Bitcoin Forum

Hi, this is KJ. I am a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Liverpool.

I am proposing a useful PoW without replacing Nakamoto Consensus. I named it Economic Proof of Work (EcoPoW).
I have talked about this algorithm to several experts in Blockchain,
including Dr. Jiaping Wang, Dr. Qi Chen from MSRA, Dr. XiaoKang Mo, Prof. Xi Chen from NYU, and received positive feedback.
It is relatively simple to understand if you are familiar with PoW and Proof of Replication (PoRep).

EcoPoW uses PoW as an encoding algorithm during the PoW outputs consensus.
As the consensus uses the left bits of the hash output binary (the more 0s, the more difficulty), the encoding algorithm uses the right N bits.
When N=8, we encode 1 byte at a time (around 256 sha2 hashes to encode 8 bits).
Since N is adjustable, we can change the difficulty of encoding, such as 2 bytes a time (around 65536 hashes to encode 16 bits ).
The encoding is expensive as designed, and decoding is cheap as it only takes one hash operation.

The reason we need to use PoW as an encoding algorithm is that the computation can be used for Proof of Replication.
It is the key algorithm for blockchain storage, such as Filecoin.
Filecoin uses PoRep for user data security against Outsourcing Attacks.
The core idea of PoRep is to encode the user file's original content into a unique replication with their unique name as a key (a public key can be used as the key).

When verifying, the prover needs to compute the proof from the replication instead of the original content.
Even the prover can perform an Outsourcing Attack by fetching the replication from others and decoding in seconds,
and he still needs a lot of computation and time to encode the decoded content with his name into his unique replication.
This prevents the Outsourcing Attacks as it is cheaper to keep the replication honestly on his storage device.

After diving into the research, once the PoW is useful, there are some important impacts:
1. The miners are making money by selling their computation and storage resources.
The coins are not the only revenue source for the miners.
2. Once the computation is consumed locally, miners will no longer sell the computation to the mining pool to exchange the coins.
It will bring true decentralization to the blockchain world.
3. The PoW computation is task-based.
If there is no demand, the computer will go to sleep mode to save energy.

We propose to build a blockchain with storage and EcoPoW.

I think the last part here is key to building a proof-of-work based consensus without all the energy consumption.

At some point in the blockchain economy, when the (logarithmic) price curve crosses the corresponding curve for difficulty - possibly with some adjustments because price and difficulty are not 1:1 - it will make no sense to throw additional hashpower to the network.

So when such a situation happens, which I'm guessing will be after a few decades, ASIC vendors can include a "sleep mode" with Wake-on-LAN feature so that a pool can wake up the miner when the difficulty reaches a certain threshold.

My suggestion won't lower existing energy usage, but puts a "soft cap" on the energy use without the need for a soft fork.

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Is there a link to the research paper of EcoPoW?

I am unsure though what would stop somebody change his node to still accept (and then rely) new blocks even in the moments he should be sleeping.
I don't know if this can be done without a centralized entity that confirms the blocks were created only when they should (or sends out the tasks and "pays" for the blocks).
What am I missing?

OK, I cannot estimate how much energy would be saved, or more would be wasted, unless we have this chain running.

However, even more energy were burned, now it is not for the chain security only, the computation is used for a honest proof of the user data storage.

I think it is risky/difficulty to change Bitcoin into a storage blockchain now. But Im planning to make a storage chain with this design.

Beside, the tasks are the storage requests. In this era, we generates data any moment. So ideal there are enough tasks making the blockchain security.

And yes, more feedbacks, please.

No, I'm not selling this to Bitcoin for any hard fork.

The idea is about how we can make PoW useful.
It is too risky and too big change for Bitcoin Network, at least for now.

However, it is still interesting if EcoPoW can be implemented. I'm working on it.
Because I see the opportunity that we can have a PoW blockchain without a mining pool.
That makes me excited.

As ETH left PoW, BTC is the only landmark for decentralization now.
However, the mining pool is still there. Maybe it can be removed?

If this works, we would have a more decentralized blockchain.

For those who don't know what's Proof-of-Replication: https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf

I took a quick glimpse to Proof-of-Replication, and the paper essentially describes a way that nodes can prove the replication of their dedicated physical storage? Sort like Proof-of-Space Chia Network uses?

This particular sentence says a lot. You have it wrong. Proof-of-Work is already useful. It protects the network from unreliable factors. It's the, yet, unique solution to Byzantine's fault.

I also believe its better to make a "pilot" storage blockchain because the chances of changing the underlying consensus type of Bitcoin is practically zero, for the distant future.

What I suggest is the following:

Try to emulate transaction volume between January 2021 and January 2022 on the pilot blockchain, so you can make an accurate estimation of the results or whatever you want to measure: efficiency, energy, or whatever.


I'm pretty sure that PoW is already useful in that it accomplishes what Nakamoto2008 described for it to do, but I am curious to know how a miner-less blockchain would look like in terms of participants. It is not desirable for the main stakeholders to be exchanges and liquidity pools (Proof of Stake / ETH) or banks (XRP).

Also, take into consideration that you can build stuff with sidechains. No consensus is required, and it is based on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Me too. What I'm confident about is that a mechanism with a real-world cost parameter missing comes with great disadvantages.
 
It's pretty much the same thing. Bankers already work as stakeholders.

I would like to comment on 2 subjects that you also mentioned here.

First of all, conceptually, when mining Bitcoin, the energy is not wasted. Nobody would say that a car factory wastes energy to run their machines either, right? You are minting new coins and expending energy for that; I don't understand why so many people believe this is wrong.

Secondly, also conceptually, adding a secondary use to your mining, such as using the heat or using an algorithm that performs 'useful' computations - since all of this has monetary value, you just extract more money out of the same energy, i.e. just increasing the efficiency of your gear. This means everyone will do it, the power consumption will not drop and the difficulty just goes up a little.

