Proof of Thought (PoT): The Holy Grail has arrived! Only Humans can mine

[aliashraf]

I am against this proposal as a framework for blockchain technology. But I do appreciate, op's dedication and the motivations behind this, kudos!

As I've briefly discussed this subject before (in the thread which has inspired @ir.hn for  starting this topic), the problem of one-human-one-vote approach to blockchains, besides the slavery threat, is its political nature in the extent that can't be applied to socioeconomic games directly.

IOW, you can not fetch/change the ledger's state by means of a nothing at stake, voting system, because voters can easily commit to a zero cost attack and confirm illegal double spend transactions.

This proposal is mostly focused on normalizing the distribution of wealth (generation of money/block reward) and not exchanging it (cash transfer).

Op has missed the simple fact that the blocks to be generated by the person (being either a freelance/solo participant or a pool/slavery center) does not only encompass a coinbase transaction (that specifies who has won the reward and its amount) but also a set of ordinary transactions that the miner asserts they are valid.

The problem begins here, suppose Alice transfers all of her wallet balance to Bob via tr1 which is normally confirmed,  then she attempts a double spend by means of a new transaction that sends the already spent money to another person or another wallet of her.

Alice is a celebrity and Bob is an infamous Wall Street broker, hated by 99% of people. Alice asks help from her followers to rewrite the blockchain and confirm the double spend transaction because 'Bob is fraud and has done something bad to me' , she asserts. When it comes to voting for this rewrite (being of any range) Alice has a good chance to revoke her funds because of the public opinion being biased  in favor of her.

It could be even worse if it was about a national crisis and financial disaster where populists can easily manipulate public opinions.

Such a monetary system, could hardly be called a monetary system. Money is a privilege people hold in their deposits/accounts against the public interest and in favor of their personal interests, it can not be put under the influence of public by letting them to 'vote' about it.

So, the main problem of this proposal, would be the lack of support by game theory, instead op tries to fill the gap with computing theory, I'm a fan of the latter (having educational back ground in computer science) but, this is an unfortunate, money and monetary systems are territories being ruled by the first one,  I can't imagine how without game theory, approaching to a blockchain based public ledger  would be possible.

As I said, it is totally an unfortunate for me, not just because of my passion for computing theory but also because I love decentralization and distribution of power and hate Wall Street, belonging to 99%  

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[monsterer2]

I am against this proposal as a framework for blockchain technology. But I do appreciate, op's dedication and the motivations behind this, kudos!

As I've briefly discussed this subject before (in the thread which has inspired @ir.hn for  starting this topic), the problem of one-human-one-vote approach to blockchains, besides the slavery threat, is its political nature in the extent that can't be applied to socioeconomic games directly.

IOW, you can not fetch/change the ledger's state by means of a nothing at stake, voting system, because voters can easily commit to a zero cost attack and confirm illegal double spend transactions.

You really, really, don't get this idea at all do you? Its not PoS, it's PoW.

[aliashraf]

I am against this proposal as a framework for blockchain technology. But I do appreciate, op's dedication and the motivations behind this, kudos!

As I've briefly discussed this subject before (in the thread which has inspired @ir.hn for  starting this topic), the problem of one-human-one-vote approach to blockchains, besides the slavery threat, is its political nature in the extent that can't be applied to socioeconomic games directly.

IOW, you can not fetch/change the ledger's state by means of a nothing at stake, voting system, because voters can easily commit to a zero cost attack and confirm illegal double spend transactions.

You really, really, don't get this idea at all do you? Its not PoS, it's PoW.

I guess I get the idea and i know it is Proof of Work, actually op has termed his proposal as Proof of Human work already, never said otherwise.

Imo, it is of vital importance to be more specific when it comes to discussing such ideas. Accusing me of not getting the idea (implying kinda ingenuity)  won't void my technical objection above.

As of similarities between this idea and PoS, I can confirm that I think there is a similarity between the two as they in share a  same vulnerability to zero cost attack.

