Actually I mentioned a proof of space and time hybrid which is much
different than staking. Sorry to draw for the confusion as PoC is more
commonly used then PoST.
It
has rarely been done though given the technological complexity of being
both CPU compatible and memory-hard compatible. There are lots of
benefits outside of the realm of efficiency, and I already looked into
numerous fault tolerant designs as well and what others in the
cryptography community attempted to propose. The actual argument you
have only against this is the Proof of Memory fallacy, which is only
partially true. Given how the current hashing algorithm works, hard
memory allocation wouldn't be of much benefit given it is more optimized
for CPU/ASIC specific mining. I'm working towards a hybrid mechanism
that fixes that. BTW: The way Bitcoin currently stands in its
cryptography still needs updating regardless. If someone figures out NP
hardness or the halting problem the traditional rule of millions of
years to break all of Bitcoin's cryptography now comes down to minutes.
Bitcoin is going to have to eventually radically upgrade their
cryptography and hashing algo in the future regardless. I want to
integrate some form of NP complexity in regards to the hybrid
cryptography I'm aiming to provide which includes a polynomial time
algorithm in the cryptography. More than likely the first version of my
BTC hard fork will be coded in a way where integrating such complexity
in the future only requires a soft fork or minor upgrade to its chain.
In regards to the argument, "As a separate issue, proposing a hard fork in the hashing algorithm will
invalidate the enormous amount of capital expenditure by mining
entities and disincentivize future capital expenditure into mining
hardware that may compute these more "useful" proofs of work."
A
large portion of BTC is already mined through AWS servers and non-asic
specific hardware anyways. A majority of them would benefit from a
hybrid proof, and the fact that it is hybrid in that manner wouldn't
disenfranchise currently optimized mining entities as well.
There are other reasons why a cryptography upgrade like this is
beneficial. Theoretically one can argue BItcoin isn't fully
decentralized. It is few unsolved mathematical proofs away from being
entirely broken. My goal outside of efficiency is to build cryptography
in a way that prevents such an event from happening in the future, if it
was to ever happen. I have various research in regards to this area and
work alot with distributed computing. I believe if the BTC community
likes such a proposal, I would single handedly be able to build the
cryptographic proof myself (though would like as many open source
contributors as I can get :)
Anyways just
something to consider. We are in the same space in regards to what
warrants a shitcoin or the whole argument against staking.
Best regards, Andrew