Maybe something along the lines of OCR or rendering... another requirement that you missed:
4) HAVE ABUNDANT INPUT
If you have to wait to mine until there is some work available agin or if you first have to download gigabytes of scene data and textures (or protein folding data) just to do PoW there might be issues.
Ideally you can generate your work yourself, just like with the current "find a hash value that is lower than X" PoW.
Sukrim, that's right! have a look at the list of distributed computing projects, there's plenty of data to crunch out there. |
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Who cares if what we do is perceived as being useful. "Useful" is a matter of opinion. I find having Bitcoins to spend quite useful. I found burning out two cpu's while folding@home not quite so useful. Wanting to contribute to the greater good is all nice and dandy, but i see no need for it here. You want to help the world? find away to cut the population in half without killing anyone. that would be a help.
Wow thank you so much for that inspiring sentiment. Any zero-use commodity in history eventually converted into a zero-value commodity. There have even been commodities with negligible use, such as tulip bulbs, that eventually had a collapse in price. They were useful in so far as they were transportable(in much the same way that BTC are easily transferable over the net). At the time of Tulip Mania, there was quite a demand for forms of wealth which could be loaded onto ships, transported to eg. New Amsterdam in the new world, and then converted into more useful assets like farmland. However, eventually the market became saturated as the production of such zero-use commodities proliferated. People were 'mining' tulip bulbs left and right, a good portion of the Dutch economy was geared towards growing tulips! How silly of them. Of course they argued that these things were great because they looked nice in your garden, thus had value, and more importantly they had EXCHANGE value- so why argue with it? Eventually people who invested heavily in tulip mania lost everything. |
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so given that, we have our work cut out for us:
what functions are:
1) HARD TO COMPUTE
2) EASY TO VERIFY
3) USEFUL?
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The problem is that mining requires a work that is hard to find but easy to verify.
Prime numbers don't work because finding one is as difficult as verifying it's prime
generally that is true, but consider that once a prime is found and verified then there is little dispute that it is indeed a prime. The idea wouldn't work like regular Bitcoin, instead it must appeal to some kind of authority that says it prime. Of course the P2P fanatics will claim that's 'centralized' but you couldn't pass of a non-prime as a prime, right? If someone found a composite to the pseudoprime then they lose their block. It's a just a fanciful thought at this point  Just want to put all these computers to work on something useful. Seems primes are discovered in batches so I dont expect new primes to be discovered on a regular basis. It would be something like the nobel prize. If you discover a new prime you get a block reward. Imagine we harnessed the power of all these mining rigs and the best mathematicians to solve some of the mysteries of mathematics? |
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oh and regarding Genetic Algorithms, as they have been proposed as a way to solve blocks(informally). GAs are simply a search function that optimize the discovery of maxima in a hyperplane of unknown shape. However if this hyperplane is non-differentiable(which SHA most certainly is, to say the least), then it cannot be used to evolve a useful function. Thus GAs don't give you anything in this case.
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There is no obvious way to shortcut the mining algorithm. The right place to look is Cryptology journals. Researchers are always looking to find holes in the standard algos such as SHA-256. They have found holes in previous algorithms. If someone found a problem with SHA-256, then 1) there would be an market signal in the ASIC miner field- suddenly this hardware would be using an inferior algorithm 2) probably some kind of effect in the price of BTC. But who really knows?
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SAT solving would only help if the algorithm does have parts that can be neglected e.g. a 0 somewhere in the input can be mapped more or less easily to a 13 or 19 in the output. This would also mean that SHA256 is weaker than expected.
I would love to see more examples on this approach, my guess is that this is just variance.
Also the extreme case that would be the easiest to solve according to the theory would be a known hash (e.g. "00000000000000000000000000000000") and then one needs to find a nonce that creates this...
Also what makes SAT solving worse is the need for a time stamp in the header and even worse the reference to the previous block. As far as I understand SAT solving it will try lots of combinations until it finds a solution or has no more combinations left to try. Frequent changes in the input area are probably not helping as there might be actual progress with SAT mining compared to the pure guessing game of traditional brute force mining.
