Nice! I’m thinking my idea of a self-adjusting currency that uses a peer to peer proof of work algorithm which solves useful NP problems as a side effect and incorporates automated credit ratings based on debt repayment and contract fulfillment rates is probably in the 3 range. But if I hook it up to a protein folding game that teaches advanced biochemistry to akrasiatic gamers as a side effect it could be boosted up to the 6 range.
If you ignore the credit rating system, and replace its hash algorithm with variable-length (expanding) one, that’s basically what Bitcoin is. (Inversion of variable-length collision-resistant hash functions is NP-hard. I had to ask on that one.)
[EDIT: That question has been dead for a while, but now that I posted a link, it got another answer which basically repeats the first answer and needlessly retreads why I had to rephrase the question in a way such that the hash inversion problem has a variable size so that asymptotic difficulty becomes meaningful, thus being non-responsive to the question as now phrased. I hope it wasn’t someone from here that clicked that link.]
They’ve made a lot of progress getting games to derive protein-folding results, but I think there’s a lot of room for improvement there (better fidelity to the laws of the protein folding environment so players can develop an “intuition” of what shapes work, semiotics that are more suggestive of the dynamics of their subsystems, etc).
I’ve been musing about the same sort of proof-of-work algorithm, but I haven’t come up with a good actual system yet—there’s no obvious way to decentralizedly get a guaranteed-hard new useful problem.
Interesting! I was actually inspired by some of your IRC comments.
I am thinking the problems would be produced by peers and assigned to one another using a provably random assignment scheme. When assigned a problem, each peer has the option to ignore or attempt to solve. If they choose ignore they are assigned another one. Each time this happens to a problem is treated by the network as evidence that the problem is a hard one. If someone solves a scored-as-hard problem, they get a better chance of winning the block. (This would be accomplished by appending the solution as a nonce in a bitcoin-like arrangement and setting the minimum difficulty based on the hardness ranking.)
Nice! I’m thinking my idea of a self-adjusting currency that uses a peer to peer proof of work algorithm which solves useful NP problems as a side effect and incorporates automated credit ratings based on debt repayment and contract fulfillment rates is probably in the 3 range. But if I hook it up to a protein folding game that teaches advanced biochemistry to akrasiatic gamers as a side effect it could be boosted up to the 6 range.
If you ignore the credit rating system, and replace its hash algorithm with variable-length (expanding) one, that’s basically what Bitcoin is. (Inversion of variable-length collision-resistant hash functions is NP-hard. I had to ask on that one.)
[EDIT: That question has been dead for a while, but now that I posted a link, it got another answer which basically repeats the first answer and needlessly retreads why I had to rephrase the question in a way such that the hash inversion problem has a variable size so that asymptotic difficulty becomes meaningful, thus being non-responsive to the question as now phrased. I hope it wasn’t someone from here that clicked that link.]
They’ve made a lot of progress getting games to derive protein-folding results, but I think there’s a lot of room for improvement there (better fidelity to the laws of the protein folding environment so players can develop an “intuition” of what shapes work, semiotics that are more suggestive of the dynamics of their subsystems, etc).
I trust you’ve looked into Ripple? It strikes me as fairly interesting, though the implementation is, at present, uninspiring.
I’ve been musing about the same sort of proof-of-work algorithm, but I haven’t come up with a good actual system yet—there’s no obvious way to decentralizedly get a guaranteed-hard new useful problem.
Interesting! I was actually inspired by some of your IRC comments.
I am thinking the problems would be produced by peers and assigned to one another using a provably random assignment scheme. When assigned a problem, each peer has the option to ignore or attempt to solve. If they choose ignore they are assigned another one. Each time this happens to a problem is treated by the network as evidence that the problem is a hard one. If someone solves a scored-as-hard problem, they get a better chance of winning the block. (This would be accomplished by appending the solution as a nonce in a bitcoin-like arrangement and setting the minimum difficulty based on the hardness ranking.)
Hm. It never occurred to me that provable randomness might be useful… As stated, I don’t think your scheme works because of Sybil attacks:
I come up with some easy NP problem or one already solved offline
I pass it around my 10,000 fake IRC nodes who all sign it,
and present the solved solution to the network
$$$