CassandrichA topic I once tweeted about but didn't really pursue, that's now looking more interesting/relevant, is what I call a lightweight "nocoin" notary chain/web. Some thoughts on what that would be, and why it's interesting. A 🧵
This idea started from looking at the definition of "blockchain" (merkle tree + consensus protocol) and asking whether such a thing necessarily facilitates running stupid toy money ponzi schemes on top of it.
In particular, can you make an underlying structure that can't represent the concept of "double spend" (and thus can't guard against it) so that it can't be used to trade virtual assets with parties you distrust? If so, is that useful?
Andrew Zonenberg@dalias The other related question I've wondered about is whether it's possible to create a "proof of *useful* work" chain.
Can we take some compute that had to be done anyway, and convince cryptobros to throw computing power at it?
Think protein folding or similar.
@dalias Every time I look at magic internet money I think about the amount of power and engineering work being wasted on generating heat bruteforcing SHA256s when we have real problems to solve.
If we can't stop them from burning all that power, can we at least do something useful with it?
Matt Corallo@azonenberg @dalias sadly not really - the requirements for PoW schemes are, basically (a) easy/cheap for a third party to verify, (b) many small tries for miners (ie there’s no progress/long-running computation). Both exclude protein folding and I’ve never seen anyone suggest something truly useful and credible. Best anyone has done is primes of specific structure but (1) it’s still basically useless and (2) it’s not very good PoW either (T/M tradeoffs hurt b).