Re: Public Keys and Proof of Work

On 2 April 2013 11:20, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> There is a concept that has become popular lately in cryto (particularly
> crypto currencies) which is called proof of work.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system
>
> The principle behind it is that you can use cryptography to make your
> public key 'special' in some predefined way, in order to prove that it was
> a very hard key to create.
>
> These special keys are considered valuable (indeed in cryto currencies you
> can be rewarded financially for creating one)
>
> However the original idea of proof of work was an anti spam measure.
>
> I wonder if were start using proof of work public keys linked to identity
> on the web, what possible formats could we use ... perhaps 6-10 leading 1's?
>

One way of thinking of a proof of work system, is the machine equivalent of
a CAPTCHA