Bitcoin Forum

I've been thinking about the issues with bitcoins, altcoins, etc.. The biggest problem seems to be that people with huge mining rigs (or botnets) come in and take all the coins while the difficulty is low.

I propose a new coin that adds on the goodness from other coins: CPU mining, Scrypt, etc.. requiring a CPU + GPU to do effective mining. Further it extends this to also require a "PoH" analysis to confirm each coin. The PoH can use captcha, or another mechanism to verify that a human did some work to confirm each coin. This would slow down the mining by large farms, and make human input and analysis relevant. Further, the human  analysis could be interesting and educational at the same time. So a miner gets the value of generating a coin + the challenge of answering an analysis question.

What do folks think? Would this work?

Captha's are a bad way to do this, since they pay people to solve captha's ( or just plain force them ! )

Maybe you can plug people in to ECG's and have them respond to stimuli, pleasent or otherwise ;)

Sort of like a mechanical turk coin?

Maybe you are exaggerating on purpose, but this statement shows a lack of understanding.

First. I could be wrong, but I would guess that nearly half of the coins mined so far were mined on CPUs and not big GPU mining rigs or botnets.
Second. You make it seem like miners get the coins for free and that is not true. If you don't want to pay for mining equipment and all the other costs associated with mining, you can just buy coins from someone. You don't have to mine them. The Winklevoss twins own 1% of all the bitcoins and they didn't mine a single one.

+1000000 to OP

I was thinking the same thing couple of days ago.

The fact is that all the coin that arrived till today make use of the real wealth of the people mining them. if you could afford a room full of  4gpu/pc you obviously have huge adv to some1 who have just 1 pc.
What did you do? You aren't smarter, you didnt work harder, nothing. You just turn your $$$ or Euro's to bitcoins. Just like what already happening in everyday life. THE RICH ALWAYS BECOME RICHER.

What we have all people in common is our lifetime, we all have 24 hours a day.

So, a coin that needed actual interaction from the user could turn the same old story real life upside down. Every1 could have the same opportunity. you want to spend 8h/day in front of your PC, do it, you want to spend the whole day, DO THAT!!!


Sorry for my bad english :) :)

Snaider.

I had this idea before too!

Instead of annoying captchas couldn't you instead design the coin so that everyone mines at the same speed regardless of hardware? Instamining wouldn't be a problem and there would be no huge dumps from mining farms when the coins hits an exchange, leading to a stable exchange rate. You could have random special blocks worth 2-3 times the normal block reward to keep people mining. I think a coin designed this way would function well as a currency. If I had any coding skills I'd try making a coin around this idea as an experiment.

What's wrong with the rich becoming richer?  If the rich want to invest their money and make more of it, so be it... as long as they do it legally.

The rich could also pay another person (or many people) for their 24 hours a day - would that not be the same difference as paying for a large number of GPU miners?

i think human interaction is the critical point here.
A captca, a stupid pass phrase, a simple mathimatical calc, what color is the water? something that verifies you still there, and it will only continue mining or submit a share or verify a found block (that become orphan after X minutes).
Something that would prevent people from having mining farms. In fact maybe you could still have a farm but you could need to hire people to do the job and you could pay them with the coin you mine :D

I think it's a silly wasteful idea. The mining hardware and electricity are already  made by humans, I would rather see them continue doing what they are good at which benefits society in general, than the formation of underpaid sweat shops to do mindless captcha entries.

Nothing wrong with that. BUT in this life, EVERY TIME some1 becomes richer some1 else becomes poorer. When you mesure wealth with countable things like land, gold, oil or bitcoins THATS HAPPENING.
And when there is no more land or gold to collect, you start collecting drinking water and maybe someday breathing air.

Snaider. ;)


Edit,
..Couldnt help it..

More often "legal" is the way of the rich people fucks with poor people life.

How about a coin that has blocks that have to be solved on paper?

That's kind of how economies work.  If I pay you for an apple, then you get richer and I get poorer.   ::)

How about not using crypto currencies at all and continue being "legally" robbed from banks, goverments and big companies???

we could do that too, but here we are now...