I totally agree that PoW is useful.
However, the others who are worried about the energy cost of PoW, most of them choose PoS now.
I wouldn't say I like PoS, as the soul of blockchain, is about the miners contributing resources but not capitalizing.

So, another direction we can try is to make PoW "more useful".
Assuming there are three roles:
Blockchain system, miners, and users in the system,
I can say the current PoW mining is useful to the blockchain system security.
The user cannot feel insecure unless the amount of computation is low enough (most of the miners quit).

EcoPoW is adding another usage to the existing PoW.
It did not change PoW for consensus at all.
And the PoRep/encoding with EcoPoW does not cost extra computing.
It is useful to blockchain users as proof that the data is kept by a resource (storage) provider honestly.
The storage providers (miners) can charge the users with the proof. It is the new revenue source for the miners.


The Proof of Replication and Proof of Space is different.

Proof of Replication (PoRep) does not generate consensus.
It only shows the data were kept by another user, honestly (on a dedicated storage, to prevent an OutSourcing Attack).
It saves useful user data on disk.
Filecoin uses PoRep for user data security and PoS for consensus.

Proof of Space (PoSpace/PoC) is a replacement for PoW.
It outputs consensus but no useful user data on disk.
It uses computation to pre-generate a lot of trash data on disk.
After pre-generation, there are less energy cost for the consensus generation.
Chia project uses PoSpace so it is not a blockchain storage project.

I agree with this.


I'm not going to get into any more bikeshedding about usefulness so let's just leave it at that.


I'm assuming this is going to work as long as a miner has other resources to sell such as storage, and by that metric, things like network traffic and RAM?

If so, then you should know that most ASICs only have a minimal amount of storage, so the EcoPoW cannot be directly used by them without dramatic redesigns of the ASIC. You can't just slap in a hard disk drive without shooting up the average cost of the miner by some margin.

The "others" who are "worried" about the energy cost of Proof-of-Work aren't sufficiently educated enough to understand Proof-of-Work, or they're just enemies of the ecosystem. We all know how Proof-of-Stake works, and if there were no tradeoffs compared to Proof-of-Work, we'd have already switched to it. But, it comes with some serious disadvantages, those are centralization and security sacrifice.

Anyway, if your idea requires no consensus, as I've already said, it can be built as a sidechain.

Yes, let's go back to the PC and maybe GPU. The original idea of Bitcoin and PoW are using the spare computation of PC, right?

PC have free bandwidth and spare compuation. The only cost is a 8T-16T hard disk. No SSD reqiuired.
And remember the user storage requirement is not one-time paid. There is sustainable incoming for miners.

PoW is almost perfect except the energy cost and the mining pool. If the "enemies" are using the PoW computation, they would have nothing to complain.
If PoW still has space to improve, let's upgrade it! (Upgrade PoW first, not Bitcoin)
I do this because I love PoW.

For decentralization, you definely want a PoW with no mining pool.

The core idea is let PoW algorithm output both consensus and Proof of Replication/encoding within same computation.
If we just use PoW for encoding, it make no sense to build anything.

Or just because there isn't much concern. The game theory discourages all kind of attacks. Not just of an outside attacker.

That wasn't the original idea, but it does form a more decentralized network, yeah.

I'm not sure I make sense from this. What do you mean "to complain"?

Mining pools are necessary for low-capital miners to have a steadier income. What's needed is to discourage centralized pools' malicious reorgs further.

The energy cost is integral to PoW-based consensus security. Diverting part of the energy cost to "useful" computation, takes away from the security of the network as means of payment. But maybe this property is not as fundamental as it seems, so it will be interesting to see a fleshed out proposal on how to approach this matter from a different angle.

I'm not a fan of the necessity of mining pools for stable mining income either; however given the free choice and ease of switching mining pools it's less of an issue than it might appear to be at the first glance.

Who pays for the computation and storage resources been sold by the miners?

Is the coin been exchanged or is it serving as a new UXTO using the usual p2p system in a new address, then  secondly if miners no longer sell the computation won't it take even longer for confirmation so as to verify the legitimacy of the coin.
Sorry to ask is the computer sleeping as a central storage network, will there be no contribution from other miners to keep the the network running

Some smart miners will create 'fake' demand  :)

You are trying to 'get more out' while 'putting the same in', though. Thermodynamics do not change.

I'd also argue that adding any such large change to Bitcoin has the potential to create so much more harm than good, e.g. through bugs and security problems, that it is completely unviable to do. And I also heavily doubt that the people who believe coins should be created out of thin air (unlike literally any other good or product), will be happy / silenced with such a compromise solution, anyway.

If the "enemies" complain the energy cost due to PoW, they will have no reason to complain EcoPoW as the computation is comsumed for both the chain security and the user data safe.
Otherwise, we must shutdown all the data centers for energy-saving.

True, but there are new revenue source for the miners by selling their storage and computation.


The users who want to storage their data in a blockchain storage network.

The "exchange" I used here, is to give the computation to the mining pool and get coin reward in return.
If miners are not connecting to mining pool, all they are solo mining. It still protect the PoW network and new blocks are generated.

We assume lots of encoding tasks are given to different PCs all over the world.
While those PCs finished the tasks are into the saving mode, the others are still working.
In this era we generate data every moment. The more data into the blockchain storage, the safer the blockchain is.

If the users pay, the tasks are not fake.
Especially when the coin's value or price is low, then the user payment for the storage become the main revenue.
Unlike the coin reward in the solo mining, you dont need to be very lucky to get incoming.

Compare to 2008, we have better bandwidth at home.
For the user storage request, it requires to be proved (PoRep) within 24 hours or 1 week, depending on the system design.
There will be enough time for a prover to download the data.

