Daniel Krawisz
Rafael LaVerde
PoW.co is a website from The Proof-of-Work Company that enables users to upvote content using Bitcoin's proof-of-work function.
There is no institution that curates the content with the power to manipulate numbers or use artificial intelligence against you. All content and engagement data is referenced on-chain and there are no moderators or moderation other than the legal system. Due to the economics of the Handicap Principle, engagement in terms of ⛏ is expected to predict the relevance of the content. Thus, content at PoW.co is both unmanipulated and relevant.
Boost POW is protocol defined using Bitcoin transactions that categorizes the relevance of content via the market-driven moderation of proof of work. Boost POW is backed by the economics of the Handicap Principle, which means that the content is expected to be relevant.
When content is boosted, funds are locked in a hash puzzle. Behind the scenes, someone with hashpower can redeem the funds to create a proof-of-work string. When the puzzle has been solved, the content appears on PoW.co with the additional ⛏ added to its total.
⛏ is a unit that is proportional the expected amount of energy spent for each ranked content.
Bitcoin miners know it as difficulty, which is equal to the expected number of SHA2_256 hash operations of the Bitcoin genesis block. Approximately 2^32 hashes have been performed recently on any meme at PoW.co for every unit of ⛏ reported.
⛏ is known by evaluating proof-of-work strings that other users have ordered which can be read directly from the blockchain. This means that you do not depend on us to know how much people have engaged with the content at PoW.co.
⛏ matters because it is a measure of provable waste, which is the definition of a handicap and therefore an honest signal of fitness. It is attached to proof-of-work strings that are associated with memes, which are therefore expected to be fit. If you ignore ⛏, you are ignoring information that is easy to find and expected to be relevant, which is something that you cannot afford.
The Handicap Principle is an idea from Zahavi which says that the only honest signal of fitness is provable waste. The idea was originally proposed to explain sexual signals in biology such as the peacock’s tail but the principle is general and has applications anywhere that the members of a large group need to find mates or make good allies quickly.
In human society, think about how business suits can separate those who are serious from those who are just playing a commercial typically has higher production values than the content it appears with. The Handicap Principle says that someone with a good product can much more easily afford to distinguish himself using a costly advertisement than someone with a bad product because he will have more accepted offers and can therefore make up the cost more easily.
Proof-of-work is a meme with antlers. In other words, it is a message that includes a solution to a cryptographic hash puzzle. Such a solution functions as a handicap and therefore as an honest signal of fitness.
Memes with antlers are superior candidates for reproduction than those without. As Graffen has shown, males with no advertisement deserve no attention by females. In the same vein, memes without antlers don’t deserve attention from Internet users.
A cryptographic hash puzzle is a computational problem in which an input must be found that hashes to a certain value or to satisfy certain constraints. A cryptographic hash function by definition cannot be inverted significantly faster than with random trials. Thus, a hash puzzle can be used to specify a certain amount of work in terms of random trials must be done in order to find a solution.
Proof-of-work is not literally a proof of work. A better term might be evidence of value. Someone who made a proof-of-work for no reason would be wasting energy. You would expect that such behavior would not be sustainable long-term. Someone who was maximizing his own energy would not make a proof-of-work without having something important to broadcast. That means that the message must be something that other people would be interested in. That is not absolute proof that the message is worth reading. As Grafen has shown, a costly signal is expected to be proportional to fitness, which does not mean that any particluar proof-of-work is any good. Rather, proof-of-work is good for selecting content that is probably worth reading and rejecting content that probably isn't worth reading.
A handicap is provable waste.
Waste in this context means that something is destroyed but not uselessly or to no avail because its destruction can be expected to yield a holistic and thorough appraisal.
Fitness is the relative ability to grow and avoid death.
Handicaps are an honest signal of fitness, which means that they solve the problem of being lost among liars when you need to find someone good. Everyone wants good relationships but nobody wants to admit to being unfit. We have limited resources to evaluate candidates and there are too many to give them all a close look. An honest signal of fitness would enable us to limit the sample of candidates down to a reasonable number.
In our society, the flow of information is controlled by well-connected individuals who have competed with one another for the ability to broadcast to many peoeple. The competition to develop many followers is better for manipulators than it is for honest people who don't have as much to gain by spreading truth. Thus, we have a problem with parasitic memes. This means that many people believe deceptions that serve an agenda rather than themselves. Our society as a whole is not good eliminating bad ideas. Gad Saad has written about this problem in his popular book, The Parasitic Mind. He understands the problem, Boost POW is the solution. With Boost POW, there is no single curator of information. Anyone can broadcast memes for direct competition in all users' minds.
