Mdubrov

SiPhox is a yc company in near MIT and we are hiring sw engineers :)

How many ex-CTOs of square have to die for it to be obvious that having thousands of junkies slowly decaying on the street in an orgy of madness and drugs might be a bad idea?

Not that this should matter, nobody deserves to be stabbed… but I knew Bob personally btw and he was a great guy.

PoWx.org or something else?

Optical proof-of-work” would improve geographic distribution of hashrate and quell fears of climate-related pushback, proponents argue.

You can play with mining heavyhash (the underlying algorithm for photonic mining discussed in the story) on your cpu/gpu here

https://pool.obtc.me/home

Are you familiar with silicon photonics? (though indeed they probably would not be on the same chip as we point out in the BIP)

We have a short primer on Si photonics in our paper actually https://assets.pubpub.org/xi9h9rps/01581688887859.pdf

You should take a look at companies like https://lightmatter.co/

Photonic chips for analog matrix processing are already being commercialized.

The underlying platform, CMOS Silicon Photonics is commercial already (in every data center) and produced in high volume.

Heavyhash can be constructed such that the Keccak hashes comprise a minimal amount of the work.

Quoting from the BIP:

"Below is a conceptual representation of a 3D-packaged oPoW mining chip. Note that the majority of the real estate and cost comes from the photonic die and the laser, with only a small digital SHA3 die needed (as opposed to a conventional miner of the same cost, which would have many copies of this die running in parallel)."

Chia is great (and the one real alternative to oPoW for low energy consumption that I am aware of), however the security assumptions are very different from PoW (it uses VDFs etc).

Bitcoin is conservative by nature, so the likelihood of adoption for a PoW with the same fundamental game theory and security assumptions is much higher.

Regarding targeting commodity hardware:

This has a good ring to it but introduces some 51% attack vectors. A lot of the security in BTC comes from the fact that miners will make their hardware worthless if they collude to double spend in a 51% attack. That's not true if the hardware is a real commodity and has resale/reuse value outside the system. Probably there will be specialized hw for Chia though as people often point out.