I would be interested in creating an "ecocoin" geared towards solo CPU miners (and penalize or prevent other forms of mining).
What are some ways of rewarding solo miners and discouraging or even preventing pools?
Any way to force CPU mining instead of GPU (and certainly not ASIC)?
Would it be possible to reward miners MORE for using less computing power somehow?
Any way to prevent people from owning/running more than one miner?
Ideally I'd want to control it so that the average person mining on a Raspberry Pi (for example) can earn around 3 ecocoins per 24 hours of mining.
Does everyone see where I'm headed with this? The idea is that:
1) It doesn't hog electricity.
2) If you own a Raspberry Pi or something like that, you earn as much in a day from mining as someone who owns a $10,000 computer.
This all sounded do-able until you got to the part about how much money someone's computer cost.
For one thing if someone chooses to throw money at the problem of acquiring coin, they will almost certainly succeed in acquiring coin, even if they end up buying it over the counter due to the coin not being on any exchanges.
So trying to prevent money from being an effective means of acquiring coin seems somewhat doomed from the outset.
Merely making a system that is very very low in resource-consumption as compared to "proof of work" based systems is easy. Ripple, for example, seems to have solved that problem. We have but to wait for the Ripple server source code to be released and we are ready to produce as many eco-friendly financial networks as we have server-hardware to run them on.
Pure proof of stake also could be a reasonably eco-friendly approach.
The "Decrits" system is probably worth studying too, however it still does deliberately burn energy as part of its economic model or economic checks and balances.
Yet another compromise approach is to continue to use proof of work like bitcoin does for securing the chain but do not use it for distributing coins. Instead of having people use hashing to obtain "coins other than transaction fees", have them use scripts and/or human interaction to initially acquire coins.
We have been testing for some time now methods of dispensing coins that would indeed work just as well for a raspberry pi as for a powerful expensive laptop on a "worker" by "worker" basis.
The current implementation however makes no attempt to limit the number of "workers" run by a single computer or a single owner of computers or user of computers or hijacker of innocent bystanders' computers.
Rather the opposite in fact: it envisions that the more time a human being has available to personally supervise "workers" the more earnings that human would be likely to reap.
That is, we do not merely aim at making the problem(s) involved in obtaining coins be problems that CPUs are far more likely to be good at than GPUs; we go even farther, allowing the problems to be such that in some respects human beings might well be better in some ways and/or in some situations at solving some of the problems than CPUs are.
Our testing so far indicates that the more "workers" a human deploys, the more of some human's or humans' time (the human of the first part of this clause or one or more other humans acting on behalf of that human) is likely to be consumed.
So far this is partly simply a reflection of the current state of the art of "worker" software:
The problems are more suitable to CPUs than to GPUs due not to any intrinsic resistance to parallelisation but, rather, to what one might term "the human element". Ultimately "the human element" should tend more and more to be the programmers of the "workers", but until such programmers have developed the start of the art of "worker" software to a point where there no longer exists any situation that that software does not elegantly handle and even, possibly, turn to its advantage, there is and will be occasional need for a human to restart a "worker" or even to reprogram a "worker" so it will in future elegantly handle the situation that had led to the need for human intervention.
Thus it currently seems likely that botnet "workers" will tend overall to work less effectively than "workers" who are members of a group of workers whose human supervisor to number of workers ratio is better. (Thus also the larger the botnet controlled by a single human, the less effective that botnet's "workers" tend to be.)
So far it is looking very promising, but that part way up above about money being or not being an issue is still present because it costs money to provide connections and problems for "workers" so more workers is more expensive than less workers so botnet operators need to be able to afford worker accounts for all of their workers, they cannot just deploy millions of workers they have to also obtain worker accounts for those workers to connect to.
-MarkM-
