Re:Ask HN: Cryptocurrencies – POUW (proof of useful work)
by randomhodler84 on Friday May 21, 2021 @07:20PM
(#27241177)
It’s not early days for it, I feel it’s been done and done and failed every time so far. I think the fundamental problem is most useful work, which we can define as work that can be used in another context rather than just validating difficulty — eg protein folding, is very difficult to reason about the energy requirements of a “valid solution”, and linearly scaling the difficult to adjust to work magnitude. Useful work tends to be expensive to validate also, whereas verify for SHA256^2 POW is trivial. Ideally you want easy to reason, linearly scaling and highly asymmetric create/validate.
Proof of work leads to stealing of general purpose computation power only in the short term because as difficulty rapidly raises "honest" miners are pressured to specialize fast in order to profit meaning moving their mining operations to specialized server farms. Once that happens it is no longer profitable for cybercriminals to use their botnets for mining since difficulty is so high they earn very little and because of that they are more likely to switch their botnets to other "traditional" cybercrimes such as SPAM and DDoS.