Anyway, if you can show me how this proposed algorithm could mitigate the attack I described in my reply, I would be fine with dropping my objection.

[monsterer2]

As of similarities between this idea and PoS, I can confirm that I think there is a similarity between the two as they in share a  same vulnerability to zero cost attack.

Anyway, if you can show me how this proposed algorithm could mitigate the attack I described in my reply, I would be fine with dropping my objection.

Any attack you can level at this proposal you can level at any PoW blockchain since all miners are controlled by humans - they are vulnerable in exactly the same way, there is nothing special about whether a human or a machine under the control of a human solves a PoW.

[aliashraf]

As of similarities between this idea and PoS, I can confirm that I think there is a similarity between the two as they in share a  same vulnerability to zero cost attack.

Anyway, if you can show me how this proposed algorithm could mitigate the attack I described in my reply, I would be fine with dropping my objection.

Any attack you can level at this proposal you can level at any PoW blockchain since all miners are controlled by humans - they are vulnerable in exactly the same way, there is nothing special about whether a human or a machine under the control of a human solves a PoW.

Well, not exactly true.
Proof of Work, implies consuming a lot of resources. To manage a 50%+1 attack an adversary has trade-offs to make (comparing incentives and costs) as of this proposal , Humans just use their free talent, zero or negligible costs are involved, so voting is free and we are left with only incentives that rule in favor of evil behavior, mostly.

[monsterer2]

Well, not exactly true.
Proof of Work, implies consuming a lot of resources. To manage a 50%+1 attack an adversary has trade-offs to make (comparing incentives and costs) as of this proposal , Humans just use their free talent, zero or negligible costs are involved, so voting is free and we are left with only incentives that rule in favor of evil behavior, mostly.

Humans expend the most valuable resource on the planet: time. This is ultimately more valuable than anything else in the universe.

The puzzles are created such than no man/machine can perform them faster than a human, therefore this represents the ultimate PoW.

[aliashraf]

Well, not exactly true.
Proof of Work, implies consuming a lot of resources. To manage a 50%+1 attack an adversary has trade-offs to make (comparing incentives and costs) as of this proposal , Humans just use their free talent, zero or negligible costs are involved, so voting is free and we are left with only incentives that rule in favor of evil behavior, mostly.

Humans expend the most valuable resource on the planet: time. This is ultimately more valuable than anything else in the universe.

The puzzles are created such than no man/machine can perform them faster than a human, therefore this represents the ultimate PoW.

Saying that 'time' is valuable or 'the most valuable resource in the universe' the way you put it, as a metaphor is acceptable but it is not concrete.

For example air is one of the most important things ever but it worth nothing in the market and barely can be called a resource.

For a thing to be categorized as a resource, it should be both rare and in demand of work, mostly hard work, to become available.

Time is not a resource, people got  lot of free time and if they could find an incentive tempting enough, they would trade it easily and cheaply.

On the other hand you can't keep people busy solving a NP-Complete problem for hours, this leads to a very unscalable solution unless the solution finding procedure can be spanned in multiple rounds, this will produce new attack vectors and will detach the problem solving procedure from confirming transactions, again money transfer features are missed here, just an alternative system for replacing central banks without interfering with  commercial banks.  

[monsterer2]

Time is not a resource, people got  lot of free time and if they could find an incentive tempting enough, they would trade it easily and cheaply.  

I'm afraid you are utterly incorrect. The only reason PoW exists in the first place is to provide an unforgeable proxy for elapsed time.

[d5000]

I know this is a thought experiment and unlikely to be realized (although ... I would like to see it as a testnet ... as a kind of "gambling" thing ).

Thinking a bit about it, there may be a problem: As far as I understood the posts and the description of NP-complete problems, there is a fast way to prove that a solution fulfills the task, but no way to know in advance which one is the "perfect" one (Correct me if I'm wrong). So, for example, in the problem of the traveling salesman, maybe one human finds a route through the cities which is e.g. 1000 km long but there may exist one with 995 km, but the system can't tell that this route exists.