Again, I said I'm not selling this to Bitcoin. Yes, the change is huge and it is not proven.
We can see this idea as an upgrade of PoW. I'd rather build a new blockchain storage project to see how things going on.
This give me the flexible to change anything, which is not limited in a framework.

I'm just dropping this here, because it's relevant: Complains don't matter. Actions do. We're perpetually debunking this environmental propaganda years now. They don't have counter-arguments to most of our arguments. Switching to another mechanism (theoretically, I know) because of these complains is not going to happen, because we're already dealing these with strong arguments.

What does this have to do with miners' steadier income?

In this system: blockchain, miners and users
Users can send transactions and request to store their data on the blockchain.
Miners can mine (produce block) and serve user content storage requests.

The chance to find new block under solo mining is very little, like a lucky draw.
However, if the miners are keeping the content for the users, they will receive the payment for storage resource every week.

That's the nodes' job. Running a full node serves the network in two essential ways: It helps it bandwidth-wise, and it insures the presence of the chain in more places. Miners can right as well run a full node, providing extra storage, but their job is to provide computational power.

I think you've confused the purpose of running a full node yourself, and avoid trusting a third party for doing it for you. There's already an incentive on running a full node, that is privacy and security. There's no need to essentially tax the users who don't want to run a full node, which is what you do if you reward those who do run one.

The Bitcoin full node is hosting the blockchain data (transactions data).
In the EcoPoW design, the miner contributes the computation for PoW consensus, and some disk space for USER's files storage.
Remember it is a blockchain with file storage, something like Filecoin.

I'm not talking about the full node or even Bitcoin. Dont limit your imagination.
I believe the future blockchain needs sharding (maybe not ETH sharding).
And we're not taxing the user. It is the real the storage demand.

So, do the files get saved in a separate chain, ideally a sidechain, wherein all hosters earn coins to incentivize them continue hosting? What's the difference with filecoin?

Okay, I thought that since the miner gets paid to use his storage, he earns an extra bitcoin, which would make it a tax. But, we're talking about a sidechain / altcoin reward here as far as I understand.

We can see the EcoPoW from two angles.

From the blockchain storage angle:
EcoPoW idea comes from my study of Filecoin.
Filecoin uses Proof of Replication framework, but their encoding algorithm is SDR plus the more expensive zk based verify algorithm, make the storage very very expensive.
On the other hand, the Expect Consensus (EC) is actually a kind of PoS. https://spec.filecoin.io/algorithms/expected_consensus/

EcoPoW intends to use PoW as the encoding algorithm, meanwhile the blockchain is PoW protected as well.

From the PoW blockchain angle:
In an ideal case, the blockchain doesn't need to issue coins to reward the miners like Bitcoin.
It is like a free protection to the PoW blockchain network.
The amount of computation spent on consensus is no longer limited by the Bitcoin price.

The real storage demand will power the consensus/block generation.
The more data stored on the blockchain storage system will be turned into the chain security.
(Maybe we still need the concept of token, such as ERC20 to create something like USDT, so that users can pay the miners)

Thus, we can have a more cheap and decenterizaled blockchain storage powered by PoW.
People can mine the blockchain at home with common devices.
And there is no mining pool.


Sure, since we're upgrading PoW, it is nice to build something without limitation.
Maybe years later we can discuss about how to apply this back to Bitcoin, or just leave it there.

For a normal user, they may prefer to purchase the storage with stable coin such as USDT or DAI, which is also different from Filecoin.

I see a use-case here in backing up data.

The data can be archived and then compressed using .tar.xz, .7z, or something like that, and then split into smaller chunks, which can each be uploaded to some server individually which then embeds them into a large central storage rack (or data center(s)).

Everyone will always need to back up data periodically, and according to what you said, more storage = more security, so this is a perfect arrangement - users get their data backed up, and the chain becomes secure against 51% attackers (and ransomware).

In case a user wants to encrypt the data so that it's only visible to themselves, their client can simply derive an AES key from a password, similar to how Bitcoin Core does it, and use that to encrypt/decrypt each of the chunks. Losing the key is not a problem because as long as you still have access to the data, you can just make a new backup copy.

People will no longer have to pay for expensive stacks of disks or backup schemes, since the blockchains are immutable by design, and always accessible.

Web3 in action. :)

This particular sentence doesn't make sense to me. What's encoding with Proof-of-Work? Did you perhaps mean timestamp-based algorithm?

How is it free? Miners will have to increase their expenses with extra hardware. I'm still not sure how Proof-of-Work helps the "decentralized-storage-network" situation.

Why would ordinary people (I presume, the storage users?) pay for mining?

This abruptly centralizes the project. Stable coins are not decentralized.

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What's the problem with purchasing hard drives? Safe, private, efficient, cheap.

I want to press the 'Like' button. Ok anyway, you get my point.

You're trying to show the free storage but miners are still rewarded with Bitcoin. I'm not sure, but maybe it works.
I'm trying to show the free chain security but paid storage.
It is open to discuss. Both can use EcoPoW.

This is explained at the beginning of the thread.
However, I made a PPT to explain how https://docsend.com/view/2n3cjscwf7c2mb29

Since the miners are already paid with the file storage, the blockchain will not need to issue/mint new coins to pay the miners.
"free" is to blockchain, because the blockchain used to mint coins to gain security.
Miners needs to get hardware, but they have been paid.

The storage users pay for the storage, and they need to get the proof that their files are honestly stored.
To generate that proof, miners are using encoding.
The encoding algorithm output two things within same computation: 1. the encoded content (replication) 2. PoW blockchain consensus (new block)

So, yes, magicly storage users paid for the mining.

