Bitcoin Forum

Is it correct to assume that the inventors of Proof of Work are Moni Naor and Cynthia Dwork?

If they were the first to have written a paper about this concept and explained how it can be useful for specific cases such as protecting from DOS attacks and spam, then yes, you can safely assume that they are inventors of Proof-of-Work. But why are you asking if it is already written in the article on Wikipedia? Adam Back's "HashCash - a denial of service counter-measure" is also based on the concept of Proof-of-Work and Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned this work in his Bitcoin whitepaper. I think the reason he didn't mention a research paper by Moni Naor and Cynthia Dwork is that he was looking for actual working implementations of interesting concepts, not abstract concepts themselves. You can always express and formalize your idea, but without implementation, it is not that interesting and cannot be used in other projects directly.

As far as it's documented, yes.

Here's also an article that might be of interest to you as it gives a pretty good overview over the conceptual building blocks that culminated into PoW's usage as key component for Bitcoin's consensus algorithm:
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559

I think the more accurate reason is that it's common in research to not cite the paper which formed the essence of some other paper in your paper's bibliography, as it's not directly related to the topic at hand (back then, it wasn't called Proof of Work when that paper was written).

I don't know why I suddenly logged in today after such a long time, but YES indeed very sure yes...
They used to say it in the intro about Bitcoin origins a strategy/idea that did not succeed in preventing spam emails in the
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685637
The paper proving it didn't work in preventing spam emails
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf
.
I'm not sure where I give the credit to first hear that; could be either Princeton University 2015/2016 lectures on Bitcoin & Cryptocurrencies, or Tim Roughgarden talk with Vitalik Buterin about EIP-1559

It's one thing to imagine a concept idea about something and totally different thing to put it into practice with real world examples.
Hal Finney was the one who adapted this concept in 2004 using the SHA256 hashing algorithm, and calling it eusable proof of work.
Few years later this was adopted for Bitcoin back in 2009, and than it was followed by all other shitcoins.

Both Nano [1] and IOTA [2] use PoW for spam protection. Or at least they used to, not sure what the current state is or how it accounts for improvements of hardware over time. Beyond that I guess having a central coordinator helps.

[1] https://blog.nano.org/nano-pow-the-essentials-6bf8b021d49d
[1] https://legacy.docs.iota.works/docs/getting-started/0.1/transactions/proof-of-work


Edit: I just reread your post and realized that you were already thinking about specialized PoW attacks, rather than how IOTA and Nano are preventing spam transactions in general. My educated guess is that the economic incentives simply aren't there yet.

Thanks that's make a lot of sense, in fact your thoughts somehow make me think about "Pure mathematics" and "Applied mathematics" in a coffee shop.