No, THATS HOW (THIS) ECONOMY SUCKS like 2100 years now, and most people learn to be used to it!!

Not me.. TY :D

Snaider.

OK U HAVE UNLEASED THE WRATH OF THE ECONOMICS GOD WITH THAT STATEMENT


say u were in the wild west, during the gold rush, if you find a an ounce of gold, who loses wealth in this situation?
if the moon was claimed as land who loses wealth in that?
if you find an oil well and set up a mining operation who loses wealth? the people who work for u? your suppliers? the construction crew? no in exchange for services they get money from the NEW oil
ITS CALLED CREATING WEALTH

As to collecting drinking water dont act like its coming out of some public pool, at least if your talking commercial enterprises, they collect it off their own land or with permission from the land owner(most likely who gets a cut of it) therefore THEY OWN IT ALREADY its simply a matter of collecting it

There is a simple principal in economics, people don't do things that cause them to lose wealth (as a collection of net worth) unless they gain happieness from it. This collective self interest causes people to create wealth or work for it (in effect creating value of something with there time).

This has been a public service announcement by the economics god

Good idea in theory but if you truly want a coin that is used as currency you have to design an inflationary one, otherwise people will hoard them.  I am still yet to see someone do this, all the coins I've seen are deflationary and this is not what you want in a currency.

no-one forces u to buy or sell stuff, at least legally 99.999% of the time

Kind of confused as to how this would work...

hm, maybe have it work like this?

Person A makes up a question

"What's 5 times 2?"

It sends it to all other miners, you are allowed one attempt per minute (using traditional mining targets)

Then sends it to all other miners to verify it is correct, if a miner disagrees (lets say you type 12) it ignores it.

After getting the answer, you hash it again and try to  get lower than another target, if you do, you find a block and submit another question.

There are a million flaws to this idea, but that's all I can think of for the basic concept. It seems really hard to figure out a way to make it decentralized and cheat proof. But I concur with previous arguments, the concept itself seems flawed.

As for the whole, it's not fair and the poorer get poorer and the richer get richer, cry me a river. Wealth IS created. The fiat money that people use is just a placeholder for things people actually need, aka wealth.

I really hope you're a teen because that's the only excuse for saying something like that.
No, economy is NOT a zero-sum game.

If X person invents a new technology and gets rich from it, nobody got "poorer".
THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE: everyone gets RICHER because the innovation helps everyone

*

Some fundamental misunderstanding of economics here.

But of course, it is a BITCOIN forum

Ba-zing!   I jest I jest...

@Praxis:
I can't agree what are you stated here.
Here is an example:
Imagine that you work in car factory assembling car parts and you get paid for this.
Let say person X invents a robot that does the same job you do but it can do it 24/7 and
faster then you. Then the investor (factory owner) will pay to person "X" bigger
amount of money to buy the robot.
Person "X"  will becomes RICHER , the investor (factory owner) will also become richer soon
but what will you become in this case?!

Did the innovation help everyone?! ;)

Check out http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

Eventually maybe people will perfect their scripts to a point where they only need human intervention when some other human screws around with them (killing their workers maybe or whatever) but it will take a lot of work on your triggers/scripts to get to that point, so far most people are still finding they need to manually intervene with at least some of their workers each day to get them back "on script", so it pretty much is a kind of "check a human is there".

The fact that the workers can interfere with each other (like you could load up a guy with armour and weapons and go killing "enemy" workers who are within the range of levels in which player versus player combat is allowed, for example) kind of means that players who do bother to manually take part have methods by which they can in effect penalise other players who do rely entirely on scripts and do not check regularly that all their workers are still "on script" working successfully and productively.

So it is a system that pretty much lets players make up their own problems for other players to solve.

Since you could probably run hundreds of workers from just one fairly old single-CPU machine, there is not likely to be much advantage to supercomputers nor even to botnets for a long time; and by the time people get their triggers and scripts to such a highly developed capability chances are other players will also have much better strategies worked out for interfering with scripted workers who are not being monitored and put back on course by a human regularly. So it is looking pretty good so far.

