Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-31 Thread Bill Stewart
At 10:40 AM 1/30/2009, Thomas Coppi wrote: Just out of curiosity, does anyone happen to know of any documented examples of a botnet being used for something more interesting than just sending spam or DDoS? There are good botnets and bad botnets. Good ones ask you if you want to join, bad ones

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-31 Thread Russ Nelson
John Levine writes: http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf I would also point out that nothing is preventing anyone from implementing their own epostage. Just send your email via a paypal Send Money, accompanied with whatever postage you feel is appropriate. No magic, no standards track epostage,

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-31 Thread Steven M. Bellovin
On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:40:12 -0700 Thomas Coppi thisnuke...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:19 PM, John Levine jo...@iecc.com wrote: Indeed. And don't forget that through the magic of botnets, the bad guys have vastly more compute power available than the good guys. Just out

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-30 Thread John Levine
You know those crackpot ideas that keep showing up in snake oil crypto? Well, e-postage is snake oil antispam. While I think this statement may be true for POW coinage, because for a bot net it grows on trees, for money that traces back to the international monetary exchange system, it may not be

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-30 Thread Thomas Coppi
On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:19 PM, John Levine jo...@iecc.com wrote: Indeed. And don't forget that through the magic of botnets, the bad guys have vastly more compute power available than the good guys. Just out of curiosity, does anyone happen to know of any documented examples of a botnet

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-30 Thread John Levine
Richard Clayton and I claim that PoW doesn't work: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf I bumped into Cynthia Dwork, who originallyinvented PoW, at a CEAS meeting a couple of years ago, and she said she doesn't think it works, either. R's, John

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-29 Thread Bill Frantz
jo...@iecc.com (John Levine) on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 wrote: You know those crackpot ideas that keep showing up in snake oil crypto? Well, e-postage is snake oil antispam. While I think this statement may be true for POW coinage, because for a bot net it grows on trees, for money that

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-29 Thread Nicolas Williams
On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 04:35:50PM -0500, Jerry Leichter wrote: [Proposals to use reversible computation, which in principle consume no energy, elided.] There's a contradiction here between the computer science and economic parts of the problem being discussed. What gives a digital coin

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-28 Thread Hal Finney
John Gilmore writes: The last thing we need is to deploy a system designed to burn all available cycles, consuming electricity and generating carbon dioxide, all over the Internet, in order to produce small amounts of bitbux to get emails or spams through. It's interesting to consider the

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-28 Thread John Levine
(Also, it's not clear that a deterministic POW works well for an application like Bitcoin; it might let the owner of the fastest computer win every POW race, giving him too much power.) Indeed. And don't forget that through the magic of botnets, the bad guys have vastly more compute power

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-28 Thread Jerry Leichter
On Jan 27, 2009, at 2:35 PM, Hal Finney wrote: John Gilmore writes: The last thing we need is to deploy a system designed to burn all available cycles, consuming electricity and generating carbon dioxide, all over the Internet, in order to produce small amounts of bitbux to get emails or

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-27 Thread Zooko O'Whielacronx
On Jan 26, 2009, at 13:08 PM, John Levine wrote: If only. People have been saying for at least a decade that all we have to do to solve the spam problem is to charge a small fee for every message sent. I was one of those people, a decade and a half ago, on the cypherpunks mailing list. In

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-26 Thread John Gilmore
If POW tokens do become useful, and especially if they become money, machines will no longer sit idle. Users will expect their computers to be earning them money (assuming the reward is greater than the cost to operate). Computers are already designed to consume much less electricity when

Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon

2009-01-26 Thread John Levine
Can't we just convert actual money in a bank account into bitbux -- cheaply and without a carbon tax? Please? If only. People have been saying for at least a decade that all we have to do to solve the spam problem is to charge a small fee for every message sent. Unfortunately, there's a