Ask HN: Cryptocurrencies – POUW (proof of useful work)
4 by danielEM | 2 comments on Hacker News.
That topic is bugging me for a little while. Anyone who follows me (probably 0 people ;-) ) knows already that I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies. And I'm not gonna dive into that here. Instead I'll try to solve one of its issues - it produces CO2 for "nothing". All computations it does is actually worthless, just bunch of bytes that people find precious itself. So here is the idea: Lets say we have a computational problem to solve and limited resources to solve it. The task would be to get as good as possible result for the problem within these limited resources. And every progress (getting better result from previous) would be gratified with "hash" coin based on proof of useful work. Lets give a practical examples: We want a video codec and best possible image quality on limited bandwidth, limited computational cycles on "virtual machine", limited code size and limited RAM resources. Library of wisely selected videos would be a reference for measurement of image quality. Every improvement in overall quality would be gratified with "hash" of the code. As long as final result fits within limited resources the algorithm of improving would not matter (machine learning/genetic algorithms ...) and be a subject of "manual" earnings. Nearly same would be for audio codecs. And then we would go for other important problems to solve for humanity - treatments for cancer, objects and voice recognition and so on... What do you think about it? I will call it POUW (proof of useful work)