[CLC] Cloud Coin Idea

[osoverflow]

Hi! This is my first idea of this type.

I'm very happy with crypto currencies, I like the idea, the development and the working.

What I dislike is the usage of the energy (I think it is a waste of energy to do only hashing) AND the problem with ASIC and other speciallized devices.

So I'm proposing this new currency, called Cloud Coin (maybe a cuter name, easy to pronounce in various languages will be better)

The basic idea is to make a currency with the same characteristics of BTC, except the proof of work.

It could use the same proof of work as BTC and LTC combined to start, but it must allow a proof of work that is different from simple hashing, like computing work.

It is basically the mix of BTC&LTC proof of work with the idea of BOINC projects.

A person, institution or whatever should be able to create a block to solve, with the code (some type of kernel, with a predefined set of instructions that don't put at risk the miner's computer) to solve that block.

That individual could add a new block to solve to the block chain paying some amount of CLCs, that the miners win when the block is solved. The solution of the block is then added to the block chain so the indivudal that placed the problem can retrive the result, and add a new block to the chain.

This way, if someone  wants to do a heavy computing work can use the CLC network paying a price for it. Because the individual requires to pay with CLC, he/she must have enough CLC on his account (address) to pay for inclusion of a block. Miners can chose which block to solve, based on the premium of solving that block.

And the individual that includes the block to solve can buy CLC from miners or a CLC market paying with whatever he has, like other coins (BTC or other) or trading for centralized and closed currencies like USD/GBP or another thing.

If no project is available, the CLC network can add blocks from boinc projects like SETI, to contribute to science.

Also, the network should provide a reward in addition to the premium that the individual paid for the work.

This way no speciallized device could be easily made that works with so generic type of proof of work, while at the same time providing the miners a better return on their GPU and CPU and maybe FPGAs, and also providing to the individual that ask for Computing time the solution of his problem on a very big cloud computing environment, and also providing to the world a better usage of the energy solving science projects.

Do you think this is viable?

[Revalin]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52155.0;all
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60703.0;all
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86589.0;all

tl;dr: You need to find a problem that is: 1) very hard to solve (about 20,000 GPU-hours per solution); 2) trivial to verify it was done correctly (less than 1 GPU-second per check); 3) politically neutral (we have to agree on the problem being solved, and some people will object to using their GPUs to solve some problems).

No one knows a useful problem in this category, so we're using SHA256.  Feel free to suggest something better, but criteria #2 is the hard one.

[Etlase2]

What I dislike is the usage of the energy (I think it is a waste of energy to do only hashing) AND the problem with ASIC and other speciallized devices.

Hashing to create new currency, imo, is not necessarily a waste as it gives the currency a rudimentary backing. Hashing to secure the network, on the other hand, is a very big waste of energy.

It could use the same proof of work as BTC and LTC combined to start, but it must allow a proof of work that is different from simple hashing, like computing work.

This has been suggested in the past, but no one has gotten past the point of "how do we actually make this work?"

This way, if someone  wants to do a heavy computing work can use the CLC network paying a price for it. Because the individual requires to pay with CLC, he/she must have enough CLC on his account (address) to pay for inclusion of a block. Miners can chose which block to solve, based on the premium of solving that block.

I think in the long run it just makes more sense to pay people in digital currencies to perform these actions, not base the currency around it.

If no project is available, the CLC network can add blocks from boinc projects like SETI, to contribute to science.

I don't know if there is a viable way for the network to come to a consensus on what has been solved and so on with projects like SETI. I am unsure though. While bitcoin-like hashing is relatively "dumb", it is hard to produce and easy to verify. These are qualities that must exist for it to be the basis of creating currency.

[ElectricMucus]

Using computing power needed to drive a cryptocoin for useful work is a worthy cause. The problem is it's not that simple.

The work has to be derived from the transaction data to provide security, on the fundamental basis. Approaches to accomplish that can either use the data which is normally derived from the 'nonce' to do useful computation or use a tradeoff where excess precision can be used to store transaction data.
Somehow they both mean the same thing and for non of those a solution has been found yet.

I think there might be very specific problems which could be approached in this manner and I have a candidate in mind, but it's a long shot and I need to do quite a bit of research and studying before I can come up with anything useful. Keep in mind that any approach in this direction will have to sacrifice security to do more useful work and verse visa.

[Etlase2]

Keep in mind that any approach in this direction will have to sacrifice security to do more useful work and verse visa.

