On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 06:20:27PM -0800, coderman wrote:
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 6:12 PM, David Vorick <david.vorick@gmail.com> wrote:
... Nobody cares how many petaflops the network is pulling, because the petaflops can't be put to use somewhere else... But if the mining was based on cloud storage, a dramatic drop in the price of the currency would result in a dramatic drop in the cost of storing data on the network.
i like the idea of "proof of _useful_ work" applied here to storage. if only mining had been applied to BOINC, GIMPS, or *@home efforts...
The critical feature of the BTC PoW block chain is that the work is applied to a believed-computationally-hard problem that is a function of the block under consideration. This precludes the "work" being a function of any other property.
surely there is prior art?
How quickly we forget ... Bitcoin did 4 impossible things before breakfast, and now we're whining that it didn't do 5. :) In 2008 nobody in the open research community would have proposed that a peer-to-peer (1) autoscaling (2) computational PoW (3) deflationary (4) space-conserving cryptocurrency was even theoretically possible. Then Nakamoto dropped working code and the paper. Adding a "useful work" unit to the mining PoW has been considered; it's extremely hard to do and puts the "useful work" project (whatever it is) squarely in the line of fire for fraudsters and attacks. -andy