But wouldn't that mean that the first valid solution would be very likely the one to win? If there is no way to prove that an answer is the "perfect" one, then all valid answers could be used as a starting point for the next block. Obviously it's possible that another human, shortly afterwards, finds a better solution. But it seems that a computer brute-forcing simple valid solutions and then trying instantly to build the next block continuing to brute-forcing would be at advantage. Eventually he would get the longest chain.

I don't know if there is a subset of NP-complete problems where a human can guess a valid, but not near-optimal solution faster than a computer, but I doubt that.

But maybe that problem can be solved? For example, I could imagine an algorithm where a linear increase in "quality" of the solution could exponentially (e.g. quadratically) increase block weight. Then computers with a low-quality solution would have a hard time to compete with a human with a near-optimal solution.

[tromp]

As far as I understood the posts and the description of NP-complete problems, there is a fast way to prove that a solution fulfills the task, but no way to know in advance which one is the "perfect" one (Correct me if I'm wrong).

You misunderstood. NP is the class of problems for which one can efficiently verify solutions.
Complete means that a problem is in some sense as hard as any other NP problem.

The Traveling Salesman Problem asks whether there is a route of at most a certain length.
This is clearly in NP.

It does not ask for the optimal route. Such a problem would generally NOT be in NP, precisely because answers cannot be efficiently verified.

If we consider OptimalTSP as the problem whose instances are a pair of a distance matrix and an optimal route, then this problem is in fact in co-NP, complements of NP problems.

[bob123]

The Traveling Salesman Problem asks whether there is a route of at most a certain length.
This is clearly in NP.

It does not ask for the optimal route. Such a problem would generally NOT be in NP

Actually, the travelling salesman problem does indeed ask for the shortest possible (=optimal) route and therefore is an NP-hard problem.

they are vulnerable in exactly the same way, there is nothing special about whether a human or a machine under the control of a human solves a PoW.

You seem to missunderstand the idea.
The idea is to have a PoW which can not be performed by a machine. In this case they are not vulnerable the same way. A human is not vulnerable to any kind of digital attacks/spoofing/.. the same way as a machine.

[tromp]

The Traveling Salesman Problem asks whether there is a route of at most a certain length.
This is clearly in NP.

It does not ask for the optimal route. Such a problem would generally NOT be in NP

Actually, the travelling salesman problem does indeed ask for the shortest possible (=optimal) route and therefore is an NP-hard problem.

Quoting from that Wikipedia page:

"In the theory of computational complexity, the decision version of the TSP (where, given a length L, the task is to decide whether the graph has any tour shorter than L) belongs to the class of NP-complete problems."

[d5000]

The Traveling Salesman Problem asks whether there is a route of at most a certain length.
This is clearly in NP.

It does not ask for the optimal route. Such a problem would generally NOT be in NP, precisely because answers cannot be efficiently verified.

If we consider OptimalTSP as the problem whose instances are a pair of a distance matrix and an optimal route, then this problem is in fact in co-NP, complements of NP problems.

OK, thanks. I admit I'm not an expert on this topic.

But in this case, is it mandatory that a solution (with a shorter route than the original graph) exists? Can the computer know that before someone submits a possible solution? Because if there doesn't exist a shorter route, then the blockchain would become stuck. You can resolve that with fallback tasks, but a certain probability may exist that none of them has a solution.

And the computer maybe could be at advantage trying to brute-force slight variations from the original route.

But overall, I would love to see a test implementation.

[Ucy]

Tyranny of the algorithm? Lol
But algorithm works according to rules. We should rather be worried about very advanced Artificial Intelligence going rogue in the future.

Your idea is very interesting though. But what stops a greedy miner from outsourcing the problems to other people?

I have always wondered whether Mining Centralization can be solved with Biometrics.. . By combining different Biometrics with passwords for every miner. The Biometrics will be hashed/encrypted and stored on Blockchain so that no one (not even "govts") except the owners have access to them.