-MarkM-

If you spent a few seconds, you would discover that there are positives for the worker, even though the immediate loss of a job would be a negative.

1. Cars will become more affordable for the worker.
2. The worker will finally realize that his skill is no longer valuable, and that he must improve his skill or learn new skills.
3. The worker will find a new job doing something that a robot can't do.

Also, do you think that this worker's situation is confined to only workers? Everyone must deal with it. If the inventor does not continue innovating, he will no longer have anything to sell. If the factory owner does not innovate, some other company will put him out of business. As a software developer, I must constantly gain new knowledge and skills or risk becoming irrelevant.

Anyone that is not trying to improve themselves is just stagnating. I don't think stagnation should be rewarded, or even tolerated.

Back on topic, I think the only possible way to do a "Proof of Human" coin is by using something that is unique to each human, but verifiable to be a human.  In other words, you can't just use a person's name and address, or social security number, because those could be faked and a headless decentralized system would be none the wiser.  The advantage to using such a system is that distribution and verification is incredibly simple:  Simply give each person an equal amount of coins, and let the currency inflate slowly along with the birthrate (since babies would also be given coins upon birth, unspendable until they turn 18 or something).

So, you have to have something that cannot be machine-faked, which is DNA.  But it can still be electronically faked, in that you could create an artificial DNA sequence.  How could the headless system verify that such a human actually exists?  With images!

To receive your initial distribution of coins, you have to give up a sample of DNA.  A scratch of skin cells off the back of your hand, perhaps.  Then, in order to spend your coins, you must verify that you are, in fact, the owner of said DNA.  Fingerprints are unique - perhaps a machine could match your fingerprints to your DNA.  Definitely not now, but 10, 20 years in the future?  Maybe.

But then, if a machine can match your DNA to your fingerprint, what is stopping someone else from grabbing a sample of your DNA, mapping it, and then figuring out what your fingerprints should look like?  And subsequently making a model of those fingerprints to be used on whatever is scanning the fingerprints, of course.

The problem with humans is, there's no one-way function for us.  If you know the fingerprints, you can discover the DNA.  If you know the DNA, you can discover the fingerprints.  Etc.  There is no human hash function.

Any "mechanical" task such as captcha-solving would be outsourced to cheap labour in India.
What is genuinely "human"? That which cannot (yet) be automatized. And that is - what?
Creativity.

Therefore we already have "proof of human" coin, it's called Devcoin.
In Devcoin you earn coins by doing creative work.

How about games like luminosity. Play games, get coins.

this is really interesting. What about steganographic puzzles. Once solved you get coins? this would be POH

We shall call it "Abacus Coin" and it requires proof-of-human-doing-physical-calculations-work. Because mining should involve actual calluses on actual hands.

Humaniq maybe with Proof of Face

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1711764.0

What color is the water mate  ;D ;D ;D in glass or in ocean?

I think the PoH cant stop rich to get richer cuz they can hire a humans to solve this, same like working. You know what is the salary in some parts of the world like China, India and so on .. ..... you cant mine a shit alone like every new coin.

There actually was a coin called CaptchaCoin launched in 2013 that (supposedly) worked this way. It fizzled out pretty quickly I think.

Two separate issues.

1) Algorithms that require human input are going to be very important. Artificial intelligence algorithms require constant human input. Not talking of course of the coins that claim ai to get investors, but of an actual ai coin in the future.

2) Distribution based on x per person rather than x per computing power a person owns etc. Coins that go in that direction also will have advantages in a lot of the world. Look at India's aadhar system that will include biometerics https://uidai.gov.in/

In this day and age scripts can be coded for a vast majority of things.

I think there's already a coin with the same mechanism, I just forgot its name >:(

Yes there is now a coin that uses captcha to claim and the name of the coin is mrai,it is now very popular new algo that hundreds or even thousands of people are now claiming it but only the top 150 claimants can claim the rewards daily,for more info please check the xrb thread.

Nope. Captchas wont work either.
Have you seen mrai? Where they pay people to solve captchas and gain raiblocks.
How could that be different with that?
Even if they pay low some people will bite here specially to those who are looking for a job even if they pay low.