Yes, maybe USDT is centralized, but DAI (or other algorithm stable coin) can be decentralized.

I'm happy to explain all this.
I do care for the decentralization and PoW.

It requires a personal email; it doesn't accept temporary email addresses apparently. Is it private / academic work? If it isn't sensitive, upload it elsewhere.

There are two ways you can reward a miner; tax the users directly, or tax the users indirectly.  :P
You have to either mint new coins, or collect some miner tax from users. As far as I understand, miners' income comes from file uploaders.

Oh. So, the difference with a cloud service and a filecoin-like blockchain is that the latter provides proof of the storage?

The file content will have to either be included into a block, or included into miner's local disk. Isn't that correct? Since the former can't scale, how do you ensure the miner will keep it in his personal storage, or just that he'll not go offline right after you pay him?

That fails to explain how you get more than 1 (or a few) bytes of storage per PoW, i.e. per block.

Yes, it explains the basic concept.
Any programmer can extend this algorithm:
1. When the current byte finished encoding, continue to encode the next byte.
2. When a new block was found and broadcasted, mine/encode based on the latest block.
3. Adjust the encoding difficulty, you can choose 1 byte or 2 bytes to encode, or any bits less than the hash output bits width. (for sha256, 256bits max. however, you wont choose too difficult setting.)


Any gmail works! You can use my gmail to watch it.
Sure, I'm working on the PhD research but I'm self-funded for several years.
The emails were collected for potential funding to build a blockchain.
We can only prove this idea working by actually building it.


Yes, just like cloud computing, it is not free.
The transactions on Bitcoin is not free as well.

Yes, for cloud service, usually hosted by big names nowaday. They can use the best hardware and reduce the redundancy to 2 copies but providing 99.999999... service available under their control.
In the blockchain, anyone are free to join or leave. Then we need Proof of Replication/storage in such a permission-less network.
Again, PoW is to blockchain security and PoRep is to file storage security.

The file content/replication are never going to a block. User content only needs several replications but the chain blocks are copied by the full nodes worldwide.
And yes, the PoRep is used to ensure the miner stay online and they need to generate the proof from replication periodically.
Honestly we can only proof the users data are still existing, but it is hard to prove the storage service provider have enough bandwidth for user to get files back. It may require the users to test downloading and the system can build reputation with good service providers. That requires further study.

Nothing is free; there's always a cost involved.

It is; nobody will buy tons of storage drives altruistically. They will want a reward. And since mining / staking / ... rewards are paid in cryptocurrency, meanwhile hardware is priced in fiat, the exchange rate always has an impact.

You say consensus is powered by storage (like pure Filecoin), yet still want PoW somehow mixed in. And how does adding file storage in parallel to a PoW (mining) blockchain suddenly allow people to mine again at home, without pools? Do you mean that people can do the 'hosting' part at home meanwhile ASIC farms still exist?

In general, I don't think a blockchain is the right data structure for decentralized file hosting. The reason is that blockchain doesn't scale. If everyone were to upload a mere 1GB, the blockchain would reach a size of 7 Exabytes, which would require you to buy almost 400 thousand (!) of the latest IronWolf 18TB drives. That runs you roughly 160 million USD. I don't think anyone would run such a node.

In practice, it means that storage space on the (any!) blockchain is extremely expensive due to the very fact that every single node will hold a copy of it. For anything except the most valuable information, it is cheaper, easier and overall better to use a different solution to store your data.

For decentralized file storage, you can generally just stick to Torrents.

Have you modeled how expensive or how centralized this blockchain you envision, is going to be? There will be a linear correlation between nodes and storage price. And the price would need to be recurring & increase with increasing number of nodes; as well as somehow include a mechanism to account for storage getting cheaper.

Except that Bitcoin transactions are tiny, the user base is pretty small and the blockchain is still at already around 500GB. You will be able to store tiny text snippets at most, if you seek to get Bitcoin-like decentralization.

Firstly, maybe consider forking Filecoin and adding whatever changes you like; could be simpler and cheaper than writing it from scratch.
Secondly, before building it, I'd actually try modeling it, running some simple numbers and calculations to make sure it's actually viable.

The core idea of EcoPoW is get the PoW output two things rather than just than the consensus.
If the users paid, the blockchain doesnt have to issue the coin for its security, or the coin price doesnt impact to its security.

No one will buy tons of storage.
But it is nice to have many miners each to buy a 8T (cheap) hard drive, and many users each purchase several gigabytes of space.
And, yes, I suggestted the storage price are counted in USDT or DAI or another algorithm stable coin in fiat.
That is another topic.

Filecoin spends most the computation on PoRep and ZK. And for the consensus, EC is actually a PoS (which doesnt cost much computing).
I believed PoW can bring the true decenterization.

The next question is very important
Let's forget about ASIC first. Everyone have CPU or GPU at home.
It is important to understand miners contributing computation for the reward. And nowaday, the mining pool is the only choice to get incoming.
If the computation are useful for miners to get more incoming, they will consumed the computation locally, which behaved like solo mining.
We can see the mining is a side output during file encoding.
This is how mining pools are gone naturely.

Next question,

I dont think scale-up is a big issue.
Maybe 7 TPS is not enough, but what if 2000-5000 TPS? It is the time to build some application.
However, I still hope the scale-up technology doesnt break the decenterization.
As we know, most of new chains are increasing TPS by decreasing the decenterization. But we must stick with the existing decenterization.

Users files are not into the chain blocks. Most of blockchain storage doesn't do this except AR and its Proof of Access.

Yes, we already have IPFS which is similar to BitTorrent.
Nothing is free, we need a blockchain solution. Filecoin is good direction but too expensive.

