CPU friendly Altcoin in development

[wiggi]

I doubt botnet resistance is possible, unless you make it such that normal people can't take part with their PC. You want broader participation for a coin to have better chance of success.

The 1% are only 1%, that is not broad.

Appeal to the starving, the children, the outcaste, make it unappealing to the rich, the well fed, the well-to-do at first, so that its appeal to them ends up coming from how many millions of people they can sell their howerver they got rich well fed etc to by adopting this currency that all those potential customers, who are currently ignored due to having no money, can become customers by means of once they have been given money by this method of giving money only to those who so desperately need it that they are willing to sit down 16 hours a day doing Turing Tests, or whatever...

-MarkM-

Just 5 or 10 minutes human input when a block is found. For example, the block hash could be used as
RNG seed for something like 1 small level of a very complex roguelike game.
Keystrokes to solve it are recorded and saved in the block chain as additional PoW.
Hard for computers, incomprehensible for 99% of all people (mechanical turk resistant),
and takes only a millisecond or so to check validity.

But I guess it would be difficult to implement in a way to make savescumming+bruteforcing inefficient for bot(net)s and
to require some human attention without making grueling working hours the best strategie.

[Seth Otterstad]

Just 5 or 10 minutes human input when a block is found. For example, the block hash could be used as
RNG seed for something like 1 small level of a very complex roguelike game.
Keystrokes to solve it are recorded and saved in the block chain as additional PoW.
Hard for computers, incomprehensible for 99% of all people (mechanical turk resistant),
and takes only a millisecond or so to check validity.

But I guess it would be difficult to implement in a way to make savescumming+bruteforcing inefficient for bot(net)s and
to require some human attention without making grueling working hours the best strategie.

If you can figure out how to set up decentralized proof of work where human input is required, you will be a millionaire.  Everyone will switch to your coin.

[Flashman]

aerobicoin for webcam, hash encoded as dance and yoga positions.... followed by the copycat DDRcoin and wiifitcoin.

[FreeTrade]

Giving coins to everyone with a forum account or email address, while open to manipulation, still gives a WAY better initial distribution than mining does.  Ripple does this. 

I think you guys are too concerned about fair distribution when what matters is free distribution.

With a fair distribution, everyone gets an equal share of the worlds coin. Even if you could do it, 99.99% immediately cash it in for something more familiar.

To bootstrap a cryptocoin economy, what matters is free distribution. That just means that those who want it can get it. With a genuine CPU currency, anyone with electricity, cpu and a network connection can trade some electric for coin.  

[A L I E N]

To bootstrap a cryptocoin economy, what matters is free distribution. That just means that those who want it can get it. With a genuine CPU currency, anyone with electricity, cpu and a network connection can trade some electric for coin.  

I consider it miners getting rewarded/paid for securing the network and processing transactions.

[Flashman]

Okay serious suggestion, but only half formed idea..

Entropy, proof of work based somehow on production of entropy, thinking cellphones have built in hardware RNGs, then require some XORing with a software pseudorandom and hashing to add a bit of CPU make work...

but checking work may be difficult.

However, it could somehow improve encryption of transactions with having huge entropy pool to work with.

Thinking entropy sources are kinda slow and throwing more CPUs or GPUs into a system would not necessarily make it faster, would be a per system advantage.

Not sure of total resistance to custom hardware, but at the moment tending to think about the same cost for about the same speed, but power efficiency would be an advantage.

Anyway, for anyone thinking they want to get the world on crypto coins, something where cellphones might be equal footing with PCs would be good, where they've gone straight to cellphones, Africa etc.

But as I said, very half formed idea, needs massaging into something workable.

[Seth Otterstad]

I don't believe it's possible to write an algorithm that a machine can't do but a human can.  Is there any evidence to the contrary?

[Flashman]

Well that's in the definition of algorithm "An algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function."

If you take something that it's hard to define a algorithm for ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP-complete_problems

Then humans may perform more effectively at the task than computers, particularly if learning and experience develops an intuition for the task.

[Lauda]

I don't believe it's possible to write an algorithm that a machine can't do but a human can.  Is there any evidence to the contrary?

I think so aswell. A machine if not now, eventually will be able to do just about anything that we can come up with.

[markm]

We can maybe incentivise the development of software to do things that currently seem best done by humans.

I have still been working with the game idea, basically stop trying to prevent people using scripts/triggers to run their chracters on auto, instead encourage that, hopefulyl to end up with much more interesting "non player characters" in the form of player characters being run by scripts 24/7 as a form of "mining" to disribute currency.

http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

The current state of the art of scripts is such that they are quite primitive, and continue to get into situations they don't have a way out of in the code yet so require a human to put them back into a situation the script can handle.

