So recently I've been interested in a coin that doesn't require resources to mine. Why? Because it would make the entry into mining that much lower. Anyone with any computer can join in on it as long as they have an internet connection. Searches on that subject have led me to some interesting discussions and coins I hadn't heard of before.
TimeKoin:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88467.0;Sybil Attack:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=359358.0;And there was another good one from 2010 that I can't seem to find again that had some big bitcoin guys talking about it.
All the discussion seems to end when sybil attacks are mentioned. No one can solve the problem of identifying unique participants. Actually TimeKoin is an implementation of this and they seem to solve the sybil attack issue by making it hard enough to become a node on the network that it would be difficult to coordinate an attack on the network. I don't like that approach very much though because it kind of nullifies the entry into mining being easy.
So here is my proposition to solve this problem: Don't. In fact do the opposite, make the coin as vulnerable to a sybil attack as possible. Make it so everyone can hit it from a bunch of different identities and still get the same reward. Make it a competition between botnets in a sense. The issue here though is that at first glance it doesn't seem to be easy to setup a botnet to mine the coin with, but is that really true? What if the coin release came with a lightweight javascript miner? Any website owner could easily attach a miner to their website. It wouldn't inconvenience the website users because the cpu cycles involved are trivial, and the effectiveness of one botnet is severely reduced. Imagine if larger sites start adopting it. We would be dealing with billions of different clients on the network mining this thing. It seems like a cool idea to me anyway.
My biggest problem is that developing such a coin is currently way over my head. I have a decent amount of coding experience including javascript. I'm a Computer Science major in his last semester but am a complete newby in the world of security, cryptography, and bitcoin. Any bitcoin experts out there want to comment on the idea? Is there some glaring issue that I've overlooked? Anybody with experience want to help bring the idea to fruition?
