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by RL_Quine
2335 days ago
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> Computational power is not a good proof of anything. It devours energy and disproportionately rewards weird market actors (like people with custom mines ASICs). It's literally what it says it is, proof of work. Consumption of electrical power in a way that can't be re-used for anything else. > If you want to transact with someone, they send you a challenge that consists of a set of addresses in a large file. You must respond with a hash of data at those addresses, problematically proving that you have the entire file. I'll cheat by making my "large file" the output of a PRNG, meaning I don't have to store any of it, but other people do because they don't know the seed. |
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This will work, but only until the file is sufficicently changed/expanded by the networks as the result of transactions.
(I probably should have said it explicitly: the file would be shared by all participants.)
You can also generate the file by recording something random everyone can observe, like records of a stock market, temperature of some location, etc. I don't see any reason it would have to be perfectly, cryptograhically random.
And yes, a single participant could "help" other nodes by responding to challenges instead of them. But think about the economics of how that would work over time.
I'm not saying that what I described is a full, working, tamper-proof protocol, but I think something interesting can be built based on the core idea.