I'm interested in alternatives to bitcoin's ASIC-friendly proof-of-work (pow).
A memory-hard pow offers two main advantages:
1) reduce energy waste
2) shift the mining balance back from ASIC-farms to desktops,
allowing many more people fair odds in the mining lottery
scrypt was developed with memory-hardness in mind, but turned out only
very mildly successful in that regard.
More recently, Invictus Innovations proposed the Momentum pow
with the exact same goals in mind, but that turns out to allow a memory-time trade-off
as well; see the discussion at
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=8cf66a1c5dbb5822f255c4a37bb0e8f4&topic=22.60The ideal pow function would require a certain amount of memory (several GB) with no
reasonable memory-time trade-off; in other words it should become grossly inefficient
with, say, only half that minimum amount of memory.
Has there been any other research done in this area?
Have any other pow schemes been proposed with memory-hardness in mind?
I have some ideas that I'm considering putting in a whitepaper,
but I'd like to make sure I'm aware of all previously published efforts.
regards,
-John