The fact that this is also interactive means that even if/when scripts are are able to handle nice sedate civilised situations, it can all be made less predictable by any player at any time simply by messing up the situation to throw the scripted characters off script, or maybe even just dress up in armour, which none of the scripted characters are actually creating yet as part of their scripted activities as far as I know, and start taking a battleaxe to other people's scripted characters.

So I think it will be quite a while before one can run thousands of scripted characters reliably like a botnet owner would want to do, yet it so far isn't taking much time per player to handle a typical player-account of ten characters only five of which can be online at the same time.

This setup proved so popular we had to shut down signups, obviously people are going to create unlimited numbers of accounts if there is no cost to them to do so thus already we had to go to auctioning off accounts.

-MarkM-

[wiggi]

I don't believe it's possible to write an algorithm that a machine can't do but a human can.  Is there any evidence to the contrary?

Hmm...  something like a SP scenario in Battle for Wesnoth where the player is outnumbered 3:1 and
under time pressure/strict turn limit would qualify imo, if the (super smart botnet) machine doesn't know what the (dumb computer) enemy will do
next turn.

I.e. synchronize it with the block chain. 1 game turn per block (30 seconds or so), RNG is re-seeded with each block hash,
this way the game is deterministic, but only in hindsight.

To get any reward, you would need to solve a block, then post a "special" transaction
(containing keystrokes/player actions and a 1use privkey to prove the original block was yours)
no later than N blocks after that (N = turn limit)

If a machine can really be made to do this the game in question will get a whole lot better.
And we have an "AI-coin". Win-Win

[achillez]

Awhile back I posted an idea for a "Human Coin". It would be tricky to create a coin that requires human intervention, but machine authentication.

[Xaltotun]

Captcha coin? Perhaps one using NSA's list of keywords.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Captcha coin? Perhaps one using NSA's list of keywords.

The problem with a "human coin" is human labor can be purchased very cheap.  Large miners will simply be the people who have the resources and connections to run "mining sweatshops" in India, Bangledash, Vietnam, etc.  That will drive up difficulty and you have new users in the first world saying "WTF?  It takes an hours worth of work to produce 1 HumanCoin which is only worth $0.12".   Meanwhile some human-net operator is making $12,000 an hour using the low cost labor of others.

[markm]

Yeah but so what? That first world "WTF" person can just go like holy shit $0.12 per coin, I can pick up lots of those for less than I pay for a tank of gas!

Its not as if sweatshop operators don't already have sweatshops, in fact at only $0.12 per coin maybe humancoin won't compete with making cabbagepatch jordan BB boots or whatever.

-MarkM-

[Flashman]

The problem with a "human coin" is human labor can be purchased very cheap.  Large miners will simply be the people who have the resources and connections to run "mining sweatshops" in India, Bangledash, Vietnam, etc.  That will drive up difficulty and you have new users in the first world saying "WTF?  It takes an hours worth of work to produce 1 HumanCoin which is only worth $0.12".   Meanwhile some human-net operator is making $12,000 an hour using the low cost labor of others.

Humancoin, bringing slavery into the digital age!

[Seth Otterstad]

Captcha coin? Perhaps one using NSA's list of keywords.

The problem with a "human coin" is human labor can be purchased very cheap.  Large miners will simply be the people who have the resources and connections to run "mining sweatshops" in India, Bangledash, Vietnam, etc.  That will drive up difficulty and you have new users in the first world saying "WTF?  It takes an hours worth of work to produce 1 HumanCoin which is only worth $0.12".   Meanwhile some human-net operator is making $12,000 an hour using the low cost labor of others.

I also don't see the problem with this either.  If all that is required is a computer to mine "human coin" (or preferably, just a smartphone), the sweatshop operator's margin would be severely limited when all the sweatshop worker has to do is get access to a $50 smartphone to get 100% of his expected earnings.  I would expect that he would have to pass on at least 50% of the mining profits to the workers, possibly less if a computer costing hundreds of dollars was required to mine "human coin".

In a perfectly fair distribution where we equally allocated coins to everyone on the planet based on their DNA, the amount would appear to be quite small to 1st world inhabitants, who would buy up the 3rd world inhabitants' coins with their existing wealth.

[Lauda]

Still waiting for this 

[mechs]

Still waiting for this  

For what? CPU friendly coin already here, it called primecoin.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Most important question is WHY? Why would you design a coin that would be botnet friendly and ASIC resistant?

Every coin so far is botnet friendly. Read this: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sq7cy/iama_a_malware_coder_and_botnet_operator_ama/
I imagine a botnet resistant coin to be a big success.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=266999.0 - care to comment?