thinking person

What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call "crypto-anarchy. Another quote in the cyphernomicon defines crypto-anarchism. Under the title "What is Crypto Anarchy?", May writes:

Some of us believe various forms of strong cryptography will cause the power of the state to decline, perhaps even collapse fairly abruptly. We believe the expansion into cyberspace, with secure communications, digital money, anonymity and pseudonymity, and other crypto-mediated interactions, will profoundly change the nature of economies and social interactions. Governments will have a hard time collecting taxes, regulating the behavior of individuals and corporations (small ones at least), and generally coercing folks when it can't even tell what continent folks are on!

One motive of crypto-anarchists is to defend against surveillance of computer networks communication. Crypto-anarchists try to protect against government mass surveillance, such as PRISM, ECHELON, Tempora, telecommunications data retention, the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy, Room 641A, the FRA and so on. Crypto-anarchists consider the development and use of cryptography to be the main defense against such problems Assassination Market was a Tor-based market operated by a self-described crypto-anarchist going by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro.

In The Cyphernomicon, Timothy C. May suggests that crypto-anarchism qualifies as a form of anarcho-capitalism:

What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call "crypto-anarchy.

Crypto-anarchism or cyberanarchism[1] is a political ideology focusing on protection of privacy, political freedom and economic freedom, the adherents of which use cryptographic software for confidentiality and security while sending and receiving information over computer networks.[2][3] In his 1988 "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto", Timothy C. May introduced the basic principles of crypto-anarchism, encrypted exchanges ensuring total anonymity, total freedom of speech, and total freedom to trade.[4] Terminology

"Crypto-" comes from the Ancient Greek κρυπτός kruptós, meaning "hidden" or "secret".

Motives

One motive of crypto-anarchists is to defend against surveillance of computer networks communication. Crypto-anarchists try to protect against government mass surveillance, such as PRISM, ECHELON, Tempora, telecommunications data retention, the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy, Room 641A, the FRA and so on. Crypto-anarchists consider the development and use of cryptography to be the main defense against such problems

Crypto-anarchism or cyberanarchism[1] is a political ideology focusing on protection of privacy, political freedom and economic freedom, the adherents of which use cryptographic software for confidentiality and security while sending and receiving information over computer networks.[2][3] In his 1988 "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto", Timothy C. May introduced the basic principles of crypto-anarchism, encrypted exchanges ensuring total anonymity, total freedom of speech, and total freedom to trade.[4]

Environmental concerns

In January 2022 Vice-Chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority Erik Thedéen called on the EU to ban the proof of work model in favor of the proof of stake model due its lower energy emissions.

ASICs and mining pools

Within the Bitcoin community there are groups working together in mining pools.[24] Some miners use application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for PoW.[25] This trend toward mining pools and specialized ASICs has made mining some cryptocurrencies economically infeasible for most players without access to the latest ASICs, nearby sources of inexpensive energy, or other special advantages.[26]

Some PoWs claim to be ASIC-resistant,[27] i.e. to limit the efficiency gain that an ASIC can have over commodity hardware, like a GPU, to be well under an order of magnitude. ASIC resistance has the advantage of keeping mining economically feasible on commodity hardware, but also contributes to the corresponding risk that an attacker can briefly rent access to a large amount of unspecialized commodity processing power to launch a 51% attack against a cryptocurrency.

History modification

Each block that is added to the blockchain, starting with the block containing a given transaction, is called a confirmation of that transaction. Ideally, merchants and services that receive payment in the cryptocurrency should wait for at least one confirmation to be distributed over the network, before assuming that the payment was done. The more confirmations that the merchant waits for, the more difficult it is for an attacker to successfully reverse the transaction in a blockchain—unless the attacker controls more than half the total network power, in which case it is called a 51% attack

The difficulty is periodically adjusted to keep the block time around a target time. Energy consumption

Bitcoin electricity consumption as of 2021[21]

Since the creation of Bitcoin, proof-of-work has been the predominant design of peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. Studies have estimated the total energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining.[22] The PoW mechanism requires a vast amount of computing resources, which consume a significant amount of electricity. Recent estimates from the University of Cambridge put Bitcoin’s energy consumption as equal to that of Switzerland

