If it wasnt clear that wild 1997-era hashcash design alternative idea was I meant this design competition would be on ongoing and a candidate picked via fair crypto lottery at each 6month epoch.  ASIC miners have to get fast off the mark or they wont recoup their investment.

A risk you run is its a bit like obfuscated malware C contest but in crypto - if someone manages to slip a backdoored design past the crypto reviewers (which could include the cryptographic community) maybe the designer of a picked design gets a small bitcoin bounty, and more importantly the breaker of a design after the submission cut off gets a bounty also to bring in the best cryptoanalytic minds from the community.

You dont really want any human intervention allowed after the lottery or its arguably destabilizing.

btw a way to think clearly about the economics of $100m+ ASIC investments - say it becomes possible to build economic machines to do alchemy (convert lead or other worthless stuff into gold).  It is actually possible presently and has been demonstrated in particle accelerators and what-not but the cost is phenomenal and they yield low.  Anyway say its possible to build one for $100m, with a yield 1000x what can be done for a $1m investment, and practical but almost zero yield machines are possible to build in your garage or buy - chance do you think you have buying one of those digital alchemy boards?  I didnt think so.

btw2 I like the argument put forward by a presenter in a Matonis + some economist guy discussion that come some unspecified pre-singularity events eg like self-replicated nano-bot gold miners, or genetically engineered algae to filter sea water for gold and dump it in locateable clumps.  Again thats going to be  government research lab or monsanto event not a garage event, and you can bet they will try to hoard the mechanism if the barrier to entry is high and not easily garage reproducible.  And anyway if they're not careful either way the bottom is going to fall out of the physical gold market   At that point its all bits an bitcoin is better than physical gold.  Singularity timeline projections: this century.  Some pre-singluarity events clearly earlier this century than later.

Adam

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