Mining bitcoins chews up a lot of computing
power for no other purpose than to sustain the network. Wouldn’t it be
useful to mine cryptocurrency in some other, more productive way?
Now a team of Serbian developers has tried to
crack the problem with a proof-of-concept altcoin that lets you mine
coins simply by exercising.
Mangocoinz was launched as a computer science project by three students at Belgrade’s School of Computing, with a simple concept: instead of using computational work to generate coins, miners have to do some actual, physical work.
For example, repeatedly moving a smartphone (typically by walking or jogging) will result in ‘proof of work‘, which the client software will turn into a portion of a coin.
While the coin is still in its very early
days and problems remain to be ironed out, the concept may
hold promise as a tool for institutions promoting fitness or as a way to
lower health insurance premiums.
Useful proof of work
Mangocoinz is the latest idea in a
long-running quest to make proof-of-work models that do more than simply
crank out coins. Some have been frankly bizarre: bumbacoin, for
example, bafflingly enables people to ‘mine’ coins by trolling
newsgroups with Jamaican expletives.
Some attempts have stuck with computation, but have tried to make the computations scientifically useful. Primecoin solves prime numbers while mining coins, for example.
Peercoin,
by the same developer, uses proof of stake, at least in part, which
mines coins based on how many a person already owns, in an attempt to
cut computing cycles and experiment with economics.
Another alternative, gridcoin, rewards people
for useful research. Its users still crank out compute cycles, but they
use them for crowdsourced scientific computing projects such as SETI@home. Gridcoins are tokens proving that their computers did that work.
All of these projects, even ridiculous ones
like bumbacoin, have one thing in common: they involve some kind of
effort on the miner’s part.
“There are many kinds of proofs-of-work. All have their trade-offs.
We discover more new ideas/avenues every day,” said core bitcoin
protocol developer Jeff Garzik.
“The general idea is that copying digital data is trivial and
frictionless. You must discover a method to make that process slower,
more difficult.”
If a proof of work is simply about effort,
then a physical proof should theoretically be possible. Running entails a
measurable effort, which has a positive fitness effect.
The ‘washing machine attack’
There are problems with the idea, though. It
would seem trivially easy to game this system so that you didn’t have to
work at it – and the cost of attack is very low. Putting the phone on a
washing machine during the spin cycle might do it. Theoretically, you
could make yourself a mangocoinz millionaire and get a nice,
fresh-smelling pair of socks at the same time, for a double win.
The trio’s answer for that involves a daily
mining limit of 10 mangocoinz (MCZ) per day, verified using a
centralized, cloud-based service.
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