Ben Laurie posted a link to this paper in response to Satoshi's posting his first version of Bitcoin[1], with this comment:<p>> Richard Clayton and I claim that PoW doesn't work:<p>> <a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf</a><p>It's in the context of a discussion about why PoW-based tokes are a bad idea in terms of burning CPUs and their carbon footprint. The generous interpretation is that he was claiming that this discussion was moot because the bigger issue was that PoW wouldn't actually work as a feature of Bitcoin.<p>The less generous (but probably accurate) interpretation is that he posted that without reading either the Bitcoin whitepaper itself or the abstract of the whitepaper. IIUC his paper is about how PoW applied to email would either break a lot of the desirable features or the difficulty would be too low to prevent spam.<p>I'm not sure why this bothers me enough to post about it on HN-- I'd actually prefer it to be true and Bitcoin fanbase never to have existed. Nevertheless, his paper wasn't really relevant to that discussion and I'm not sure why he posted it there.<p>1: <a href="https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10225.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10...</a><p>Edit: clarification
I'm "old" enough to remember Bill Gates talking about getting rid of spam with puzzles in 2004:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/jan/25/billgates.spam" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/jan/25/billgates...</a>
For context, Bitcoin launched in 2008, and this paper, concerning proof-of-work as an anti-spam prevention measure, launched in 2004.<p>Question: has any email system attempted proof of work? Did it run into the problems this paper predicted?
Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus".<p>I don't think anything else can solve decentralized rate limiting more effectively than proof of work.<p>I wrote a short blog post about the use of Proof of work beyond crypto mining [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://as1ndu.xyz/2019/11/proof-of-work-on-layer-two/" rel="nofollow">https://as1ndu.xyz/2019/11/proof-of-work-on-layer-two/</a>
For everyone who is a big fan of crypto, what is the next "big step" after PoS.<p>I am more than happy to use a cryptocurrency where I can take 1 USD and receive a coin that is worth ~1 USD, without needing the promise that it will be a moonshot "investment," merely a vehicle for value.<p>When is that coin coming our way?