As Richard Dawkins has explained, memes are alive and want to reproduce as much as possible, just like biological life. Meme is just another word for idea, and our society is overrun with ideas that are unfit because they promote the destruction of civilization and therefore of our brains, which is the only environment they can survive in. We need a better way of evaluating ideas before they reproduce too much. This is the problem that handicaps solve and we can solve it by requiring memes to show us an honest signal of fitness before we look at them.
Handicaps are honest because they demonstrate cost. At a given level of signal, a more fit candidate faces a better trade-off from a bigger signal than a less-fit candidate. The more fit candidate can both more easily bear the cost and will gain more from the extra attention he will receive from evaluators. Exposure via boost could be deadly for content; it invites more shrewd evaluators. As a result, more fit candidates optimize at higher levels of signal than less-fit candidates. Handicaps are honest because they make deception unprofitable. Thus, the handicap game is one that you lose if you are dishonest.
As Graffen showed, costly signals are honest on average but not absolutely. Because of mistakes and lies, there is a correlation but not an exact relationship between handicap and fitness. Thus, although handicaps are honest signals of fitness, they are not the final word on fitness. They are useful because they save time. The time that is saved with handicaps can be used to assess fitness even more closely. Among the candidates that pass the handicap test, some may still be truly unfit but at least one is expected to be very fit. Without the use of handicaps, the truly fit candidate may not be discoverable in a reasonable amount of time.
Honesty in this context means honesty about fitness, which means selecting the correct rank among all content. Handicaps change the game from one in which everyone is trying to reach the top to one in which everyone is trying to select their own best rank.
Then he is in direct competition with other males who are really stronger than him and either they will beat him up or the females will see that he's making a bad offer.
What if a candidate refuses to use a handicap because he doesn’t want to get trapped in an honesty game?
Graffen showed that rational females pay no attention to males with no advertisement. This is related to an important early objection to the Handicap Principle that was made by Maynard Smith, who developed a model in which only fit males would signal and unfit males would try to conceal their inadequacy. Such a situation is only possible when males have a binary choice to signal or not to signal. When males can signal at any level they all signal in proportion to their own fitness.
Not because other honest signals of fitness are impossible, but rather because handicaps win out in competition with other signals, due to their ease of evaluation. Over the long term, handicaps would be expected to replace other honest signals of fitness.
An important kind of argument that has been made against the Handicap Principle is that signaling games can be designed which do not involve handicaps but for which the optimal strategy is to be honest. This would seem to contradict the claim that handicaps are the only honest signal of fitness. However, although the Handicap Principle is not true if it is taken as a statement of logical necessity, it is true as a statement about the real world because nothing else is as good.
Graffen showed that every honest signal of fitness demonstrates cost. Although he believed he had proven the Handicap Principle, his paper did not distinguish betewen cost and waste. Waste is cost, but not all cost is waste. Theoretical biologists who have argued against the Handicap Principle have followed Graffen in missing the fact that handicaps save time and therefore have not understood that handicaps win out over alternatives.
Although Graffen proved that every honest signal must demonstrate cost, it does not follow that every costly signal is honest. A cost may be difficult or easy to evaluate. A cost that is difficult to evaluate can be dishonest because the candidate may be hoping that an evaluator may not look at it closely enough to assess it correctly.
Because waste has no benefit.
As Graffen has said, “the cost of a signal is the key to its meaning”.
In Austrian economics, all costs are opportunity costs. In other words, the true cost of anything is everything else you could have done instead. Thus, cost is both the meaning of the message and the alternative to the message. Thus, handicaps are the ultimate case of "the medium is the message".
In evolutionary theory, all cost is fewer viable offspring and more risk of death, which is the opposite of fitness. Thus, if a true signal of fitness must demonstrate cost, then what it is really doing is bringing the bearer closer to death and failure. Thus, the best handicap for any given animal is the one which corresponds to the resources that are the most necessary for its success and whose loss brings it closest to death.
TL;DR- Energy that could have been used in other things; opportunity cost. The cost is energy, and the opportunity cost of energy is motion in general. Thus one who signals with proof-of-work has the ability to transform energy and sustain motion. It is a machine that won't turn off regardless of the external conditions.
If a costly signal was truly a signal of fitness, therefore, it must have life and growth as its meaning, which means that life and growth must be the alternatives to the signal. In other words, handicaps are always about approaching death.
