bitcoin as a global medium of exchange (was Re: Interesting take on Sanjuro's Assassination Market)

[Andy Isaacson]

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 at 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