Sacrificing security is not necessarily a requirement if you separate security from proof of work. This has been the basis of the encoin/decrits proposals since day 1.

Interestingly enough, I ran across a newer proposal just after reading this one that touches on this thread's subject: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=108888.0

[osoverflow]

Great! thanks for the info and the links. I'm going to think about point 2, maybe some espresso coffee cups can help

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52155.0;all
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60703.0;all
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86589.0;all

tl;dr: You need to find a problem that is: 1) very hard to solve (about 20,000 GPU-hours per solution); 2) trivial to verify it was done correctly (less than 1 GPU-second per check); 3) politically neutral (we have to agree on the problem being solved, and some people will object to using their GPUs to solve some problems).

No one knows a useful problem in this category, so we're using SHA256.  Feel free to suggest something better, but criteria #2 is the hard one.

[JoelKatz]

tl;dr: You need to find a problem that is: 1) very hard to solve (about 20,000 GPU-hours per solution); 2) trivial to verify it was done correctly (less than 1 GPU-second per check); 3) politically neutral (we have to agree on the problem being solved, and some people will object to using their GPUs to solve some problems).

You missed the hardest requirement -- the calculation must secure the blockchain somehow. SHA256 hashes do this because they hash the block so you can't take a solution and apply it to a different block without redoing all the work that went into it.

[osoverflow]

I was thinking about how to solve this all requirements, and also adding some extra functionality to the energy and calculation power of the crypto currencies.

I think I found a better, faster way to do a crypto currency that is secure, not centralized, open, distributed, protected for double spending, protected for split brain problems, with faster transactions, and at the same time use the cpu/gpu power, bandwidth and storage more efficently than the current crypto currencies.

I will elaborate my suggestion this week, and post here, for you to analyze the potential risks and failures.

[DannyM]

The CLC abbreviation is already taken by "Luke-Jr's CoiledCoin"

[osoverflow]

The CLC abbreviation is already taken by "Luke-Jr's CoiledCoin"

Thanks! and CDC?

[osoverflow]

mm, but coiledcoin is DEAD, so I think I can use CLC for CLoudCoin

[markm]

mm, but coiledcoin is DEAD, so I think I can use CLC for CLoudCoin

It is not dead yet, although its reported "difficulty" : 6340.40526376 is possibly more to do with having been attacked like namecoin than with currently being mined a lot. (I think it maybe lacks the faster-adapting difficulty that some coins introduced following that namecoin attack.)

-MarkM-

[markodude]

This is kinda similar to my gamecoin idea. I love the concept and believe that "true" cloud computing is going to be distributed massively across cheap hardware eventually (not in large custom built, corporate owned datacenters)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=109904.0

I think  that starting a peer to peer cloud service based on virtualization is the way to achieve this, using de-centralized nodes all over the world which contribute towards pay-per use IaaS, SaaS etc

[doublec]

is possibly more to do with having been attacked like namecoin

What attack on namecoin are you referring to?

[markm]

is possibly more to do with having been attacked like namecoin

What attack on namecoin are you referring to?

Hit it with sheetloads of hashpower to drive up the difficulty then abandon it to months of more difficulty than its remaining hashers can lower (due to it taking umpteen blocks for it to change and it taking them huge time to complete each block).

In other words possibly the current difficulty of coiledcoin does not reflect the hashing currently directed at it; possibly it could take many months or even a few years for the few people still hashing it to reach the block number at which its difficulty will adjust.

-MarkM-

[doublec]

Hit it with sheetloads of hashpower to drive up the difficulty then abandon it to months of more difficulty than its remaining hashers can lower (due to it taking umpteen blocks for it to change and it taking them huge time to complete each block).

This wasn't really an attack, which implies malicious intent, but was a consequence of the difficulty adjustment algorithm and chain hopping. People would mine namecoin when it was profitable, driving up the difficulty, and then leave when it wasn't and it would take a long time to come down. The people mining weren't deliberately attacking the chain, they were mining for profit.

[markm]

Yeah it paid them to attack it. Real smart eh?

-MarkM-

[osoverflow]

Please check the advance of my proposal. It is translated with google translator, so it is not very good translation.

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=14z032-Vx_iN5GuoMj80A9SL1fUUd7A3qXjSkuIlJ2sE

I'm trying to cover all the basic requirements for a crypto currency, like security of funds, of transactions, anonymity and speed.

also I'm adding suggestions about how to provide cloud computing and cloud storage.

