Oddbean new post about | logout
 Impressive! 

Have you considered that the gaming context is quite different from the blockchain context and therefore POW may not need to function in the same way? 
 i have considered it and my opinion is that if the game artifacts are worth money the money chasers will buy beg and steal hashpower to outcompete the players

it has no place in either nostr or a game system, because it has historically, after some 25 years, proven to only be secure in the bitcoin use case and everywhere else it's a mess 
 The difficulty adjustment in bitcoin is to regulate the time between blocks. AFAIK it isn't relevant in a game context? 
 it is relevant to the economy of in game artifacts

but i think Lightning could do a much better job by making it concrete value and following the same kind of probabalistic pattern used by gambling computer games (pokies)

if you are talking about highly time constrained, limited participant, competitive use cases for proof of work then you will see that the most determined players will equip themselves with higher powered hashing devices and dominate games by this, it will lose the chance aspect and that's gonna ruin RPGs at least

none of that will take long to manifest, so again

there is no use for proof of work outside of the bitcoin consensus

every other possible use case that might consider it is better served by simpler probabilistic distribution algorithms, and weightings based on gamer's financial inputs

in the end that's always going to be how it plays out so you need to consider that it doesn't level the playing field like you wish it would 
 I'm just not convinced that we know with certainty that POW has no other uses. What if bitcoin is simply the first — not the first AND last?

ancient Chinese alchemists: there is no use for gunpowder outside medicine 
 I think it’s a fun idea to use it as a roll system. Imagine for the game to accept the item the nonce tag has to be less than a certain value. Then you would be guaranteed that a high pow roll was really lucky.