Proof of Useful Work?

[PrimeNumber7]

The mining manufactures have large upfront R&D costs associated with manufacturing ASICs. So the mining manufacturers have an incentive to not sell large quantities of miners to a single entity who could potentially do harm to the bitcoin network, or else they are risking their R&D investments.

Good one to know. So it is correct to say that the manufacturers of ASICs are the people indirectly preventing 51% attack.

Yes, it is somewhat correct to say that. The ASIC manufacturers have a distinct financial incentive for the miners to not harm bitcoin.

With a neural network you could have this principale of pow with a learning set and shorter testing set the goal of solving the problem would be finding a network configuration that have lower error ratio than the previous on the testing set. Then the one who found the solution gain the reward.

If the same test set is continuously used, the resulting model will simply overfit the test data (it would obviously need to be public), and would likely not perform well against data "in the wild" -- it would perform poorly in production.

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[Wind_FURY]

<snip>So the PoW essentially guarantees the security of a bitcoin transaction.

Thank you for response. So it means that the energy expended is not used to add transaction to the next block but to secure the transaction. So, all the miners commit energy to the system to secure it. If the system fails their cost of energy will waste.

You are correct in your understanding.

Thank you.

The mining manufactures have large upfront R&D costs associated with manufacturing ASICs. So the mining manufacturers have an incentive to not sell large quantities of miners to a single entity who could potentially do harm to the bitcoin network, or else they are risking their R&D investments.

Good one to know. So it is correct to say that the manufacturers of ASICs are the people indirectly preventing 51% attack.

Not entirely. ASICs made mining more efficient, but it’s the honest entities/good actors that take the costs to spend energy to find the appropriate Proof of Work that prevent 50% attacks. Mining can be done without ASICs.

[thecodebear]

The main problem with this idea I believe is that SOMEONE must decide what problems to give to 'the work' being done. Bitcoin PoW works because it is just general work being done, and it is useful, not wasted, because it secures the blockchain, which is obviously of prime importance.

If you want to have a system in which the work gets applied to some outside series of computational problems then someone has to be inputting these problems into the system. I mean I guess you could have the users vote on the upcoming problems to be worked on or something, but the whole design seems rather flimsy and like it might work better for a very centralized network but not for a global open decentralized system like Bitcoin.

Then again, no cryptos are actually trying to compete with Bitcoin so the crypto ecosystem is, other than Bitcoin, made up of fairly centralized networks. But still, I think this idea of PoUW is flimsy even for altcoins for the most part. Maybe for an XRP-like network, which it is super centralized and a single entity is the central authority and acts as gatekeeper for all nodes, then it could work because that single entity would also be deciding on the work to be done so all nodes would have to comply due to the focus on centralization. But that sort of system is already anethema to the entire idea of crypto so it seems unlikely to succeed in the market just trying to ride off this idea of 'useful' work.

[unrealisticexpectations]

The main problem with this idea I believe is that SOMEONE must decide what problems to give to 'the work' being done. Bitcoin PoW works because it is just general work being done, and it is useful, not wasted, because it secures the blockchain, which is obviously of prime importance.

This, people see PoW as flawed because it "waste" computational power to solve the SHA256 puzzle but they miss the point. This energy is not wasted it is used to secure the network and makes it easily auditable. Eg: you know roughly how many watts of energy you need for a round of SHA256 which can be easily extrapolated to the network. This gives an ability to easily audit and verify nothing was tempered with.

There are something similar to what you described which is boinc distributed computer. You use your GPU for computation and get rewarded in "points" replace those points by token and you have something similar. However right now those point are worthless because they are just a way of ranking and you have no way to easily audit (by non mining node).
* How do you verify the work was done?
* In boinc it is centralized which means effectively you could print money

[jvanname]

Proof of work problems need to satisfy several properties. They need to be quick to verify, hard to solve, have a fine-tunable difficulty level. They also need to be progress free (a miner that started 5 minutes ago but who did not achieve a block will have no advantage over someone who started 1 minute ago). The solution to the proof of work problem also needs to be tied to the blockchain to prevent reuse of solutions and precomputing solutions. Finally, it should not be possible for one to construct a secret algorithm for solving the proof of work problem that is significantly better than the standard algorithm (ahem, asicboost and possibly approximate mining; fortunately these shortcuts were not bad enough to ruin Bitcoin). These conditions that proof of work problems must satisfy make it much harder to make a more useful proof of work problem. And to make things a bit worse, the proof of work must be useful for the public, but not for the miners themselves for reasons that people have already laid out in this thread.

With this in mind, it is probably best to think about what sort of energy efficient computing technology we will need to use in the far future but is hard to develop now because a lack of a market and then design a mining algorithm to incentivize the development of that energy efficient future computing technology. Please read the recent paper by Ralph Merkle on energy efficient mechanical computation to get an idea of what kind of energy efficient computing technology we should try to incentivize.