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Perhaps it's not the right thread to ask this, but:

What stops e.g. Pixar from opening up Pixarcoin where they let the community render their next movie? Am I missing something here?




Rendering a movie is not suitable as a proof of work function. It's probably very difficult to design a mathematical framework to verify that you really rendered the movie and not just send garbage back in exchange for coins.

At the moment most Coins use either one or multiple hashing functions¹ or prime chains² as proof of work system³.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin#Proof-of-work_system

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system


An additional problem is that the rendered images will leak.


Thank you! Exactly the answer I was afraid of.


I think one of the harder problems would be verifying that the render results from a distributed system are correct, and then Pixar would be a centralized entity doling out coin for correct output. Unless there's some decentralized way I'm blissfully missing.


How about protein folding? That actually has a way to check that it was done correctly (NP hard). Sounds really awesome.


What if people started a Pixar road, where drugs and guns would be sold for Pixar coins? Pixar would have no control over that what so ever. I don't know about the technical part however, it could probably be possible.


Nothing at all. What do think you're missing?




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