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

[Sean Lynch]

On Mon, Nov 25 2013, 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...

> surely there is prior art?

I just remembered, there is in fact prior art, though it's state of the
art, as in "nearly practical." They're called SNARKs: Succinct
Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge. You can take any computation and
annotate it sufficiently that whoever runs the computation can generate
a (constant size) proof that they did it correctly in (nearly) constant
time. Andrew Miller posted about it on the Tahoe-LAFS mailing list. See
http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf for one implementation.

I'm not sure if you could use this for a Bitcoin-style problem, though,
since I have no idea if the difficulty can be adjusted smoothly. It's
interesting that we can now take ALL computations problems and turn
them into the "easy to verify" variety, however.

-- 
Sean Richard Lynch <seanl at literati.org>
http://www.literati.org/~seanl/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 835 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20131125/a120d436/attachment-0002.sig>