Let's say we already have PC at home. We dont purchase extra bandwidth and space like in the data center. And we dont hire expensive engineers.
The only additional cost is the extra hard drives.
Maybe Chia miners would love to join this.
The miners will figure out how to get revenue higher and how to make the price lower.

Again, the users files are not into the chain blocks.
Hoever, we definely need a high TPS and sharding blockchain.

I wont fork a PoS chain. It takes longer to build, because we have to remove all the code first. Did you see Filecoin or ETH fork Bitcoin?
I already have a sharding blockchain.

The price model is adjustable, and sometimes requires the feedback from the community, but the blockchain code structure is hard to change.

I don't understand what that means. Can you explain how exactly you propose to change the consensus rules?
Why would a miner spend 256 more effort to get the last 8 bits "correct", when they can instead just focus on the initial zeros, and once satisfying those, pretend that whatever the final 8 bits encode is what needed to be stored?


Even at minimal encoding difficulty, you can store at most 32 bytes per block.

Me neither, that's why I think this proposal, filecoin included, is fundamentally flawed. If I want to share a file, I'm the one who first of all have to take personal responsibility of the file, and second, pay the required cost. There's no reason a hundred miners keep my file when I only need one to store it. That's the definition of inefficiency. If I want true decentralization of my file storage, then I should run a BitTorrent client, and seed my stuff there. If I don't care about that (which I honestly don't), I can stick with a centralized solution, such as Mega Upload. Privacy can be assured with encryption.

And that's before I even comprehend (2 pages now) how Proof-of-Work can help the situation in decentralized file sharing / storage. It's just flawed, no need to. Blockchains solve the double-spending problem, and that's all they do.

Miners aren't the only ones keeping a copy of the blockchain, though. Every single node will need to buy 8TB (or however much) storage for the blockchain to remain decentralized.
There are even miners without own full node; not sure why you conflate those groups.

Exactly; only PoW can give you true decentralization. By adding paid file storage, you add in all the problems of Filecoin & keep the high power consumption of SHA256 mining as well.

Oh, so there will be no actual SHA256 mining anymore; when you say mining you actually mean file encoding? You should have said that earlier. Well, Filecoin also requires file encoding right. So filecoin is also a 'PoW' mechanism in your eyes, because the nodes need to do some computation?

Do note that mining pools aren't such a big issue as some papers or articles may make it out to be. If you got more questions about this, feel free to ask or browse the forum.

I don't understand what you wrote in the last paragraph, but I suggest you use the right spelling (decentralization); if you always write it like this, you may get less / worse search results when browsing the web.

How do you aim to make it less expensive? What is the big difference maker here?

What do you mean by 'miners'? Just file hosting nodes that decode / encode data or actual ASIC (or other algorihm based) miners? By the way; ASIC is probably the way to go here, especially in this application since you want your CPU to be fully available for file delivery and delegate any other computation to a separate ASIC chip.

Oh wait, so you are proposing a regular PoW blockchain, with regular repeated hashing for mining and minting new coins, just like Bitcoin, but nodes can choose to host some files (depending on their capacity) and get a reward for it? What if they delete them again? Is it a recurring payment? There will be no guarantee of file availability right?

This sounds like just adding Bittorrent into Bitcoin Core (or similar); I don't think it makes sense to mash different softwares with different purposes together like that. Just add a reward system to Torrents and that's it. There is no reason to claim it somehow makes PoW more useful or anything like that. This is much easier implemented as a Bittorrent add-on instead of building a whole new blockchain.

The nonce are the enocded value. I'm using python 3.8

We did not change the rule of consensus, the block difficulty is the start of the hash. (left bytes)
But just adding a check for the end of the hash to see if it is equal to the byte we want to encode. (right bytes)


Maybe it is true.
However, if I did not step into the detail of Filecoin, I will never realize that PoW can be upgraded. (Now lots of people turns to PoS, what a pity!)

Compare to other blockchain storage project, I will say EcoPoW based blockchain is totally different.
It is not just a blockchain storage, this is the key to build a more decenterization blockchain!

I can foresee the storage feature become the source of PoW computation, since we all know that coin price will not go up forever.

No, only the miners need extra hard drive, the node doesn't need to.
Again, the users file doesnt go into the chain.

I believe I was fix Filecoin's problem with EcoPoW.
Again, I'm not selling this to Bitcoin, there is no hard fork. We build a new chain but PoW based.

Filecoin is PoS (EC), check out my previous post.
There is SHA256 mining and encoding. They are combined in the EcoPoW.
The PoW used to output mining, EcoPoW outputs mining and encoding with the almost same computation (we added another 'if' check).

Yes, mining pools is not big a issue as Bitcoin is still the most decentralized blockchain so far.
However, a PoW blockchain without mining pool will be more decentralized, right?

Yes, I will turn on the grammarly :)
I feel I have repeated many times on lots of the same questions, forgive me for the typos.

OK, I have explained above.
Filecoin uses expensive server, and it is too noisy. The servers must be place in the data center.
Home PC is cheaper, and the bandwidth are free.
Compare to could computing, there are no expensive engineers.
And, the ZK, we remove it, we have the better way do this.

PC
ASIC can speed up the encoding, GPU as well. Outsourcing is possible.

Nodes doesnt host files, the miners do.
PoRep is designed for guarantee of file availability.
EcoPoW is both a PoW and a PoRep.

This sounds like just adding Bittorrent into Bitcoin Core (or similar); I don't think it makes sense to mash different softwares with different purposes together like that. Just add a reward system to Torrents and that's it. There is no reason to claim it somehow makes PoW more useful or anything like that. This is much easier implemented as a Bittorrent add-on instead of building a whole new blockchain.
A blockchain storage project like Filecoin, but PoW based and other improvements.
BitTorrent and IPFS has no PoRep.

