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Comment by david_at | Hacker News Reader

> What's stopping me from finding all the unsecured IP cameras in my city and using them to "mine" data?

Absolutely nothing.

> Further, if I could do that what's stopping others from reusing the nodes that I set up?

Right now, nothing. Nodes could overlap other nodes. But they're still using compute cycles so they're still spending money. The only issue is, who gets theirs into the tree first. And if the hash is the same, you better be first or you're just wasting time.

Keep in mind, I've still got a lot of work to do. And until today, I've been working on this by myself. And pretty much since last summer. You can see the list of tasks that I need to complete on the site under "Beta Version".

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Thanks for answering my question. And I want to say I appreciate what you're doing. Information is power and it's being leveraged against individuals practically unchecked. If I had to guess some state actor would have come up with (or already has) with a technology like this eventually. Everything in that system would be kept private and be leveraged against the individual without consent.

Tools would be built with it that contain their own biases and uses. The appeal of using this system against others would be too great, either for those in power or those who seek to sell the ability. For that reason I like the ubiquitous access _everyone_ would have.

Distributing this to everyone reminds me of the end of "The Stars My Destination"

To continue with my original question though; I'm guessing whatever system has faster compute cycles will win the race of who hashes first? Will you be able to tell who's hash gets there first

> I'm guessing whatever system has faster compute cycles will win the race of who hashes first? Will you be able to tell who's hash gets there first

Yes, but it's not just about hashing power though. And there's no nonce like Bitcoin. It's mostly about deep learning inference power. You can see the process described on the website under "Unrewriteable History And Reasonable Storage Requirements" (though I'll probably change that title soon and call it "[something] Merkle Tree"). I've copied the last bullet point here...

* The process of producing the next Merkle Tree is a competition any node can compete in. A person who cultivates real trees is an Arborist so we'll use that term. Our "arborists" will also need to perform inference on the frames that were randomly selected for evaluation based on the last Merkle root, and will need to publish each frame's digest tuple and the "reserved digest" (see diagram). If the original node holding the reserved digest signs the arborist's digest, it generates that node's reward coins and a percentage goes to the arborist. But that will only propogate if that arborist's tree is also accepted by a majority of the network. Therefore, as long as (1) there is always active competition to compute the Merkle Tree by statistically verifying the work of all other nodes and (2) over 50% of every active node prevents inflation of the money supply by rejecting trees that don't pass their proof-of-work, then all rational (self-interested) nodes will have to be honest.

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