The Beginnings
Initial Concept
The conceptualisation of this idea was born from the start of a school project, namely the Grade 9 Community Project. On the 15th of May, 2021, Natsuki messaged me detailing the idea he’d come up with, and quickly, the idea started to spiral.
For the year nine thing we coukd try and make an eco friendly crypto currency
(typo included and all)
The initial concept was simple, one that had been implemented many times before, and we set our sights on producing a crypto similar to SolarCoin or NANO.
We also then detailed the other elements of the project, such as education, and called it a day, having a good few ideas as to what we could base our project around.
16/05/2021
Natsuki came up with an idea: what if crypto’s relied on human work instead of computer work?
The idea was crude at best, implausible at worst, but needless to say, it was very interesting. The logistics and architecture were miles beyond what we as high school students knew, but if it was possible, it’d definitely be interesting. In a day where crypto currencies such as Bitcoin has a comparable amount of energy consumption as pakistan a year, using proof of human work systems would provide a better alternative to the inefficiency’s of such technology
Over the next few weeks, we developed the idea further and found some resources with people thinking along the same lines:
Developing the Idea
Somewhere around the start of June, we introduced Liam to the concept as well. It had the same impression on him as it had on us, and we spent a lot of time figuring out what this crypto was actually going to look like.
In the end, we settled on one idea, as described on the homepage:
The idea was to design proof of human work puzzles for a cryptocurrency, which could serve as an alternative to current CAPTCHAs. This would effectively create a crypto with human miners, possessing the benefit of being better for the environment than most widespread cryptos, being less vulnerable to 51% attacks that small cryptos can frequently face, and generally being a fairer crypto that anyone could get into.
To phrase it in layman’s terms, when you normally send someone money with a credit card, the bank gets a message saying “Garv is sending Natsuki 5 dollars”.
Subsequently, the bank takes 5 dollars out of my account and puts in Natsuki’s.
A collection of all these transactions is called a ledger.
Now, with normal money, there is one entity (the bank) managing all the trades, which makes it very easy for them to get away with whatever they want.
We don’t like big corporations, so the cryptocurrency was created.
Instead of sending this information to the bank, a crypto sends it to everyone on the network and everyone acts like a bank.
This means that if anyone wanted to just send themselves some more money, everybody else would be like “no you can’t do that”.
Our current system requires an inherent trust on big corporations, and cryptocurrencies allow us to take this into our own hands.
This is where our idea comes in. Since most cryptos have to send their transactions to everybody, just for one transaction, a lot of computing power is needed.
As a hyperbole, if there were 7 billion people using the network, me sending Natsuki $5 would force 7 billion computers to process the fact that “Garv is sending Natsuki $5”.
This becomes very bad on large scales, where so much computing becomes terrible for the environment.
You’ve probably seen those things on websites that ask you to prove you are human. They require effort right?
Well the idea is to use all of this wasted effort to fuel a cryptocurrency, and as it is already using this readily available “energy”, it’s environmentally friendly.
Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but it expresses the basis of the idea, and with that, we aim to make CAPTCHAs less tedious.
The Problem
The problem we have here is that we have to create a way to “fuel” a cryptocurrency that not only cannot be done by computers, but is publicly verifiable by a computer. It’s a bit convoluted, and we don’t yet know how to do that, so we’re in the process of contacting as many people as we can to tell us if it’s even possible. Obviously this is well beyond the scope of us as school students, but we hope to gather as many brains to help us achieve the idea.
Progress
Here, you can see the timeline for our project. It was pretty easy to whip up a quick website to display the idea. At the time I’d been working on my school’s Maths Club Website, so porting the RSS/Atom feed over to this site was pretty easy (link if you want it). And now we have a website! I put quite a bit of effort into the documentation for the blog so check it out if you want to know more: Blog GitHub.
We’ve also had a few chats with our Head of Learning Technologies, Mr. Heinrich, who’ll definitely be able to help us in our endeavours. He’s currently said he’ll contact Philip Browning. Philip works with Holochain and as he works with technology that is very closely related to our idea, we trust that it will be a great opportunity to take the project further.
Besides this, we have contacted various people in this field, such as the people who wrote the paper linked above, and the creators of the Pi Network. So far, no responses :(
Where to?
As seen by the timeline, we’ve just gotten to the point where we’ve established the idea. Now we need to contact as many people as possible to verify if this is even possible. We also are going to make sure not to forget about the other element of this project, namely education. For this aspect, we intend to develop a “crypto trading simulation”, which will use Coin Market Cap to create a Firebase database, which will all be presented as a Flutter app. This is intended to help teach students about crypto trading, and we couldn’t really find an online tool that matches our needs, so we’re going to create our own! Presumably, Liam will be driving the education side of things.
Concluding Statement
Yeah so that’s it so far :D
It’s been really fun, and I can’t wait to see where this project takes us!