[domob]

Have you looked at Motocoin?  That basically does exactly what you propose - mining through a puzzle game.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be bot-able in the end.

[buwaytress]

Have you looked at Motocoin?  That basically does exactly what you propose - mining through a puzzle game.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be bot-able in the end.

You're just providing yet another example of a failed solution to find this Proof of Human holy grail.

As I said above, and as others seem to agree (sorry for speaking for the rest), the basic challenge and the essence of the solution is yet to be overcome: how do we create or find a task that a computer cannot complete, neither by learning nor by brute force?

Puzzles seems to be just the one way but it's always going to end up bot-able. Riddles maybe? Psychic tasks maybe?

[Philopolymath]

The fatal flaw is this.

HUMANS DO NOT THINK...THEY CAN NOT THINK. THEY HAVE NEVER THOUGHT...THEY WILL NEVER THINK.

Most of mankind has no idea what thinking is.
What Mankind calls thought is but "Sense Based Reasoning" This is not thinking..it is simple plagiarism from programming of the SENSES.
For further reading on the topic READ Mark Twain's Essay, "What is Man".

Mankind is infantile,ignorant,arrogant and negligent.

MIND alone thinks.
MIND ALONE IS.
MIND ALONE KNOWS.

MIND KNOWING is NOT SENSE BASED REASONING.
For further illumination on this concept.
Read "A New Concept of The Universe" By Walter Russell

And remember... comment without investigation is the epitome of ignorance..self imposed and self deceived.

[Kprawn]

You know, we started with CPU/GPU mining and then some clever people designed ASIC chips and this completely changed the

mining scene, because only a selective few people with enough capital to invest, was able to afford these chips and they

started to dominate the mining scene. Now you want to introduce something that only a few people would be able to do and

they will once again dominate and centralize this scene.    Rather develop something that more people will be able to do.

[mixoftix]

the idea is amazing, not applicable, not applied..

This is exactly what we want; a problem whose proposed solution can be quickly verified by computer and yet the computer would be "bad" at finding solutions itself. Perfect. Some example problems to solve could be the traveling salesman problem and/or minesweeper, and/or any other NP-complete problem or combinations of problems.

at first, you may need to check the good ability of Genetic Algorithm in solving TSP.. this could entirely fail the idea in utilizing human brain as a source for PoW with NP-Hard problems:

https://medium.com/@becmjo/genetic-algorithms-and-the-travelling-salesman-problem-d10d1daf96a1

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introducing the idea as another version of PoW has a major flaw in event of "flood of common optimized answers get broadcast to the network".. this may be another kind of sibyl attack, or others hijack of the best answer.. this happens because TIMESTAMPING has missed in this proof model.

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"A truly decentralised consensus mechanism is one where humans perform the PoW."

and getting back to the main idea, I could say, the common problem around these sort of ideas is that the algorithm dose not involve in CHAINING process of BLOCKS - they do not work on data of block header, so relationship among blocks remains unproved..

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BUT, getting humans involve in the PoW is valuable and needs to be something close to the nature of human commerce..  I personally have chosen Marketing Knowledge for mining. in my model miners need to market their ability of mining and then accept job from users. now miners could improve their marketing skills to receive more job, then do mine transactions the way that PoW shows us. as we could see, now relationship among blocks and getting humans involve in the process, both satisfies.

[aliashraf]

BUT, getting humans involve in the PoW is valuable and needs to be something close to the nature of human commerce..  I personally have chosen Marketing Knowledge for mining. in my model miners need to market their ability of mining and then accept job from users. now miners could improve their marketing skills to receive more job, then do mine transactions the way that PoW shows us. as we could see, now relationship among blocks and getting humans involve in the process, both satisfies.

By Marketing Knowledge you mean marketing and sales power which is a matter of investment, how is it related to any human characteristics?

Miners engaged in marketing their services, is not a good idea. I'm afraid that you are somehow poisoned by corporate oriented sales discourses that are not adequate for crypto ecosystem.