OK guys i am deeply interested in this right now. '

If a coin or coins were only able to enter the circulating supply by a HUMAN solving some sort of puzzle unsolvable by a computer alone does this constitute as a PROOF OF HUMAN coin? or is this a PUZZLECOIN?

here is another point of view.


Say there are coins being MINED using something similar to Proof of Stake (proof of stake would not work properly in my opinion but this is just an example) and transaction ledger is being built. The transactions happen just the same as any coin with a user, and a wallet, and a private key.

HOWEVER!!!

The new coins that are being created are locked! The private key to each one of these coins is not available. Once a human comes into the picture and solves a series of puzzles proving that the USER is IN FACT a HUMAN the final puzzle would reveal a key that would decrypt address/location that the new coins were created are in. This is how coins would enter into circulation. From then on they would function as a normal crypto.



Which one of these examples constitutes a TRUE  proof of human coin? Are they both proof of human?



If they are? How would you implement these puzzles?


please serious discussion I am really into this. There are tons of resources about this out there from cryptographer even before true crypto.

This is actually what is happening now in Mrai people are accepting low fee for solving captchas because this is easy and fast money and mrai is such a popular coin today that it is profitable and easy to invite newbies to participate to mine this coin.

Great that this thread is still alive. Ideally a "proof of human" coin would do useful work. Starting with captcha is ok, but what if it could be applied to learning, or perhaps analysis to help society. That would be the best proof of human algorithm.

I saw a project a while back working on this in the Ethereum Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4aoavy/two_new_components_for_the_proofofindividuality/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4aoavy/two_new_components_for_the_proofofindividuality/). They were trying to use Google hangouts to give people a proof of identity token. However, I think things like UPort (https://www.uport.me/ (https://www.uport.me/)) on Ethereum are solving this problem in a different way, by associating addresses with human information. E.g. you can add your address, or some of your IoT data to a given address, and let Dapps request that information from you (and regulate who gets to see what).

can someone here please give me a response to my questions? on page 2? Do any of these scenarios constitute a proof of human coin?

It's important to notice that there are different kinds of ways to require human input, and that a big factor is the motive behind the coin.

As with any technology, a person wants maximum benefit and minimum damage.

The best way to implement "proof of human" to start is in a coin that has severe limitations, like if you invent a gun, first give it to somebody who can't hear or see too well. Huntercoin took a lot of the big steps in developing the human idea, but the game that the coin uses is something nobody wants to play, the cost to play is prohibitive etc. But if you are interested in how that tech should be developed, look at huc and its devs who are not as mercenary as most.

"Nature find its way". I think is the same with Humans and Technology. People always find a way to take advantage and gain profit from a "software"/technology
Examples:

• Forced labor: Prisoners forced to play WOW to gain gold and equip. Then it would be sold for dollars
• Scientifics and students using AI to solve capchas
• People using apps to fake GPS coordinates to capture pokemons
• Cheap labor: have x numbers of phone, pay someone to give 5 stars to certain app in all the x phones. Then you can sell 5 starts reviews
• Twitter bots / followers
• Etc...

Yes, it's true, but a person can either support poor judgment or discourage it. The sharpest minds never favor abuses like those, and it's a part of nature that bad shortcuts don't work for long.

Good idea but a little bit complicated when you tried to enforce it on making such changes.We cant do anything since there are companies,people do have an advantage as of now when a certain coin pops-out they can easily mine and accumulate as they can since they have the capability and thinking off on human interactions it will surely slow up the rise of difficulty but those whose on the top wont really agree on this thing for sure.

I posted a poll in off-topic with the same name  :D
I asked if people thought captcha's proved you were human.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1827611.0

Captcha coin ?

Impossible due to Sybil. Someone who makes 1,000,000 accounts will mine faster than an honest person who has 1 account.

Captchas are not good either. Most captchas can be broken by algorithms. Even if you do manage to make a bullet proof captcha, people living in the poorest parts of the world will always have an advantage over people who don't because they are willing to work for much less. Then investing or buying the cryptocurrenct is effectively an overly complicated charity. There are better, easier, and less complex ways to donate to charities.