Since energy is abstract, the machine is not associated with any particular way of storing energy. The fitness to transform energy in general is the ability to transform into whatever is needed. Not just that, but it has optimal intelligence in order to understand how to transform.
Yes.
Because you want to live in a world where people have good ideas rather than bad ideas and you know that approaching death is the only way for honest folk to get more attention than manipulators.
That answers why I would use PoW.co in general but not why I would boost any specific content. Why is any particular meme worth approaching death for?
Because truth is the appetite of the human intellect. Humans are a social animal. If more people have better ideas, that's a better environment for you to live in.
No because you pay the cost and therefore the miner does not bear it.
Then that is the same as if the miner boosted your content. People might be confused about who boosted the content, but we don't care about that very much.
What's better, a platform that is free to upvote or a platform with good information?
It is possible to pay someone back in private, so you don't really know if a payment represents a real cost.
Furthermore, the cost of satoshis is not the same as the cost of energy. The cost of money is everything that is unknown in the economy, whereas the cost of energy is something that is very near to all of us because we all use energy in our own bodies and machines. Even if you burn satoshis, that is not genuine waste because satoshis are non-physical so nothing was really destroyed. The cost of satoshis cannot be understood without reference to the whole economy whereas the cost of energy is innately understood at least to some extent by all living things.
If handicaps are the only honest signal of fitness, does that mean that other social networks are dishonest because they don’t use handicaps?
Not necessarily, it simply means that with Boost we save time in the evaluation process of fitness, value, and/or honesty.
Unfit memes cannot ultimately win out because they destroy their own environment. Truth tends to win out over deception in the end regardless of whether we use handicaps. When we use handicaps we would expect this to happen a lot more quickly. Remember, handicaps save time. On other social networks we would expect unfit memes that are not symbiotic to overtake fit memes a lot more easily in the short term.
We save the biggest costs by identifying errors early and correcting them before they cause damage. Thus, although truth tends to win out in general, we ensure that it wins out quickly rather than slowly.
It it about understanding the value of your own knowledge in relation to everyone else’s.
We welcome you to try. Incentives are naturally aligned so that such actions are suicidal. Eventually, the market will learn that it will be more profitable to simply be honest.
That is not a good idea because he can't prevent other content from being upvoted. Manipulation depends on keeping the audience away from alternative ideas.
So on PoW.co, you would expect people to be talking about how to continue to transform energy no matter what happens?
Exactly, and that is another word for survival.
The ultimate predator is scarcity of energy and time in regards to content. It is certainly true that opening oneself up to predation is costly. However, there are many costs other than the risk of predation. Spending energy inherently brings anybody closer to failure. Whether or not a predator exists may change the degree of risk involved, and hence the optimal level of signaling, but it does not change the nature of the game.
Is a degeree or patent proof-of-work or is proof-of-work a solved hash puzzle attached to a broadcasted message? The problem with menaphorical uses of "proof-of-work" is that they are not economically similar enough to real proof-of-work to be a good comparison. Degrees and patents may be literal proofs of work but they are not honest signals of fitness because they are not handicaps. A handicap are easy to evaluate, whereas degrees and patents are not. Contextual information and expertise would be require to evaluate them properly. Proof-of-work provides a number that can be evaluated instantly in a computer, and the number cannot be manipulated with any known trickery. A patent or degree is more like something that you would look at after you had evaluated the proof-of-work.
No, and please don't try to use them that way. You should never commit to anything that happens in a handicap contest. Remember, the top candidate is not necessarily the best. Boost POW is good for figuring out what is worth thinking about, not for selecting an executive officer or passing a bill into law. Arrow's Theorem shows that voting systems do not work. Poof-of-work will not make them work. Proof-of-work is good for collective decision making in a sense, but only if everyone using it retains their autonomy. If people are committed to the top boosted candidate, then it becomes a lot more worthwhile to try to manipulate the result.
No, you are not absolved from your need to make personal judgements. Remember handicaps are [honest on average], not absolutely. You can use them to collect a sample of information that is likely to be relevant but you cannot use them to think for you.
Fitness is about avoiding death, so a fit meme is one that will continue to reproduce in people’s brains. Over the long term, a meme can destroy its own environment by leading people to their deaths or mental degeneration. This is the kind of unfit meme that we can stop at PoW.co. A fit meme will enhance its own environment so that there will always be lots of brains. It will be something that tells us how to survive.
A meme’s environment is also all the other memes, not just people. Fit memes are symbiotic with other fit memes as well. Hence a fit meme will fit into a larger whole that tells us how to survive and thrive in general.
I don't know, you tell me. We all need each other to teach us what we know.