PoW.Market
A market for proof of work: people posted puzzles on content, and miners raced to solve them, turning a Bitcoin hash into a signal of where attention should go.
A Bitcoin hash is a costly signal: it proves that someone spent real energy on it. PoW.Market used that in an information network. Anyone could attach a proof-of-work puzzle to a piece of content, and miners raced to solve it. The work done on each item showed, without any central ranking, where people thought attention should go. That made it a market, and a testbed for decentralized ranking.
It was one of the projects that pushed me toward my later writing on consensus, self-sustaining networks, collective action, public goods and public choice:
- The Zen of Saito
- Organizations 2.0
- Disintermediating Network Effects for Fun and Profit
- The Future of Open Source Software
I tested it with Pow Pow, which fills the chain with test puzzles. In late 2020 I rebuilt it to be faster and cheaper to run, on Hummingbird. The Building on Bitcoin #2: Rebuilding PoW.Market video walks through the rebuild.
Videos
