Cryptocurrency

Notes and thoughts

Verification Selection

This is the linchpin of the whole operation. For BTC, it's accomplished with the hash puzzle. The likelihood of 100 consecutive bad actors is very low and the hash-puzzle evenly distributes who wins. It's also the source of the biggest flaws - uneven access (though much better than traditional banking) and enormous power consumption.

So validation of state can happen in fundamentally two ways; authority and "randomness". Randomness is in one sense easy and one sense hard. It is easy to pseudo-randomly choose and "entry", but it is very difficult to prevent "stuffing the ballot box". The best we can do is have everyone compete to see who has the most entries.

I actually think we can do a bit better with authority using Markov chains. It does require seeding authority. The seed state has every "authority" node equally weighted. Authority nodes can now extend trust to other nodes, including new nodes. Now, through a Markov process, we can find the total trust any node has. Over time, trust is distributed. However, I think this "authority" should not be used directly for block verification but for the distribution of mining credits. Mining credits can be used to verify state.

Dev Coin

The idea here is to nominate open-source project as the "authority seeds". As the worth of commits is continuously evaluated, the projects are granted mining credits. These credits can be traded along with the currency. Forging a block requires a mining credit. Now the "work" portion is valuable, open, contributions to open source projects. But the mining portion stays in place.

Black Holes

Simple idea - create a "nothing up my sleeve" address in another coin space and any coins sent to that address will be "imported" into the new coin.