Proof of Useful Work - a discussion about an idea

[KennyPowers]

Hello community,

Bitcoin (and altcoin) mining is starting to use a lot of power (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-mining-consumes-electricity-ireland). Besides keeping the Bitcoin ecosystem alive, spending that power has no other practical use.

It is a way, and it works, but it's not very efficient. Here's a metaphor: A gasoline motor has efficiency of ~30%, while electric motors have >90%. Yes, we used and still use gasoline & diesel (eff. 45%) engines, but electric are starting to have their piece of cake because in the end it is the better technology.

So the new types of consensus algorithms are being developed constantly, and I'm interested in those that provide something useful in addition to "writing transactions in the public ledger in a safe way".

I'll start off with an idea to clarify what I mean and hopefully we can come to a conclusion if it is possible and what would it take.

Let's call it Proof of Printing  :                        

My cousin is into amateur 3D printing. He prints some stuff for a local community and the low budget printers still require a lot of time to print. Let's say that his printer is working 6h/day.

? How would it work ?
Well there should be some sort of a device connected or implemented in a 3D printer that would serve as imutable proof that work is being done (electricity & material being spent), while also having capability to write transactions or whatever useful things graphic cards do.
An obstacle is: how to prove that useful work is being done (e.g. you're not printing random things and throwing them in the trash afterwards)?

? Who would do it ?
Because of the obstacles for making it legit, it would probably need some sort of a KYC. Also, it probably wouldn't function as a standalone mining/consensus method (because of a possibly small user base) but as a part of a multi-algorithm mining system.

This idea is not well thought, but is an example of a Proof of Useful Work.
Opinions about other types of "Proof of Useful Work" are very welcome, be it existing ideas (like Steem's Proof of Brain!) or some of your own!

[FutureDigiCoin]

Kenny I understand your good intentions. But I don't think anyone with a good idea will share this in an open thread of BTC? Maybe starting a telegram group where you can invite People with same intentions is an idea?

[KennyPowers]

Thank you for the idea. Well I was aiming at least @ the people which would like to think and discuss about it, but know that they won't invest more time in realizing those ideas themselves.

[valium]

So good, think this is very interesting, futuristic!

[Vod]

Bitcoin (and altcoin) mining is starting to use a lot of power (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-mining-consumes-electricity-ireland). Besides keeping the Bitcoin ecosystem alive, spending that power has no other practical use.

Some companies are starting to combine mining with other useful features, like heating.
https://www.qarnot.com/crypto-heater_qc1/

I agree it's a complete waste of electricity to produce all that heat and do nothing with it - even worse you have to spend more electricity to vent that wasted energy!

[FutureDigiCoin]

Bitcoin (and altcoin) mining is starting to use a lot of power (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-mining-consumes-electricity-ireland). Besides keeping the Bitcoin ecosystem alive, spending that power has no other practical use.

Some companies are starting to combine mining with other useful features, like heating.
https://www.qarnot.com/crypto-heater_qc1/

I agree it's a complete waste of electricity to produce all that heat and do nothing with it - even worse you have to spend more electricity to vent that wasted energy!

And some of those companies with a lot of mining servers get cought because they use elctricity illegal 

[Jhiesha]

Insert Quote
Quote from: Vod on March 12, 2018, 07:45:06 PM
Quote from: KennyPowers on March 11, 2018, 04:13:38 PM
Bitcoin (and altcoin) mining is starting to use a lot of power (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-mining-consumes-electricity-ireland). Besides keeping the Bitcoin ecosystem alive, spending that power has no other practical use.

Some companies are starting to combine mining with other useful features, like heating.
https://www.qarnot.com/crypto-heater_qc1/

I agree it's a complete waste of electricity to produce all that heat and do nothing with it - even worse you have to spend more electricity to vent that wasted energy!

Yes and lots of companies with many mining servers  will get caught due to their use of illegal electricity.

[BTRIC]

? How would it work ?
Well there should be some sort of a device connected or implemented in a 3D printer that would serve as imutable proof that work is being done (electricity & material being spent), while also having capability to write transactions or whatever useful things graphic cards do.
An obstacle is: how to prove that useful work is being done (e.g. you're not printing random things and throwing them in the trash afterwards)?

Hi Kenny,

I think a natural case for "useful work" is in distributed computing projects.  There are numerous tasks that can be effectively divided into work units and a ready market for entities that want to buy computing power to have those tasks completed.  For purposes of this post, I'll talk about a very simple distributed computing use case, OCR text recognition from scanned images of pages.  There are businesses that pay to have their files scanned and OCR recognized.

The minimum viable product would be building an OCR engine that works in a pool-mining fashion.  However, the work is centralized.  So that's not ideal.

Next iteration, allow it so that anyone can submit work projects from any node, they can also set pricing in terms of what they want to pay for each completed work unit.  Further iterations could allow them to deploy their own sandboxed OCR engine (and, of course, any number of other distributed computing engines, image recognition, structural analyses, statistical calculations, training ML/DL algos, complex systems modeling, etc.).

I think that would be a useful type of decentralized computing system, there's some work being done in this area and I want to see what can be done to advance this.  I've reached out to GPU vendors regarding this for my organization because I believe they'd have an interest in finding "useful work" applications for a mining-type client base.  They are making a decent percentage of their income now from cryptocurrency miners, so finding a way to sustain that income through types of mining that is more about useful work as opposed to algos (which can be more easily ASICed) is in their best interest.

I think on Reddit there's a post about using excess mining heat for a greenhouse, I thought that was a pretty cool idea.  I don't see "useful work" mining replacing cryptocurrencies, but I do see it as a novel application of distributed computing that can work in a mining-like manner if properly implemented.  I am focused on finding models of replacing content monetization that isn't so dependent on advertising.  We need new "YouTubes", but we need to be able to pay those that put their lives into earning money off of that platform.  Mining a traditional cryptocurrency is only one way that users of a hypothetical decentralized platform can contribute to monetization without actually paying directly.  Advertising will probably always be a part of the equation but I believe that multiple revenue models should be explored.

Best regards,
Ben