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Dec 302013
 

A Proof-of-Snark (POS) protocol deters denial of service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some original snark from the service requester, usually meaning a sardonic summary of the request, typically in the form of dry or biting understatement.

POS was developed by an individual or group of individuals using the pseudonym Frito Pendejo, who developed SnarkCoin, the premier, best-in-class, end-to-end proprietary, turnkey cryptocurrency solution.  Rather than lose first-mover advantage by taking time out to draft a white paper, Frito set up an invitation-only portal on the dark web, so that insightful and forward-thinking SnarkCoin early adopters could get in on the ground floor and access the distributed P2P parallel financial system that is used by high net worth Family Office hedge fund managers to finance high-yield, midterm debentures used to securitize sovereign debt.  (Those who have not received invitations can buy their way in with bitcoins, and those who cannot afford the initialization fee can pool their resources with others’.)

A key feature of POS schemes is their asymmetry; the snark must be appropriately difficult for the requester to formulate but easy for service providers to verify as original. This idea is also known as a Smartarse Comeback Function (SCF) and in academic research as a Non-Repeating Sardonic Rejoinder Protocol (NRSRP).

The benefit of a POS system over a Proof-of-Work (POW) system is twofold: i) the difficulty of POS validations becomes more difficult organically, and ii) POW is already integrated into the Bitcoin protocol, and developers of so-called altcoins are running low on buzzword-compliant distinguishing characteristics to differentiate technically clever, though commercially pointless or ethically dubious, alternatives.

Granted, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) fulfills the requirement of being different merely for the sake of being different from POW, as does the discovery of new prime numbers, but these are already taken, and promoters must refresh their channel so that their downstream can use innovative terminology with increasingly sophisticated investors.

As with a POW system, a POS system avoids the double-spending problem by collecting transactions into blocks and adding a reference to the current final block in the database (blockchain). The verification nodes (straightmen) then verify that each transaction is permissible against the current database and then generate a sardonic summary of the block of transactions (snark) with the caveat that the snark must be unique.

sidebar: It is imperative that the snark be sardonic and not sarcastic.

Sarcasm is any statement that is the exact opposite of what one means, e.g., “SnarkCoin and Proof-of-Snark are great ideas!” whereas sardonicism is a true statement that conveys irony, e.g., “It was only a matter of time, before someone came up with something like SnarkCoin.”

Also, understatement must be strictly enforced, as overstatement is inherently untrue, e.g., “SnarkCoin is the worst idea in all of human history!”  Much better would be, “SnarkCoin, eh? Probably from Florida.”

It is critical that the summaries be true, otherwise they do not summarize the blocks with which they are associated, placing the system at risk.

To accomplish this, the POS protocol has an additional layer—the snarkchain—that collects embedded hashes of the snark associated with each block, using the Supernumerary Meta-Hash Embedding Protocol (SMHEP) that calculates the SHA512 fingerprint of the original snark, then calculates the MD5 hash of the first hash, then the TIGER192,4 hash of the meta-hash, followed by HAVAL256,5, RIPEMD320, FNV164, GOST, and finally ROT13, for no point other than to satisfy Frito’s paranoia and desire to show off.

As snarkcoins are not mined like bitcoins, but instead manifested, a straightman can be rewarded for being the first to issue original snark, with transferable warrants that are redeemable for snarkcoins or can be exchanged OTC for altcoins or even bitcoins.  In this way, straightmen have an incentive to validate transactions and to invest in increasingly powerful AI hardware and software to issue snark that is not already memorialized in the snarkchain.

By issuing warrants, which convey the right but not the obligation to acquire snarkcoins, straightmen avoid the fate of Bitcoin miners, who receive actual bitcoins for their efforts and have been declared to be money transmitters in many jurisdictions.  SnarkCoin straightmen’s warrants represent unrealized conditional value, and thus are non-taxable off-balance-sheet transactions, notwithstanding the income tax is voluntary.

POS provides an incentive for early adopters to become straightmen, as the snarkchain will contain only the Genesis Snark initially: “I am my first transaction.”  From there, low-hanging fruit can be added, like “One would expect this kind of thing,” “I’ve never seen /this/ before,” or “This block is valid.”  However, over time, it will become very difficult to issue summaries that both are recognized as snark by the underlying protocol and do not repeat previous snark.

In this way POS is superior to POW, in that the difficulty adjusts organically, whereas with POW the difficulty of the computation must be adjusted by some arbitrary rule as the amount of computing power available grows.