>1) Can we use SAT (or another NPC problem) as a POW? Meybe. Remember that a POW has to be hard to compute but easy to verify and each instance should be roughly the same difficulty. My impression is that some SAT problems are a lot harder than others, and you can't tell in advance which is which.
>3) Would there be any problems in allowing people to solve a problem > defined in advance, rather than having it vary based on the current > block? Yes. The amount of computing power that people have thrown at bitcoin mining has increased by orders of magnitude since bitcoins were invented, and varying the problems keeps the mining rate roughly constant. If you had problems of fixed difficulty, either they'd be too hard and mining would creak to a halt, or they'd be too easy and the price would crash from the flood of new bitcoin blocks, at least until they hit the fixed total block limit. >4) Would it be useful to decouple any of the aspects of the block chain > from each other? Could one decouple the financial impacts from the > cryptographic operations from the persistent, distributed storage? There are certainly blockchains whose entries are things other than sort-of-money, and there's plenty of electronic money that doesn't use blockchains. So this question doesn't make a lot of sense. >6) Could we create markets around the various services required to > implement the block chain in a way that creates incentives that > align with the overall goals? Depends what you think the goals are. The current process meltdown is an argument between people who want to make what they see as a simple and overdue change to increase the number of transactions, and people who for various reasons ranging from algorithmic purity to protecting the transaction fees their racks of mining hardware is collecting. R's, John _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
