
Ethereum “Dagger” proof-of-work function is flawed - wslh
http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/ethereum-dagger-pow-is-flawed/
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joosters
I suspect these attempts to design a computation that cannot efficiently be
performed by 'hardware' (ASICs, or even graphics cards or whatever) are doomed
to fail. Furthermore, they're essentially pointless.

Even if you end up with a scheme that can only run efficiently on a general
purpose computer, it will probably be through making the computation utilise
all the features of the computer. Which means that the computer won't be very
good at doing anything else while it is mining. End result: people will have
to dedicate machines to mining.

What end benefit does this give to the users or to the currency? People either
spend money on dedicated computers or dedicated ASIC miners.

(I guess, at least if/when the currency crashes and burns, those machines
could then be reused for other things... but it's still 'wasted' on the owner,
who wouldn't have otherwise bought the computer)

~~~
bhouston
joosters wrote: "I suspect these attempts to design a computation that cannot
efficiently be performed by 'hardware' (ASICs, or even graphics cards or
whatever) are doomed to fail."

For sure. Each time someone figures out something that can not be done on
current ASICs/GPUs, a bunch of smart people throw themselves at figuring out a
way to modify the GPUs/ASICs in order to enable it. It is an arms race
scenario, where these inefficiencies for 'hardware' are just temporarily.

~~~
iSnow
> Each time someone figures out something that can not be done on current
> ASICs/GPUs, a bunch of smart people throw themselves at figuring out a way
> to modify the GPUs/ASICs in order to enable it.

Well, yes and no. Litecoin was invented in 2011 and still no one has
successfully built ASICs for LTC mining.

~~~
wmf
This was just released:
[http://www.gridseed.com/main.php](http://www.gridseed.com/main.php)

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aaron-lebo
There was this response by one of the devs:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1vh94e/dagger_upda...](http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1vh94e/dagger_updates/)

They seem to be moving away from Dagger:

"We will switch our PoW from Dagger to a hybrid PoW/PoS system to be developed
via a bountied competition conducted by our university partners and open to
the general community for participation."
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0;all](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0;all)

Whether this instills confidence that they are agile and not ideologues or
shows inexperience is your call.

~~~
judk
> Although we have great talent as far as theoretical computer science is
> concerned, we have not yet acquired any experts in computer hardware on our
> team

Note to readers: the exact wrong time to use an appeal to authority is this,
the moment after your authority been disproven by facts.

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barkingcat
i think it's better to approach this from the other side - there are already
many distributed computing projects like folding@home, etc that are trying to
solve "problems that are cpu and memory hard" \- and will realistically have
no ending (unless one day there is no disease, or we attain world peace, find
aliens, etc). How about we assign value and proof of work to something
tangible? Like if your computer folds a correct protein that solves a problem
re cancer or aids, you get 1 "humanity coin" ?

~~~
bmm6o
While protein folding calculations are useful, they can't be used as a
foundation of PoW systems because there is no easy way to verify a solution.

~~~
barkingcat
Yes there is. It's the most easy way to verify - see if the protein matches
with the problem receptor. It's pretty much black or white if something binds
to a receptor.

I think the perspective just needs to change. Maybe a little handheld "protein
receptor match" kit that you plug your numbers into, and it will "make" your
particle to try to match in a small lab kit that is portable.

~~~
possibilistic
First you have to verify that the conformation of the protein is correct. What
use is an improperly or incompletely folded protein with regard to ligand
binding?

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quantumcash
Proof of Work and proof of stake hybrid. Mining to create useful computations
as much as possible. Make produced resources available using the currency
only. Proof of computing resources provided.

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nly
Why is Scrypt not a suitable solution?

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TheLoneWolfling
Scrypt requires as much memory to verify a POW as to create one.

~~~
Dylan16807
The author doesn't seem to think that's a problem.

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foxhill
the problem of finding proof of work is inherently parallel - embarrassingly
parallel, in fact - and cannot possibly be anything else.

so calling dagger flawed for being parallelizable is.. well, ridiculous.

