt that is much of a problem on other prime number networks as the points / rankings they get are worthless. If people can mess with folding results then i bet prime results are probably even easier to mess with.... maybe op has some slick way to advert this but i dont see it being possible to fool proof it completely from cheating even if the primes get hashed according to dynamic values. hopefully im missing something there?

Depending on how it works you could actually plan that out. Basically use the prize money to gradually buy up PrimeCoin all of which is put into a development fund/wallet. It would instantly make it at least the 5th or 6th highest market cap. With all that interest and market jump you could probably hit the 2nd prize too after a while.

This is all speculation. We have no numbers right now.

Maybe a good way to integrated with PoS, but OP said it is pure PoW

Interesting. @mokimarket is the first person who thinks of using prime number

However, it is better to see a whitepaper to explain in detail why prime number will work in a coin

Nice. We should accept only primecoins as prize payment, that will be distributed into the network to the miners .

Yes, I know, I just wanted to confirm I was following correctly.