Unless the whole concept of your cryptocurrency is redistribution of wealth... but even still, you would need people to buy the cryptocurrency to do so, and just like real life- only a portion of people will give a portion of their wealth to charities. Nothing really changes in that sense.

There are many Captcha farms... for instance, solve 1000 Captchas and get $0.97 USD here: https://2captcha.com/

These are the weak links of your idea. There are no puzzles that humans can solve that an algorithm can't.

---------------

Biometrics may not even be feasible.

There is no scientific evidence that no two fingerprints are the same. It can only be quantified as being unlikely, as it is impossible to examine the fingerprints of every human alive. Furthermore, no two fingerprints from the same person are exactly the same due to inconsistencies in the way they are scanned/imprinted which can cause fingerprints from the same person to go unmatched. (A nice video from a  good TV show if you like to learn stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM1QgwaKv4s)

DNA fingerprinting is not reliable either. Generally, a certain amount of locations of chromosomes (loci) are used to determine DNA matches. As the number of people in a DNA fingerprint database grows, the more likely it is for collisions to occur. http://freakonomics.com/2008/08/19/are-the-fbis-probabilities-about-dna-matches-crazy/

Furthermore, someone can simply sell their DNA fingerprint to someone else. Therefore, the rich end up with the same advantages they have in PoW and PoS algorithms. Even if you created hardware specifically for a cryptocurrency to scan someone's DNA to confirm it is a certain person, the hardware can still be hacked to produce false positives.

----------

I too am interested in solving this problem, but I have done plenty of research into it in the past few years and came up with no solutions. There may yet still be a solution, but it will not be easy to conceive it.

Wait a minute. When a poor person mines with actual work, they are receiving "charity", but when a rich person mines using hardware while they are actually doing something else, it is "work"?

http://www.thewrittenreference.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/wtf.png

Lol. I never said that exactly. I hate ASICs for opposite reasons, and prefer CPU/GPU mined coins since they are an equilibrium of the two extremes.

All methods of PoW/PoS are different.

Investing in an ASIC mined coin is effectively agreeing to the rich taxing the poor and the middle class. The reward is incentive enough for all to participate, but the rich receive massive efficiency boosts due to the economies of scale ASICs bring and the high costs associated with their development.

CPU/GPU mining is a decent equilibrium between the two extremes. The rewards are also incentive enough for everyone to participate, but the rich receive no benefit on the efficiency of the PoW because GPUs/CPUs cost them the same amount of money as they cost a poor person. Yet, there is no such thing as an ASIC-proof coin, and these too will eventually be mined by ASICs if the risk/reward is enough for it to become economically feasible. So, although these coins start out more fair, just like Bitcoin/Litecoin did, they end with the rich taxing the poor and middle class too.

I stand by my reasoning that investing in a Captcha PoW mined coin is effectively giving to charity, as the reward for the PoW is only big enough for the poorest of people to participate. It is the opposite of ASIC mined coins... instead of the rich taxing the poor, the poor tax the middle class and the rich, because the poor receive the lionshare of the inflation/transaction fees.

PoS and all of its variants end up with the rich taxing the poor too. With the PoS coins that pay X percent per annum for staked coins, the rich tax the poor more and more over time due to compounding interest when the rich reinvest their earnings. They become more and more likely over time to find the next block and process transactions. Especially considering the rich don't need the money or earnings, whereas the poor and middle class are less likely to reinvest the interest, or may even have to withdrawal it all at times due to unforeseen circumstances. dPoS also suffers from the rich taxing the poor, as with dPoS the rich have more voting power which they can use to vote in their own witnesses/delegates to process transactions and receive newly minted coins.

The bolded is why I am interested in alternative consensus algorithms. PoS/PoW and all of their variants are great experiments that are much needed by the cryptocurrency community, because all forms of currently existing PoW/PoS consensus algorithms are broken in one way or another (with many other issues other than this issue alone). Every consensus mechanism has its pros and its cons, and there are no perfect ones whether it be a PoW or PoS variant. There are tradeoffs with all PoS and PoW variants. However, I believe that by continuing to experiment with and brainstorming new consensus algorithms, that we will continue to improve upon currently existing consensus algorithms. Ideally, an improved consensus algorithm would benefit everyone equally- the rich, the poor, and the middle class. It is just a very complicated problem to solve.

