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

[David Vorick]

Joe, the only reason that the price of cloud storage would fall is if
demand for cloud storage falls. The value of cloud storage over time should
be fairly stable, perhaps not as stable as today's US dollar but certainly
more stable than bitcoin is today.

But in the case of tulips, bitcoins, etc., their stability was only derived
from their speculative value. Bread will be reasonable stable, because
people don't speculate in bread. Bread has a minimum price, because there
is a limited supply and a clearly defined need. All commodities are not
equal. Bitcoin is one of the worst I can imagine, but the tulips during
tulipmania take the cake.

I believe you can regulate cloud storage in a way that prevents fraudsters
from manipulating it. The only assumption I need is that the majority of
the network is honest. You can use hashing + random strings to confirm that
a person still has the file they are hosting. You only need then to be sure
that the person hosting the file and the person uploading the file are not
in cahoots. You can achieve that by making a random mapping between people
and hosts, and only picking the host after a person has announced how much
file storage they wish to rent (and paid for the first month). This makes
it too expensive to host files on your own machines, because you have a
very low probability of getting the opportunity to store a file on your own
machine.


On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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