A couple of quick responses to the questions on RPOW, as I am at Crypto this week.
I’m wondering how applicable RPOW is. Generally speaking, all the practical applications I can think of for a proof-of-work are defeated if proofs-of-work are storable, transferable, or reusable. Once they’re storable, tranferable, and reusable, aren’t we restricted to applications already nailed down by digital cash schemes?
So, even if it works flawlessly, this seems like an exercise of cleverness that makes a cryptographic entity less generally useful than the primitive from which it’s derived. It probably has a few specialized applications that normal POWs won’t serve; I just haven’t been able to distinguish them from the applications served by digital cash.
Why doesn’t this scheme give rise to a “POW server” that just sits there, generating proofs-of-work in advance of need and dispensing them at request? Or even to a company that sells POW’s to people who can’t be bothered to run their own server? And doesn’t such a device or service defeat the use of POWs for real-time load balancing, traffic control, etc?
Bear