hi Sukrim, youre right! sha256("1")= 6b86b273ff34fce19d6b804eff5a3f5747ada4eaa22f1d49c01e52ddb7875b4b sha256("2")= d4735e3a265e16eee03f59718b9b5d03019c07d8b6c51f90da3a666eec13ab35 sha256("3")= 4e07408562bedb8b60ce05c1decfe3ad16b72230967de01f640b7e4729b49fce sha256("4")= 4b227777d4dd1fc61c6f884f48641d02b4d121d3fd328cb08b5531fcacdabf8a sha256("5")= ef2d127de37b942baad06145e54b0c619a1f22327b2ebbcfbec78f5564afe39d sha256("6")= e7f6c011776e8db7cd330b54174fd76f7d0216b612387a5ffcfb81e6f0919683 anyone notice a pattern here?if you did, you should publish a paper because so far no one has. btw- people did find problems with SHA-0 and some others that's why they are no longer used. SHA is supposed to be irreversible, as in there is nothing you can tell about the input from the output. thus it is theoretically impossible to reduce the probability of finding a solution to a block. Advanced techniques like Genetic Algorithms will not improve your chances. We might one day make advances in Number Theory which can tell us something about about where to look for eg. solutions to Bitcoin blocks, but as of now we don't know(that is, the general public- the NSA et al. might have secret knowledge of number theory and many people have suggested so). there are things that haunt us about number theory that tend to indicate there are things we don't know. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral |
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Why don't we require some sort of useful computation in each Bitcoin block? For instance each block must include a successive prime number. ex. Genesis Block has 2, next block has 3, next 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 ... and the 241883rd block would have the value of http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=241883th+prime The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers rewards for the discovery of very large primes: https://www.eff.org/awards/coop http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/ask-ars-why-spend-time-and-money-finding-new-prime-numbers/ Rather than just making the block computation difficult in some arbitrary way, why not set these processors to doing something useful? At least this creates some kind of real world demand to produce these coins, as there is a real purpose to running the processes. Primes are very useful for the cryptology community and you could 'give something back' to the general space. Also the computation gets increasingly more difficult as you move along the set of primes. There are many techniques, really a whole field of study about how to ascertain these numbers. The set of primes remains one of the more mysterious corners of mathematics. We really don't know much about them. http://140.177.205.23/PrimeSpiral.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects If you got rid of the nonce, and just had a prime number in the block, then hash it- you would basically be giving away all the coins for the entire list of known primes. If you combined it with a nonce/hash scheme then you would introduce some difficulty. Also another approach is to start the genesis block with the LAST KNOWN PRIME. The real 'value' is in the primes that come AFTER the list of known primes. A fun idea would be to create a altchain with no BLOCK NONCE( just the prime number ), the EFF buys them all- then whoever discovers successive primes also generates ownership in this currency. Of course the EFF in the meantime can use this asset to do things like fundraising, etc. -bm |
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note that I titled this 'something LIKE a Put Option'.
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"OpenCoin, the company developing the Ripple protocol"
that's a brilliant use of language there.
do you think that's what they tell their investors?
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Armory already produces fragmented M of N backups. All you have to do is print QR codes along with those backup fragments. That is the alternative to VC that exists. It has numerous advantages like ECC and better hardware/software support.
They had mentioned something along those lines. So if you can produce a secret private key from two numerical factors(in the form of QR codes), then the official described above reveals these two keys by scanning the QR codes and then releasing the coins. It would work in much the same way, just require a little more hardware/software. Would also be more reliable. |
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Greetings Bitcoin People.
There has been much talk in the threads about Bitcoin Especially ways to hedge the future price of bitcoin. For non-Finance types, this means ways to place a bet(hedge) on the projected future price of Bitcoin.
On the projected future price of bitcoin against what? it's just hedging on the future DEMAND for bitcoin. So as long as I have the ability to temporarily trade the coins that I borrow, then I can profit from depreciation. ex. MONDAY: 1 BTC is trading for 100 USD. I BORROW 20 BTC and agree to PAY BACK 21 BTC on FRIDAY. I then SELL the BTC for 2000 USD. TUES: 1 BTC is trading for 90 USD. WED: 1 BTC is trading for 80 USD. THUR: 1 BTC is trading for 70 USD. FRI: LOAN DUE! I buy 21 BTC for 1470 USD. pay back my creditors. 530 USD PROFIT. it's not possible to implement a credit system directly in the block chain.the only reason why no one is doing this is because there are no good credit systems for BTC. I think though that you could use the ones that are out there if you're really good at math and economics. To my knowledge they are not set against the current market rates. |
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Error correction is a problem with this approach. QR codes for example have error correction built in and have wide support by a variety of devices and programs. You can split a private key into multiple fragments using secret sharing algos and then print each fragment together with a QR code on a separate piece of paper. This way you can recover a secret if even 30% of the QR code is damaged.
Im not suggesting having a QR code as the secret. The VC algo ensures that you cannot determine anything about the secret from either of the factors. How VC works in conjunction with QR codes would probably be an interesting research project. I believe both systems use some kind of derivation of the Discrete Fourier Transform. There's another thread that discusses the use of Shamir Secrets(that VC was based on) with ArmoryX client. You could for instance use Shamir Secrets in the form of QR codes, and their combination produces a private key. So you could do this scheme without VC per se, just the underlying algorithm. |
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that's really impressive.
the owners of this forum could use this data to hedge the price of BTC.
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can you plot the BTC/USD exchange rate on top of that graph?
-bm
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Adam, btw- this app does something related to your idea: https://bitcoinvanity.appspot.com it generates a key pair, but doesn't know it completely. Part of it is generated in your browser. So I think some aspects of your system have already been demonstrated to work. -bm |
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