[markm]

You do not seem to address the rather important matter of consensus.

If my node thinks 60% of everyone's data has arrived and thus closes the block, what happens with all the other versions of the block who heard from a slightly different 60% than I did? Each of us when we were at 59.9999% might not have had the same nodes in our collection but even if we did, we each could hear from a different node as our last straw that broke the 60% barrier and caused us to close the block.

Also, since your objective supposedly is to be a provider of cloud computing, all of this crap about how currencies could work is irrelevant, as there are already working currencies in existence. What you need to do as a provider of distributed p2p cloud computing is solve that goal's problems, such as how to decide which nodes to pay how much currency to and why.

As a person wanting cloud computing, how do you check you got what you wanted and are not being charged for services that were not in fact provided, stuff like that. See for example the distributed storage thread about dirt cheap remote disk storage which so far it seems turns out not to be dirt cheap at all due to being a difficult problem; notice how often they end up back at the idea of a centralised service that will co-ordinate home computer nodes that want to be paid for providing storage... And to cloud-compute, you need storage out there to hold data people want computation to be done with/on so storage is just part of the problem you are facing...

-MarkM-

[osoverflow]

You are right. The paper should say "connected to at least 60%", so the nodes should be connected to more than 60%, maybe 70% or more to prevent the problem you said.

The objective of my idea is not to have cloud computing p2p, but to make better use of the cpu/gpu power. I like the idea of p2p currency, a lot indeed, but I also want to make a better use of the energy consumed, that's the reason I'm proposing the cloud service, to make useful calculations that while secure the net and the currency, also provide solutions to other problems and maybe profit from a fee, adding value to the currency.

With a currency that requires to be able different calculations and functions like this, it would be almost impossible that someone makes a custom device that broke the system and wins the 51%, because one don't know what is required to solve the next problem, maybe it is simply a hash, maybe it is a collection of Fast Fourier transformade, maybe it is a block of data to be transferred, maybe it is a full simulation of a protein molecule, who knows? and that is going to be impossible to predict and impossible to make a custom device.

About the cost for cloud computing, what you are getting is your block solved with your own kernel code, in at least 60% of the total nodes of the network, so if there are 100 nodes, you know that at least 60 nodes solved the problem with equal results. If something is wrong in the result is your fault, because you provided a bad kernel to solve it, and you need to fix your code and resubmit the block and the new kernel to solve it.

For storage, the idea is that in some countries the public TV is a garbage, with manipulated media, so an open TV, with people making it's own media, that also provides the big movie producers a way to have DRM or charge for the addition of video, that  can't be handled by any entity, because it is open and p2p like namecoin and bitcoin, could replace the public, manipulated TV. That will require a custom device that can be made with very cheap hardware (about 35-50 USD, check Raspberry PI or another micro computers), a GUI to present the video and menus to the viewer and the cloud storage.

One can setup that micro computer box, share the space of the flash card and the bandwidth to the network, win some coins while doing that, and use that coins to be able to consume blocks from the network and also to pay for DRM protected media. That payment is going to be redirected to the owner of the block of data, with a commission of the miners that relayed that block, and also that could add proof of work to the coin, because the block is required to be relayed by 3 nodes, generating work on that 3 nodes that require to confirm that the block was relayed by them.

cloud coin is still a simple, napkin idea hehehe

You do not seem to address the rather important matter of consensus.

If my node thinks 60% of everyone's data has arrived and thus closes the block, what happens with all the other versions of the block who heard from a slightly different 60% than I did? Each of us when we were at 59.9999% might not have had the same nodes in our collection but even if we did, we each could hear from a different node as our last straw that broke the 60% barrier and caused us to close the block.

Also, since your objective supposedly is to be a provider of cloud computing, all of this crap about how currencies could work is irrelevant, as there are already working currencies in existence. What you need to do as a provider of distributed p2p cloud computing is solve that goal's problems, such as how to decide which nodes to pay how much currency to and why.

As a person wanting cloud computing, how do you check you got what you wanted and are not being charged for services that were not in fact provided, stuff like that. See for example the distributed storage thread about dirt cheap remote disk storage which so far it seems turns out not to be dirt cheap at all due to being a difficult problem; notice how often they end up back at the idea of a centralised service that will co-ordinate home computer nodes that want to be paid for providing storage... And to cloud-compute, you need storage out there to hold data people want computation to be done with/on so storage is just part of the problem you are facing...

-MarkM-