A lot of people have complained about how hashing is a “worthless” activity, and this is true. Apart from competing for the coinbase (block reward), there appears to be no other constructive purpose for mining, which has led to it being broadly deemed as ‘wasteful’.
From the blog post, “VPN⁰ leverages a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) — a class of distributed systems that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table — to privately locate at least a VPN⁰ node willing to act as VPN relay node for some specific traffic.”
Obviously, as the name implies, a lot of hash operations will have to be conducted by users on the network in order to perform the accompanying hash lookups.
Given this fact, it seems like we could start working on a framework for blockchain where we don’t necessarily alter the Proof of Work task (i.e., hashing data in some form until an output is given below said target), but rather apply the hashing to a fixed task whilst still retaining some sort of structure that allows us to measure work, objectively in a non-gameable fashion.
Possible Utility for Hashing (Mining)
A lot of people have complained about how hashing is a “worthless” activity, and this is true. Apart from competing for the coinbase (block reward), there appears to be no other constructive purpose for mining, which has led to it being broadly deemed as ‘wasteful’.
But this idea by Brave (released today), could be a gamechanger. They published a whitepaper for a ‘decentralized VPN’ that operates on different mechanisms than prior ideas.
One specific aspect of the idea involves the use of DHT (Distributed Hash Tables):
From the blog post, “VPN⁰ leverages a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) — a class of distributed systems that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table — to privately locate at least a VPN⁰ node willing to act as VPN relay node for some specific traffic.”
Obviously, as the name implies, a lot of hash operations will have to be conducted by users on the network in order to perform the accompanying hash lookups.
Given this fact, it seems like we could start working on a framework for blockchain where we don’t necessarily alter the Proof of Work task (i.e., hashing data in some form until an output is given below said target), but rather apply the hashing to a fixed task whilst still retaining some sort of structure that allows us to measure work, objectively in a non-gameable fashion.