Make Bitcoin More Valuable with Distributed Computing Projects?

[bluemeanie1]

  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

[jackjack]

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
 

[bluemeanie1]

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?

[bluemeanie1]

 so given that, we have our work cut out for us:

  what functions are:

  1) HARD TO COMPUTE

  2) EASY TO VERIFY

  3) USEFUL?

[Trongersoll]

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.

[Sukrim]

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.

[bluemeanie1]

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.

[bluemeanie1]

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.

[Sukrim]

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.

Yes, but I rarely can generate that data on my own (well maybe finding large primes, but that is hard to verify). Usually I get a work unit and crunch it over a day or more while reporting progress. Also many projects might even give the same WU to several users to let them verify each other.

Please have a look yourself and give examples of some that actually fulfill these criteria... I'm not interested in burning money and generating heat on a barely optimized machine to do some work that could be done much cheaper in a proper data center aka most distributed computing projects.

[bluemeanie1]

Hold on here, lets pull back for a minute and think about what were talking about here.

So basically what Im suggesting is make a coin that awards a miner for doing USEFUL work- e.g searching for extraterrestrial life.

If you compute the data, its verified somehow that you've done it, then you get the block and the reward.

is it valuable?  in this case SETI should make it valuable.  For example you can use this coin to gain access to The Vanderbuilt Planetarium.  You can use it to purchase Hubble Space Posters, etc.  Thus there is a DEMAND for it.  Once we have DEMAND, we have VALUE.

Once it has some kind of value, then it also has an exchange rate, and for instance our friend here can use it to eg. purchase pornography on Silk Road.

[Sukrim]

I also would rather have someone pay me in Bitcoin (e.g. via these constantly adjusting microtransactions) for running a "useful" program than have this program generate bitcoins themselves.

[bluemeanie1]

I also would rather have someone pay me in Bitcoin (e.g. via these constantly adjusting microtransactions) for running a "useful" program than have this program generate bitcoins themselves.

that would perform a similar function, however this is more 'free market'.  Youre making a market for computation.

the problem with Bitcoin is that there is nothing keeping the price afloat.  As many have explained, USD are valuable for more than simply FIAT, they are LEGAL TENDER, which is supported by our justice system.  If there is a dispute about payment, then we appeal to our court to settle this dispute.  Bitcoin has NONE of that.  Secondly the value of a USD(presently) is related to the debt and good credit of the United States Government and the Federal Reserve.  Ultimately, it's worth resides in these places.  Again, Bitcoin has none of these qualities.

so Bitcoin is, seemingly, a self-creating value loop.  It technically *shouldn't* have any value.  Perhaps there is some other party that is 'pumping' up the value, and fooling uneducated individuals into THINKING it's valuable?

[Garrett Burgwardt]

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5617/why-are-bitcoin-calculation-useless/5618#5618

This has been done to death, and unless you come up with something absolutely unprecedented, there's no way to have bitcoin calculations be based on your "useful" computation (F@H, SETI, etc).

Seriously, search is here for a reason. Worse, you don't appear to know how bitcoin's underlying technology works. I recommend you do some studying.

[bluemeanie1]

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5617/why-are-bitcoin-calculation-useless/5618#5618

This has been done to death, and unless you come up with something absolutely unprecedented, there's no way to have bitcoin calculations be based on your "useful" computation (F@H, SETI, etc).

Seriously, search is here for a reason. Worse, you don't appear to know how bitcoin's underlying technology works. I recommend you do some studying.

"There should not be any central source that affects the types of calculations"

problem is that the Bitcoin is longer truly decentralized, so we've compromised this feature already- thus this particular requirement is possibly no longer relevant.

Seems you're not aware of these details about Bitcoin.

[Loozik]

 Why don't we require some sort of useful computation in each Bitcoin block?

  For instance each block must include a successive prime number.

PRIMECOIN. I like it 

[jaywaka2713]

Instead of submitting a hash or some form of data, why not form a large p2p network, but one that operates like a server. Much like the Amazon EC2 servers, except a p2p version. People could come to "rent" time to the server and pay in Bitcoin. Those who "mine", or contribute compute power to the server get a proportional share of the payment.

[Sukrim]

Do you like to spread viruses, spam and worse? Because that's what's going to happen.

Also you are responsible for what happens at your internet connection, if you don't secure your wireless network and your neighbor downloads the latest movies, you have to pay and then can try to sure the neighbor after.
Now imagine this situation with attacks on us infrastructure (classified as act of war by the us regime!) originating from you. They don't send letters, they send drones.

Also, would you use this platform where every node can actually just do a memory dump and extract any private keys you use? You trust Amazon to not do this - do you trust me?

[bluemeanie1]

the idea is this.

Instead of having hundreds of thousands of CPUs wizzing away at pointless SHA computations, we can use this principle of Proof Of Work to do something USEFUL.

these distributed computing projects need only modify their service slightly.  If you compute something useful for them, then:  they offer to sign your block, or give you a token you can use to create a block

this becomes your Proof of Work.  The coin founders can decide what various programs are eligible and which ones are not, they can also determine what your block reward is.

YES, it violates the principle of decentralization, because you MUST get the signature of eg. SETI on your block for it to be valid, however it DOES fulfill all the other requirements for proof-of-work.  It would optimally be a program that various distributed computing projects can participate in.  It offers us a sort of decentralization, just not perfect decentralization(SHA256/nonce scheme is superior in this sense because it does not require a complex system to validate).

Thus we can have a PoW based currency that produces something useful.  The coins have REAL WORLD VALUE that could even be backed by the programs themselves(some of them offer real payouts).  We could solve major computing problems in a distributed and attractive way with this program.

[TalkingAntColony]

How would these distributed computing projects know if someone is cheating? Ex compute fake SETI analysis which takes much less CPU time than real analysis. This is not a problem currently because there is no incentive to fake work in these computing projects. Once people get money to do it, there will be an incentive.

This is why proof of work is easy to verify.

[bluemeanie1]

My assumption here is that they cannot be faked.  Some projects pay for computation, why don't people game those systems?