The more unique is that it provides the PoW blockchain free security. That is the key point!
The reason to claim EcoPoW more useful is two usage is larger than one usage. And we did not even alter the PoW, but just adding a 'if' check.

A block can have some extra metadata. You don't have to mess with nonce if you want to include an encoded value. I still don't understand why you'd want to do this, though.

Seriously, do you call this whole thing an upgrade? It's unnecessary and inefficient.

I don't question your part, in comparison with other such blockchains. I question the entire "decentralization of storage" as a concept.

I strongly disagree. A more decentralized blockchain puts scaling above all.

OK, looks like you dont like this.
Sorry that we can not be friends.

I already pasted the python code above, maybe it takes time to understand.
However, thanks for spending so much time on this, bye. :)

It's not about liking something or being friends or not; the tone in this forum is just generally pretty direct and honest. Something I really appreciate.

TL;DR: I don't see why you wouldn't just implement your idea as an addition to a Torrent system or as a whole new Torrent system. Just like Bittorrent, except that 'storage nodes' can set a price per GB and get paid monthly in some (or maybe even one of a few selectable) existing cryptocurrencies. To me, that sounds like an actually useful and realistic product. Tying paid, decentralized storage too much into a (existing or not) blockchain or cryptocurrency client seems to make less sense than tying it into a decentralized file hosting client.

GM,

More about what I had done so far

http://159.65.14.92/dashboard
I have a testnet launched since May 2022.
There are lots of debug info.
It runs on a $6 DO server.
This is developed since 2018.
However, after found EcoPoW I decide to change this into a pure PoW blockchain.

I haven't intergate the storage feature onto the chain.
The design is there but still needs time to code.

It is open to any one. I can only do algorithm and code.
You can be the CEO or any roles.
Feel free to talk to me https://discord.gg/bUu5GcQPb5

I feel like this would just complicate things. PoW is simple, powerful, useful, and has big side benefits to the energy infrastructure of the world. That's pretty great.

I don't see the point of adding Filecoin storage concepts to PoW.

I get the idea of wanting to add extra use cases to PoW's power consumption, but this is just an optics thing. People who don't understand Bitcoin and PoW and aren't educated on its purpose and utility are the ones who attack it. The vast majority of people don't understand these things. Like 99%+ of people. It's just an educational gap that causes bad optics.

PoW is perfect because it doesn't rely on secondary use cases or a secondary market. It's entirely self-sufficient.




So the solution is not to make PoW more complicated by adding ideas from some altcoin. The solution is to continue educating the world so that eventually the majority understand Bitcoin and PoW and a shrinking minority are against it.



The educational keys to the PoW optics problem are:

1. There is no relation between PoW energy consumption and # of transactions so talking about energy used per transaction is nonsensical.

2. There are many more bitcoin transactions happening than what are shown on-chain so even if it wasn't nonsensical to talk about energy per tx the number would still be very much lower than the frightening numbers thrown around by the media and politicians.

3. PoW is by far the most useful consensus mechanism for a decentralized monetary system and is an absolute requirement for Bitcoin's value proposition (and Bitcoin's value proposition for humanity is immense!).

4. Bitcoin will never switch away from PoW so there is no point pushing for the change anyway.

5. Much of Bitcoin's mining has been done by renewables for numerous years now, and some of it is also done with already produced but 100% wasted energy at power plants, which also don't add any pollution to the environment, so compared to the rest of the world Bitcoin mining is leading the movement to clean energy.

6. Bitcoin mining strengthens the energy infrastructure of the world because it can use the wasted energy from any kind of power plant (and power plants waste A LOT of energy), thereby making the energy industry stronger, likely helping lower the cost of energy for society, and allowing humanity to increase energy production (granted this part of Bitcoin mining is still in the early stages but I bet in 10 years the vast majority of power plants will have Bitcoin miners set up on-prem for precisely this reason).

7. PoW is a self-balancing system so the only reason why energy usage keeps increasing is that the economic output of Bitcoin is increasing even faster. PoW mining will always produce more economic output than the energy-cost input. That's just a fact of its design.

8. PoW is already very useful and it is a misnomer to say the energy is wasted. 100% of the energy is used in exactly the way it was designed to be used. The energy is used to secure the most secure network in human history, which operates the most fundamentally sound currency in human history.

9. Bitcoin's energy consumption is still minuscule compared to plenty of other industries, and the only reason Bitcoin's energy consumption is talked about and derided so much is because it is easy to calculate and it is still a new technology that most people don't understand yet so they question it.

...I think those are the main educational points, which, if the populace understood, the bad optics of Bitcoin's PoW would disappear entirely. So that should be the goal, not trying to make hybrid and complicated PoW models.

To the OP, have fun working on your idea though! Nothing wrong with that. I'm sure it'll be fun to try to design it. But since Bitcoin isn't going to hard fork and adopt a different consensus mechanism when PoW already works perfectly, and there isn't really a point to making yet another random altcoin just for the purpose of having a hybrid consensus mechanism, I would point out that this idea should just be an interesting experiment for you and it isn't likely to be something needed by society.

There will be in a few decades when the block subsidy dwindles into insignificance and the network security is mostly funded by transaction fees.

That's just simply not true.

The lack of relation between PoW energy consumption and number of transactions has nothing to do with the fact that there is a block reward. The two systems are entirely unrelated. When miners get mostly, or even only, tx fees the mining energy consumption and number of transactions will still not be related at all. Number of transactions is decided by block time and block size limit, which have nothing to do with amount of energy used by miners.


Think about this: Would number of transactions change if a year from now mining was 1/10th what it is today, or 10x what it is today? Nope. It would have zero effect on number of transactions processed. Transactions will simply continue to stay at the limit of what Bitcoin can handle no matter how much or how little energy is used.


