Re: Public Keys and Proof of Work

On 3 April 2013 18:57, Roman Evstifeev <someuniquename@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Melvin Carvalho
> <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 3 April 2013 18:00, Roman Evstifeev <someuniquename@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 1:20 PM, 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?
> >>
> >> What for? What is the usecase?
> >
> >
> > It's like passing a captcha ... the person on the other side can have a
> > little more confidence that you are not a throw away identity.  ie it is
> a
> > reputation vector.
>
> As far as i understand this - botmaster can pregenerate a lot of these
> "proofs" and link them to fake identities. So this is not useful at
> all.
>

It would be if that was your *only* metric.  But it is a vector of many.
Spam assassin actually uses these technique to help prevent junk mail.