David_Gerard comments on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Will_Newsome 12 January 2014 02:18AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 18 March 2014 06:17:57PM *  3 points [-]

I received this question via email earlier. Might as well answer it here as well.

In bmoney you say the PoW must have no other value. Why is that? Why wouldn't it be a good idea if it were also somehow made valuable like if perhaps protein folding could be made to fit the other required criteria?

In b-money the money creation rate is not fixed, but instead there are mechanisms that give people incentives to create the right amount of money to ensure price stability or maximize economic growth. I specified the PoW to have no other value in order to not give people an extra incentive to create money (beyond what the mechanism provides). But with Bitcoin this doesn't apply since the money creation rate is fixed. I haven't thought about this much though, so I can't say that it won't cause some other problem with Bitcoin that I'm not seeing.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 18 March 2014 08:39:29PM 2 points [-]

I received another question from this same interlocutor:

Also, I understand you haven't read the original bitcoind code but do you have any guess for why the author chose to lift your SHA256 implementation from Crypto++ when the project already required openssl-0.9.8h? Is there anything odd about the OpenSSL implementation that wouldn't be immediately obvious to someone who isn't a crypto expert?

Hmm, I’m not sure. I thought it might have been the optimizations I put into my SHA256 implementation in March 2009 (due to discussions on the NIST mailing list for standardizing SHA-3, about how fast SHA-2 really is), which made it the fastest available at the time, but it looks like Bitcoin 0.1 was already released prior to that (in Jan 2009) and therefore had my old code. Maybe someone could test if the old code was still faster than OpenSSL?

Comment deleted 20 May 2016 02:49:46PM [-]
Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 20 May 2016 04:32:15PM 0 points [-]

Two years ago he turned down $100k for it.

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