All of crypto is about "redistribution of wealth"
None of these "coins" are being created out of thin air..

BUY into an ICO lately ?

Kind of funny how you'd need to have money that is used to buy some other money that replaces the first money no ? ROFL

What about a coin that before it enters circulation. The key to the coin or coins location after being mined is held on a uncrackable and encrypted database that terminates itself after a HUMAN solves a sequence of steps and puzzles to prove the USER is a human? The inputs to access this database would be sanitized properly and the "Keys" stored in this database would be stored as a Salted Hash until a human properly retrieved it. If malicious code was injected into the database and ANYTHING was retrieved. Not only would the attacker receive a Salted Hash but the database would know something was pulled from it and Purge itself, since it only stores the single Salted hash anyways. The attacker would be left with a Salted Hash to try and crack to gain access to the key witch would make them feel stupid because its a HELL of a lot easier to just prove you are human. Of course to implement this you would need hundreds of thousands of databases and thousands more being created daily by a decentralized service. So this is all in theory at this point.

Specifically solving capchas is a wasteful use of labor, of course, but maybe somebody will develop a proof of work algorithm involving a science coin that requires intellectual input, some decision made by a human, in order to constantly sharpen the algorithm.

Regarding "effectively giving to charity", I think your view is a bit skewed. You use the context of "taxes" and "charity" to give the appearance of more legitimacy to coins that favor the wealthy.

I thought I was fairly objective, or at least I meant to be. To be clear, I hate BOTH being taxed by the poor AND being taxed by the rich.

EDIT: To be even more clear- I hate taxes in general because they are generally spent on things I disagree with, shadily pocketed by some individual or corporation, or spent wastefully.

Fair enough, but in a global economy you are not the only participant.

There are puzzles that a computer cant solve. Steganographic and cryptographic puzzles are a good place to start. Also there is a chess puzzle that a computer can not solve http://mashable.com/2017/03/14/solve-this-chess-puzzle/#xsRzI9xYgiq3

There is also a way to make a Human prove they are a human before they even have access to the puzzle ;)

Could you explain how steganographic/cryptographic could be made to be immune from algorithms?

One immune puzzle will not work, as it would be easy to program the solution to that single puzzle into a bot's logic.

via ReCaptcha? It is not immune to computer algorithms either... Google shows numerous instances of research showing it being breakable.
via captchas? Plenty of literature showing they are even less immune than reCaptcha...

solving captcha is a bad idea i guess

I think it is,raiblocks is all mess up in my opinion with to many people claiming but only the top 150 claimants can payout people wants an easy to get a coin and captchas are one of the easy and lazy way to work online .

i think humans would find any way possible to manipulate this system for monetary reward. If someone could hack a computer a bit to emulate two humans to earn twice as much, then that system has a direct monetary reward.. and development shall begin.

Maybe it has to be proof of human with no computer hardware..

I agree that one puzzle would not work the puzzles would have to be different every time with completely different solutions and using different algorithms to encrypt the answers.I would steer away from anything captcha related. Think BIGGER and more dynamic.

The puzzles would have to be dynamic and created by a human with the answers encrypted by a computer and deployed at random by a computer.

the sequence would have to be something that can only happen once. Like a key to the next step would be in a database that purges itself once accessed once. if someone tried to hack the database they would receive a salted hash. Making them feels stupid because its a lot easier to prove they are human than to solve a salted hash.

It just need to prove human activity - so something what it is hard to emulate or trick

some tests can be hidden from audience or be taken randomly during compilation, there is also a lot of possibilities and behavioural data to analyse.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1944481.0

Proof of Being HUMAN mixed with Proof of Work [ANN] [preICO] ICO Unicorns.WORLD

Obviously it need to be a inflation coin, but that is not a problem for currency as long as there is software build on it to boost popularity.