David A. Harding
Saturday, 13 Nov 2004
Warning, possiblly stupid idea contained herewithin.
Last night while investigatiing the world of hashcash I discovered RPOWs (Reusable-Proofs-Of-Work). Today I read more about how RPOWs work. The quick idea is that, unlike hashcash which produces single-use POWs, RPOWs are re-usable and thus can be transfered from entity to entity much like money can.
Of course there are factors that inhibit it from ever being used as "real" money, the biggest being Moore's Law. Imagine a currency deflating at the same pace that CPU-per-dollar increases. OTOH there's nothing preventing them from being used in inheriantly short–term markets, one such market is the web.
The web is a meritocracy where the 'merit' of a page changes at an incredible pace. Search engines like Google measure the 'merit' level of a page by checking how many other pages link to it. This has proven to be enormously accurate in most cases. On a personal level I find the patent on this technique to be the worst thing about it; on a technical side the worst thing about this is that it requires a _massive_ amount of web crawling to generate accurate results (although the potential for spammers "google-bombing" using fringe throw-away domains would be a problem, I suspect).
My idea is simple (I think): Supplimentary to tracking by link-backs and content matching we can rate sites by the amount of time people have spent with any given page open on their computer screen. Web browsers would generate and transmit RPOWs while viewing a page. After receiving these tokens they are added to the web page's RPOW 'counter' which can be easily retrieved by web spiders or even sent directly to a database at the search engine's HQ which could instantly update it's own statistics upon verification that the count is correct (this assumes that tokens are easily verifable without transferance, which may not be the case at present).
A RPOW setup would only allow transferable tokens to be given. This is a neat way to impliment a micro-payment system: anyone who wants can optionally donate some of their CPU time to a site they like. The site owner can then re-transfer the RPOWs to a site s/he likes or even sell them to a company who wants to improve their page ranking. Since the patrons already paid for their computers there is no additional charge on them.
Adding support for an optional resource field like hashcash would allow patrons to limit the redistributablity of their support by tying the support to a resource unique to that site or page. An example would be the URL of the page, an even more strict example would be a hash of some of the page source.
I have some questions I need to ask the author of RPOW but I'm hoping that the current implimentation is flexible enough that I can start playing with some of these ideas.