Thank you for pointing out the educational gap in Bitcoin. You're a "hero member" on this forum, so presumably you've been into Bitcoin for a while. And no offense, but even you just got something basic about Bitcoin totally wrong. This just emphasizes the lack of education about Bitcoin because if someone who has been around Bitcoin for a while can get something as basic as that wrong, it kinda drives home the point about why the average person who knows nothing about Bitcoin can so easily buy into the false bad optics spread by the media and politicians about Bitcoin.

The fact that the system will be dependent on transaction fees doesn't mean that you can measure transactions in energy that is spent effectively. A block can contain 4,000 transactions, or it can only contain 1 (e.g., mined right after the previous). Furthermore, a block that took very little time to be mined likely used less energy than one that took longer, while both blocks can have the exact same number of transactions.

Then, we have off-chain transactions, whose number is unknown as far as anyone can tell. Measuring transaction per energy spent is fundamentally prone to error.

You have the causality all wrong.
Amount of mining depends on amount of transaction fees, not the other way around.

With no block subsidy, if the amount of txs drops 10x, then there will be 10x less rewards available for miners  (actually even less if you go from (nearly) full blocks to never full blocks) and so mining must decrease 10x to remain profitable.

It's worrisome that senior members can get such a trivial implication all wrong.


Of course I'm not talking about individual blocks, but about longer term trends.
I'm also (like the poster I replied to) talking about on-chain transactions only. With L2, the number of off-chain transactions becomes completely unrelated to everything, as you could do a trillion off-chain transactions for 2 on-chain ones.

It is true. Think of it this way. The network asks humans to provide security to the network in terms of energy in each step. Since the amount of energy is nontrivial (the whole basis of Nakamoto security), the network promises some compensation to those that protect the network. Nobody is going to mine at a loss (unless they expect greater returns in some reasonable amount of time) so the network security will be roughly the same as the compensation amount because of the incentives/game theory. At the moment, the compensation is a sum of two variables:
1. subsidy - a fixed reward that mints new coins. This variable is design such that it phases out over time
2. fees - a "tax" to incentivize your transaction to take the space on the chain

With time, the subsidy variable disappears into "basically nothing" value and you're only left with the fees. This directly corresponds to the number of transactions as a lower boundary. The network security will be based on it's usage which means on the number of onchain transactions and the competition to capture the block space (bumping the fees as a bribe mechanism).

That, provided that parameters such as bitcoin price, energy price, ASIC price, state intervention etc., all remain constant. But they don't. If you check on the numbers, you'll see that there are times when the price fell by more than 50%, and difficulty rose more than 100%.

Maybe there is less room for error if you consider long term trends, and exclude off-chain activity, but I'm yet to acknowledge the whole point then.

You don't know where the price goes. You might have purchased an ASIC, done the logistics, but there's definitely one variable you can't be sure of.

I agree, hence why I added the "(unless they expect greater returns in some reasonable amount of time)" which you left out of the quote.

Although you must remember, the incentive structure developed within the system of Bitcoin is what's making everything stick together. If the miners are not incentivized, do you actually believe they would continue mining altruistically at cost?

There are Bitcoiners, such as Peter Todd, who are starting to believe that there should be continued block rewards through a "tail emission" for Bitcoin to support the system. I made a topic asking about it before, but no one joined. Hahaha.

Where did you make such topic? I can't find it.
There was a 9-page discussion on this in summer, though:
"Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary" -- A post by Peter Todd (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5405755.0)

I can't find it too, maybe it was just a post in one of someone else's topic, but the "shower thought" behind it was not essentially a tail emission, but a soft fork to decide, yes or no, to a hard fork for maintaining the block rewards by cancelling any future halvings. For example a hard fork, starting on 2048 block rewards are maintained to be at BTC0.04882812 per block until all the coins are mined, cancelling all future halvings.

I'm trying to find it. I found another post of mine, posting about it, but I can't find the original, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5357973.msg57847458#msg57847458

That doesn't solve the issue in the long run, though - if anything, it makes it worse since the date for the last mined coin would approach faster. Anyhow; this is now very off-topic from this thread's original purpose. ;)

Here is a really easy way to implement "proof of replication" in bitcoin:

Require each mining attempt to hash the last "n" blocks, instead of just the current block.

Here is a really easy way for bitcoin to democratize mining pools:

Instead of hashing attempts to find a golden nonce, require signing attempts, where the key used in signing is 1/100th of all the coinbase outputs.  This would mean mining pools realistically could only have around 100 miners each.

I'm glad you are using your PhD to try to help solve this energy problem.  As someone who has been thinking about blockchain since 2010 and energy use nearly as long, I can assure you the place to be looking is "difficult" algorithms.  CPU only algorithms are one of the best places to go.  Also research CAPEX/OPEX ratio, you will find it discussed in oPoW whitepaper.

If we can limit only CPU's to mine it democratizes mining like you want and also limits large mining farms by the much higher capex/opex ratio than easy algorithms like sha256 which can be sped up by orders of magnitude with specialized hardware, throwing much more power at it than CPU's ever could utilize.

There has been a missing link, and that is memory hardness is the only way to reliably stop asics or gpus, but given enough time they will overcome the memory hardness due to moores law.  The simple yet non-obvious solution which I described previously, is to scale the algorithm's memory requirement with moores law.  So for example every 2 years worth of blocks the memory requirement for the hashing algo doubles.  This will preclude asic manufacturers keeping up as the consumer commodity market is the only thing that can keep up with moores law in fast memory.

Have you compared the energy efficiency of CPUs against ASICs?
And have you compared the CO2 footprint of residential energy mix to the CO2 footprint of an ASIC farm's energy source?

12% of the electricity in the US is renewable; while Bitcoin ASIC mining operations use around 70% renewable.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
So suggesting that mining farms are an environmental problem makes no sense.


