Bitcoin Forum

Hypothetical question. I'm just curious. Is it possible to make coin when transactions would be confirmed by work that is only possible for human to do and why is it bad or good idea?

That would not work. The mechanism used by cryptos to converge to one canonical blockchain depends on operations that are hard to perform (hashing) but cheap to check (verifying that a block hash is valid).
I assume it's impossible to define such an operation that only a human can perform, but that can be verified independently by thousands of nodes. If it can be verified by a program, it can be computed by a program.

Onkel Paul

That's a good idea, have it where it can the amount be varied independently through thousands of nodes as a computer program for maximum reward.

You could do it with Proof of Stake.

Um.. why? There's a video on youtube of someone working out the bitcoin calculations on a piece of paper, but it's not feasible to have a system composed entirely of human confirmations. It would take too much time and human error would be rife so that's why it's automated with computers.

you may change the proof of work mechanism.
For instance you can use Geolocation data of users via GPS of phone or browser's location etc. Then you may use this data as a proof mechanism.

It's maybe too hard but it's good for human health ;D (you need to walk to find a proper location to have accepted shares ;D)

That would probably be something similar to POW, with something else on top of it.

That's not safe against cheating. A hacked device can easily spoof geolocation or other information of that kind.
Proof of work using hashing is actually a pretty strong concept. I have never looked into the way proof of stake works, but I suppose it's equally sound.
Remember, the key is that the "mining" operation must be hard (with an adjustable difficulty) so that even millions of parallel activities trying to mine a block will only result in one block every x minutes, but verifying that a hash is correct must take a computer only fractions of a second.
I still claim that it's impossible to find such a mechanism where the actual "mining" is performed by a human. If it is verifyable by a computer, it can be generated by a computer, and much faster than it could ever be generated by a human.

Onkel Paul

What kind of work? Mental or physical ? Sticking to one would be not fair. The other, wouldn't be easy to achieve.

Mangocoinz?

So why not make both verifiable by humans? Mining then would be a process of both solving and verifying, and verification would be by consensus. You could argue such a system would be flawed in that you could spam the network with false verifications, but the reverse would also be true, and eventually legitimate users should far outstretch false verifiers. The proof of work would have to be something beyond the capabilities of any modern or near-modern computers, and there are plenty of areas of human reasoning that would be beyond machines for at least a decade or two.

why exactly do you want to that? everyday everyone is trying to make things easier by making machines, computers and such do people's work

Please provide a concrete problem domain and explain how generating, transmitting, and verifying transactions will work and how the coin is secured against attacks.
Will transaction & block verification be done by humans? That would involve a lot of work if you have more than 5-10 transactions per day, operating a node that's just keeping up with the blockchain without any mining at all will become a 24/7 job (if you have a spouse and kids who can stand in for you while you take a nap or eat something you might survive it for some time.) As I said, if verification of a block can be done by a computer, the computation can be done by a computer as well (it's just brute force enumerate-and-test just like normal hashing.)
If you're thinking of something like solving chess or go problems, think again. Computer chess is already almost on par with the abilities of world chess masters. For go, the situation is not so clear-cut, but I suspect that within short time computer algorithms would improve a lot.

Onkel Paul

There is DPOS delegate-proof-of-stake by BitShares where useful work for the DAC is basically rewarded by extra mining rewards going to those who produce more work as judged by the BitShares stake-hodlers.  People can get "hired by the blockchain" or "crowdhired". 

The blockchain isn't secured by the work they do though, they just get extra rewards for working for the DAC.

Why do we even need to confirm transaction by humans , doesn't make any sense.