[iTokio]

It’s interesting that it does something useful (training a LLM) without trust and in a decentralized way.

Maybe this could be used as proof of work? To stop wasting computing resources in crypto currencies and get something useful as a byproduct.

[_ink_]

I read an argument, that proof of work needs to be useless and wasteful. If it would produce value in itself it would make 51% attacks more economic and thus the currency less secure.

[throwanem]

Sure. The whole point of "proof of work" is to show (prove) you've lost energy to heat (work). That's what makes it costly and thus an honest signal.

The model breaks where work can be counterfeited (usually impossible) or where energy prices go to zero, which is why "bitcoin colonialism" was briefly a thing last decade. Much of bitcoin's design, this aspect also, is intended to protect against the bare-fanged, red-eyed money weasels it was also designed to attract.

[ucha]

It needs to not have economic value but it doesn't necessarily need to be useless and wasteful.

[api]

I’ve seen an argument that military power and credible threat are the proof of work mechanism for fiat currencies. That is also useless, but it does throw off secondary useful effects like inventions.

Not totally convinced the analogy maps but interesting.

[Geee]

No, this process doesn't produce "proof of work", i.e. verifiable proofs that energy has been used.

[naasking]

New weights that have lower loss than the input weights is proof that work has been done.

[bastawhiz]

> Maybe this could be used as proof of work

There's nothing provable here. Crypto proof of work is easily verified (does the hash of this value look the way I expect?). How do you prove in ~O(1) time that someone did some operation with their GPU? You don't. You don't even know what the thing is that you're training (without a trained model you don't have the ability to know whether the model the was allegedly trained learned the thing you want it to learn).

[naasking]

> How do you prove in ~O(1) time that someone did some operation with their GPU? You don't.

The work in this case could be that the weights after the was done work have lower loss than the input weights. Applying the new weights to input to check that it's lower is much cheaper than calculating the weights, which is the same trend as proof of work (not sure about the magnitude of difficulty being enough to replace proof of work though).

[fastball]

The emphasis is indeed on "without trust" – as far as I can tell this project is unable to verify whether the decentralized training nodes are contributing productively.

Without the ability to validate that training compute is heading in the globally desired direction, it is unlikely you could use it as the foundation of a (sound) cryptocurrency.

[mentalgear]

The reward model could be used as a validation/reward for the client. Give the same nodes the same inferences to make, and the one with the highest reward (those could be short, or even partially calculated long-term) will also get the "currency" reward.

[proof_by_vibes]

There could be merit to this. Proofs are generally computationally hard, so it's possible that a currency could be created by quantifying verification.

[littlestymaar]

> To stop wasting computing resources in crypto currencies and get something useful as a byproduct.

Bitcoin is the only major cryptocurrency that still use proof of work today (others are either using “proof of stakes” or are “Layer 2” chains), and due to its (relative lack of) governance structure, it's very unlikely to ever change.

[mentalgear]

That would be indeed a very promising way of FINALLY making cryptocurrency useful!

[k__]

Arweave and Filecoin use PoW algorithms that prove something useful.