Flux Coin — Proof of Useful Work
If you don’t want to read the full article, the video below goes over everything written.
Proof of Useful Work Concept
We all know the mining market is very unprofitable right now with all coins being in the negative as far as profits go. However Flux coin is looking to remedy this through their new proof of useful work (PoUW) system. This is a concept where the GPU miners can secure a blockchain by solving real world problems instead of random ones, for example the work needed could be training A.I learning machines, animation and visual effects rendering or protein folding software in academia. The proof of useful work concept allows for no energy to be wasted as it is put towards things that need computing power. The concept of useful work has been explored a lot in theory but we have yet to see it successfully implemented into a real blockchain. The aim of Flux is to be the first to make useful work happen. Now the main reason this needs to be implemented is because many environmentalists have been hammering down on the energy consumption of crypto mining. So if they implement useful work then other cryptocurrencies will follow suit and solve the negativity that mining faces.
Flux Innovation
Flux coin have always been pushing the boundaries on innovation as in the past they introduced a new parallel asset system and their node system that works in synergy with the miners is very innovative. As I said the main reason for useful work is to curb the criticism of wasting energy, but also there are added benefits to the network if introduced. It will massively improve the network capabilities, by pointing the hashrate towards real world problems it will encourage more adoption of the coin by institutions that need the large computing power. Flux currently has over 12,000 miners on the network which is a lot of power and resources waiting to be tapped into.
Flux-Proof of Useful Work Model
Flux have been working on this for some time but they have finally started to roll out new information for the concept, this comes in the form of this infographic. So on the right hand side it starts with use cases which we covered earlier but the 3 main use cases they are going for are artificial intelligence, video effects rendering and cloud gaming services. All these systems require large computing power and therefore could be incentivised to use the Flux network. Now below that we have the hardware section which correlates to the left side of the screen. So the concept works like this, you connect either your gaming pc, mining rig or GPU cluster to the Flux network. Then you’ll start mining Flux, while that’s happening Flux will be benchmarking your hardware and giving it a score out of 10 based on each of the three traffic light use cases. So red is rendering, yellow is artificial intelligence and green is cloud gaming. Then it will put you into the proof of useful work pool, from here you’ll be waiting around until the Flux network gets a job. For example, let’s say an A.i company wants to do some deep learning, they will request this job and then based on your hardware rating for A.i Learning you can be selected. Let’s say you have a rating of 10, it will select all the GPU’s that have the highest rating and work downwards until they have enough computing power selected. Then you leave your machine on until the jobs finished and you get paid a percentage of work done on the task. It works in a similar fashion to mining.
How Flux is Helping GPU Miners
Right now nobody can really say how much these tasks will be worth as it’s never been done before. However it should be a little bit higher than just mining because they want you to perform specific tasks. So the best way to use useful work would be to mine Flux and then complete jobs when they come around. For example you could be mining for 10 hours and a new job comes onto the network, then you switch to the proof of useful work pool and complete that and then go back to mining Flux. I also couldn’t find any information on the payout of parallel assets when looking at proof of useful work but I assume that the companies will be paying that extra amount in native Flux, so you’ll just be receiving two times the amount of native Flux that you could mine. There are also three parallel assets that need to be released so I think that they are going to wait until they have all been released to then go ahead and put all their work into proof of useful work. They can combine the mining and useful work together to produce half as much energy waste. Usually a company would use their own GPU but this eliminates then having to use them which means less power consumed and still keeps the Flux network secure. If you want to read more about Flux’s push for carbon neutrality then head over to flux/carbon where you can find more information on that.