Also do consider that CPU mining farms would fuck up the consumer PC market even more than the GPU mining of Ethereum did in the past. You could run a PC without GPU, but not without CPU.

Many good points n0nce.

Firstly, when you talk about energy efficiency of CPU vs ASIC, you are probably talking watts/hash.  This isn't a valid metric because the algorithm determines how many hashes is "alot".  A slow algorithm could provide just as much security at 100 hashes/second as a fast algorithm at 1 billion hashes/second.  Hashes/second does not matter, what matters is how difficult it is to achieve 51% of the network hashrate.

Mining uses a lot of power.  It has been discovered that the reason for this is (of course the value of the coin and the block subsidy) but also the low CAPEX/OPEX ratio of SHA256 hashing.  In other words, the equipment to hash a tiny SHA256 input is very basic.  So this framework (an asic chip) can be produced cheaply and fed (with data and power) easily so that dozens or hundreds can live on a single board.  They can run reliably at high temperatures and speeds.

This leads to a massive ability for people with modest capital and lots of cheap energy to scale almost indefinitly.

On the other hand with CPU mining, CPU's are complex and difficult to feed (you often won't find more than one on a motherboard) and the capital (CAPEX) versus power cost (OPEX) ratio is very high.  You simply can't easily scale up to 100 computers (the equivalent of 1 asic hashboard) very easily.  Especially when these large miners can't dominate the market, everyone with a laptop from angola to zimbabwe will be competing with them.

For an example I am CPU mining as I am responding to you, browsing the internet, watching videos, there is no noticable slowdown. Wheras with GPU mining you can't use the computer that is running the GPU mining. Yet this dual use of CPU mining and browsing the web is producing 1/3 the coins as an S9 miner would produce at a fraction of the power usage and heat production.  So I don't think it would hurt the consumer market, in fact it would benefit it by not diverting extra fab capacity to unnecessary GPU chips or ASIC chips.  Especially with the moore's law memory req scaling, consumers would always have, at the very least, last gen of CPU's on the secondary market to buy up.

A little off topic, but that was one of the problems with GPU paradigm was that the memory scaling for EThash was linear not exponential, so GPU miners could basically use all the cards that have been on the market for the last 10 years.  Not so if you double memory req every 2 years then miners would only be able to use the newest cards.

So I was looking at the prices of some dual-socket and quad-socket servers that also got some good memory inside them, and if you put a few of these together, you're staring at the price of an ASIC, but nowhere near it's performance.

It's all in the circuits. I'm not a hardware engineer or anything like that but the more stuff you can push to transistors directly, the more performance you'll get in any application.

And if you can't afford the short-time cost of accelerating a formula like that (likely because the problem will be irrelevant soon), then FPGAs are a nice alternative that gives you some flexibility in wiring it without sacrificing too much performance.

There's more to mining than hashing [1].


Then you'd want to use a memory-hard PoW that can be instantly verified with no memory, or PoW verification
will be unbearably slow.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210506232722/http://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mining-hashing/

How difficult == how much power or hardware do you need. Therefore, for achieving the same level of security, you need to invest the same amount of real-world capital in form of electricity and hardware.
Security is directly proportional to 'waste'.

I understand that ratio, that makes sense. However, your numbers are a bit off. If we assume a 3kW miner that costs roughly 3000$ (it was over 10,000$ at the top): The S19 Pro.
For $10k, you can buy 10 rigs consisting of a motherboard, 12900KF and a PSU. The chip pulls 250W, probably 300W at the wall; achieving a similar ratio as with the ASIC.

With current ASIC prices (same machine going for $3k), the ratio may be 3x better on CPU mining, but it's not orders of magnitude better.

That's assuming nobody will build mining motherboards with 4 chips each or something like that. You know... like nobody expected SHA256 ASICs at the start. ;)

Sorry but you've still got this all wrong. Again, number of transactions has no relation to the amount of energy used for mining. There is zero relationship there.

Blocks are always going to be filled up no matter how much energy is used to mine those blocks. You're confusing number of transactions with cost of fees. Fees have to do with the size of transactions and how many transactions are trying to get into the block, not how many transactions are actually put in the block, because that second number essentially stays the same. We can safely assume that Bitcoin blocks will continue to be filled up in the future as they have been for the past like 6 years or whatever. So there is no real change in the amount of transactions happening per block.

If the case you are trying to make is true then mining would simply stay static forever once the block reward is done and mining only gets transaction fees. Obviously that is not the case. Energy use will go up or down with how profitable Bitcoin mining is. That relies on how many people want to get into current blocks and what the price of Bitcoin is, and then of course on the miner side things like price of electricity, efficient of mining machines, etc. Nowhere in that equation is the number of transactions.

During periods of Bitcoin mania when everybody's making transactions, electricity that goes into mining will go up even though no more transactions will be getting processed on-chain, because fees will go up.  In slower periods the same number of transactions (or more exactly, amount of data per block) will be getting processed but if the mempool isn't bursting transaction fees will be low and therefore electricity used will likely go down.

Again this is why education is so important. If you can't get this right how do we expect the casual politicians and voters and investors to understand this stuff?!
This is why it's important to state over and over and over again that any calculation done about energy per transaction is wrong and simply a nonsensical calculation to make. Now and into the future.

Let's say a block can accept exactly 1000 transactions. Imagine we have two forks Bitcoin1 and Bitcoin2 both of which are valued at $10 per coin and have the same supply.

Bitcoin1 has blocks with a single transaction along with a coinbase output.
Bitcoin2 has blocks with 1000 transactions all paying the minimum fee to cover their transaction size.

Which one do you think secures more energy per block?

Sorry, but your long rambling failed to show anything wrong in either statement.


Plainly false even as we speak...