A website can demand a PoW token in exchange for service. Requiring a PoW token from users would inhibit frivolous or excessive use of the service, sparing the service's underlying resources, such as bandwidth to the Internet, computation, disk space, electricity, and administrative overhead. Finney's RPoW system differed from a PoW system in permitting the random exchange of tokens without repeating the work required to generate them. After someone had "spent" a PoW token at a website, the website's operator could exchange that "spent" PoW token for a new, unspent RPoW token, which could then be spent at some third-party website similarly equipped to accept RPoW tokens. This would save the resources otherwise needed to 'mint' a PoW token. The anti-counterfeit property of the RPoW token was guaranteed by remote attestation. The RPoW server that exchanges a used PoW or RPoW token for a new one of equal value uses remote attestation to allow any interested party to verify what software is running on the RPoW server. Finney's RPoW system differed from a PoW system in permitting the random exchange of tokens without repeating the work required to generate them. After someone had "spent" a PoW token at a website, the website's operator could exchange that "spent" PoW token for a new, unspent RPoW token, which could then be spent at some third-party website similarly equipped to accept RPoW tokens. This would save the resources otherwise needed to 'mint' a PoW token. The anti-counterfeit property of the RPoW token was guaranteed by remote attestation. The RPoW server that exchanges a used PoW or RPoW token for a new one of equal value uses remote attestation to allow any interested party to verify what software is running on the RPoW server. Since the source code for Finney's RPoW software was published (under a BSD-like license), any sufficiently knowledgeable programmer could, by inspecting the code, verify that the software (and, by extension, the RPoW server) never issued a new token except in exchange for a spent token of equal value. Until 2009, Finney's system was the only RPoW system to have been implemented; it never saw economically significant use. Bitcoin-type proof of work

In 2009, the Bitcoin network went online. Bitcoin is a proof-of-work digital currency that, like Finney's RPoW, is also based on the Hashcash PoW. But in Bitcoin, double-spend protection is provided by a decentralized P2P protocol for tracking transfers of coins, rather than the hardware trusted computing function used by RPoW. Bitcoin has better trustworthiness because it is protected by computation. Bitcoins are "mined" using the Hashcash proof-of-work function by individual miners and verified by the decentralized nodes in the P2P bitcoin network.

The difficulty is periodically adjusted to keep the block time around a target time.

A website can demand a PoW token in exchange for service. Requiring a PoW token from users would inhibit frivolous or excessive use of the service, sparing the service's underlying resources, such as bandwidth to the Internet, computation, disk space, electricity, and administrative overhead. Finney's RPoW system differed from a PoW system in permitting the random exchange of tokens without repeating the work required to generate them. After someone had "spent" a PoW token at a website, the website's operator could exchange that "spent" PoW token for a new, unspent RPoW token, which could then be spent at some third-party website similarly equipped to accept RPoW tokens. This would save the resources otherwise needed to 'mint' a PoW token. The anti-counterfeit property of the RPoW token was guaranteed by remote attestation. The RPoW server that exchanges a used PoW or RPoW token for a new one of equal value uses remote attestation to allow any interested party to verify what software is running on the RPoW server. Finney's RPoW system differed from a PoW system in permitting the random exchange of tokens without repeating the work required to generate them. After someone had "spent" a PoW token at a website, the website's operator could exchange that "spent" PoW token for a new, unspent RPoW token, which could then be spent at some third-party website similarly equipped to accept RPoW tokens. This would save the resources otherwise needed to 'mint' a PoW token. The anti-counterfeit property of the RPoW token was guaranteed by remote attestation. The RPoW server that exchanges a used PoW or RPoW token for a new one of equal value uses remote attestation to allow any interested party to verify what software is running on the RPoW server. Since the source code for Finney's RPoW software was published (under a BSD-like license), any sufficiently knowledgeable programmer could, by inspecting the code, verify that the software (and, by extension, the RPoW server) never issued a new token except in exchange for a spent token of equal value. Until 2009, Finney's system was the only RPoW system to have been implemented; it never saw economically significant use.

A website can demand a PoW token in exchange for service. Requiring a PoW token from users would inhibit frivolous or excessive use of the service, sparing the service's underlying resources, such as bandwidth to the Internet, computation, disk space, electricity, and administrative overhead. Finney's RPoW system differed from a PoW system in permitting the random exchange of tokens without repeating the work required to generate them. After someone had "spent" a PoW token at a website, the website's operator could exchange that "spent" PoW token for a new, unspent RPoW token, which could then be spent at some third-party website similarly equipped to accept RPoW tokens. This would save the resources otherwise needed to 'mint' a PoW token. The anti-counterfeit property of the RPoW token was guaranteed by remote attestation. The RPoW server that exchanges a used PoW or RPoW token for a new one of equal value uses remote attestation to allow any interested party to verify what software is running on the RPoW server. Finney's RPoW system differed from a PoW system in permitting the random exchange of tokens without repeating the work required to generate them. After someone had "spent" a PoW token at a website, the website's operator could exchange that "spent" PoW token for a new, unspent RPoW token, which could then be spent at some third-party website similarly equipped to accept RPoW tokens. This would save the resources otherwise needed to 'mint' a PoW token. The anti-counterfeit property of the RPoW token was guaranteed by remote attestation. The RPoW server that exchanges a used PoW or RPoW token for a new one of equal value uses remote attestation to allow any interested party to verify what software is running on the RPoW server.

A website can demand a PoW token in exchange for service. Requiring a PoW token from users would inhibit frivolous or excessive use of the service, sparing the service's underlying resources, such as bandwidth to the Internet, computation, disk space, electricity, and administrative overhead. Finney's RPoW system differed from a PoW system in permitting the random exchange of tokens without repeating the work required to generate them. After someone had "spent" a PoW token at a website, the website's operator could exchange that "spent" PoW token for a new, unspent RPoW token, which could then be spent at some third-party website similarly equipped to accept RPoW tokens. This would save the resources otherwise needed to 'mint' a PoW token. The anti-counterfeit property of the RPoW token was guaranteed by remote attestation. The RPoW server that exchanges a used PoW or RPoW token for a new one of equal value uses remote attestation to allow any interested party to verify what software is running on the RPoW server.

A website can demand a PoW token in exchange for service. Requiring a PoW token from users would inhibit frivolous or excessive use of the service, sparing the service's underlying resources, such as bandwidth to the Internet, computation, disk space, electricity, and administrative overhead. Finney's RPoW system differed from a PoW system in permitting the random exchange of tokens without repeating the work required to generate them. After someone had "spent" a PoW token at a website, the website's operator could exchange that "spent" PoW token for a new, unspent RPoW token, which could then be spent at some third-party website similarly equipped to accept RPoW tokens.

Reusable proof-of-work

Computer scientist Hal Finney built on the proof-of-work idea, yielding a system that exploited reusable proof of work (RPoW).[20] The idea of making proofs of work reusable for some practical purpose had already been established in 1999.[1] Finney's purpose for RPoW was as token money. Just as a gold coin's value is linked to gold mining cost, the value of an RPoW token is guaranteed by the value of the real-world resources required to 'mint' a PoW token. In Finney's version of RPoW, the PoW token is a piece of Hashcash.

A website can demand a PoW token in exchange for service. Requiring a PoW token from users would inhibit frivolous or excessive use of the service, sparing the service's underlying resources, such as bandwidth to the Internet, computation, disk space, electricity, and administrative overhead.

Memory-bound[8][9][10][11] where the computation speed is bound by main memory accesses (either latency or bandwidth), the performance of which is expected to be less sensitive to hardware evolutionevolution.Network-bound[12] if the client must perform few computations, but must collect some tokens from remote servers before querying the final service provider. In this sense, the work is not actually p

erformed by the requester, but it incurs delays anyway because of the latency to get the required tokens.

Finally, some PoW systems offer shortcut computations that allow participants who know a secret, typically a private key, to generate cheap PoWs. The rationale is that mailing-list holders may generate stamps for every recipient without incurring a high cost. Whether such a feature is desirable depends on the usage scenario.