Proof-of-work system
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A proof-of-work (POW) system is a system used to prove that a device, like a computer, has done some work, usually meaning processing time. One of the more popular systems for this is Hashcash which uses partial hash collisions to prove that work was done. A common application of a proof-of-work system is to help prevent spam by having any computer that wants to send e-mail have to produce one of these proofs before accepting the e-mail. They can be used for any resource that is scarce, like network bandwidth, to stop floods and denial of service attacks.
[edit] Reusable Proof of Work
The computer scientist Hal Finney has built on the proof-of-work idea, yielding a system called reusable proof of work (RPOW).
The easiest way to understand RPOW is to view it as a form of token money. It is in fact the only form of digital token money invulnerable to inflation caused by a greedy or untrustworthy mint's issuing more tokens than they said they would issue.
In this aspect it resembles the gold coin: an issuer of gold coins cannot unfairly profit by minting extra gold coins because in a well-run gold-coin currency, obtaining the gold to make the extra coins has a cost approximately equal to the revenue or benefit to be gained by the minting of the coins. Moreover, this cost (i.e., the price of gold) is knowable/predictable by anyone in advance to a useful degree.
Just as a gold coin's value is in an important sense guaranteed by the value of the raw gold needed to make it, the value of a RPOW token is guaranteed by the value of a POW token. (In Finney's version of RPOW, that POW token is a piece of hashcash.)
The property that makes the gold coin and the RPOW token invulnerable to cheating by the nominal issuer of the currency also of course makes it invulnerable to counterfeiting.
Since the cost of creating a POW token decreases as a function of time in a fairly predictable way, e.g., by a steady logarithmic decay sometimes called Moore's law, it is impractical to hold onto a POW or RPOW token for years as a form of savings. Still, these tokens are quite useful and stable when used as a form of exchange.
If I operate a web site that offers some benefit or service that many people are highly motivated to use, then I have the option of demanding a POW token in exchange for this benefit, and in fact there will often be good reasons for doing so: my offering the benefit will almost always entail the consumption of certain resources, like bandwidth to the Internet, computation or disk space, that have a definite cost. Demanding a POW token will prevent Internet users from making frivolous or excessive use of the service (and consequently of the resources underlying the service).
Parenthetically, most people do not yet have software installed on their computer to mint POW tokens, but this could easily to change in the near future.
An RPOW system differs from a POW system in that after someone has "spent" a POW token at my web site, I have the option of exchanging that "spent" POW token for a new, unspent RPOW token, which I can then spend at some third party's web site (provided of course that that web site has been set up to accept RPOW tokens). This saves me the computational resources I would have otherwise needed to mint a POW token.
That third party can in turn exchange that spent RPOW for a new, unspent one of equal value.
The anti-counterfeit/anti-inflationary property of the RPOW token is guaranteed by a technique called remote attestation. In particular, the "RPOW server", the Internet server at which one exchanges a used POW or RPOW token for a new one of equal value, uses remote attestation to allow any sufficiently knowledgeable and interested party to verify what software is running on the RPOW server. Since the source code for this software has been published (under a BSD-like license), any sufficiently knowledgeable programmer can by inspecting this source code satisfy himself that the software, and by extension the RPOW server, never issues a new token except in exchange for spent token of equal value.
Finney's system is the only RPOW system to have been implemented so far, and it has not yet seen economically significant use. It is implemented as 12,000 lines of C code.
[edit] References
- HashCash The current most popular proof-of-work system
- The first proof of work system was proposed in 1992 in
Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor, Pricing via Processing, Or, Combatting Junk Mail, Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO’92, Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 740, Springer, 1993, pp. 139–147. (PDF)
- Bit gold. Describes a complete money system (including generation, storage, assay, and transfer) based on proof of work functions and the machine architecture problem raised by the use of these functions.
- "Proofs of Work and Bread Pudding Protocols", In B. Preneel, ed., Communications and Multimedia Security, pages 258-272, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. This paper formalizes the idea of a proof of work (POW) and introduces "the dependent idea of a bread pudding protocol", a "re-usable proof of work" (RPOW) system.
