Folks: Speaking as a list member rather than as the moderator, changaco@changaco.net's statements that "money has to be based on something", that Bitcoin is "based on" proof-of-work and that people would need to waste CPU cycles in order to trade files (under danimoth's proposal) are all incorrect. b: Money, to be useful as money, only has to be acceptable and valuable to enough people. It doesn't have to be "based on something". Bitcoin isn't really "based on" proof-of-work. It's mostly "based on" digital signatures. The proof-of-work part is really just to make it difficult (but not impossible) for attackers to perform a rewind attack. There are designs floating around which replace the proof-of-work with other mechanisms intended to deter rewind attack, and the properties of the resulting systems are almost the same as the properties of Bitcoin. People would not have to burn CPU cycles in order to trade files in danimoth's proposal. Only the transaction-verification-servers (also called "miners" in Bitcoin) need to do any proof-of-work (in order to deter rewind attack). Normal users who want to send or receive Bitcoin do not need to do any proof-of-work. Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep https://LeastAuthority.com _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE