PNPCoin: Distributed Computing on Bitcoin infrastructure

TL;DR

This paper proposes leveraging Bitcoin's extensive computational infrastructure via a soft fork to enable distributed computing for machine learning and complex computations, utilizing blockchain-compatible ledger technology.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to adapt Bitcoin's mining infrastructure for distributed computation of machine learning and NP problems through a soft fork.

Findings

Creates a blockchain-compatible infrastructure for distributed computing

Enables stochastic optimization and deep learning tasks on Bitcoin network

Proposes a soft fork to repurpose mining hashes for general computation

Abstract

Research and applications in Machine Learning are limited by computational resources, while 1% of the world's electricity goes into calculating 34 billion billion SHA-256 hashes per second, four orders of magnitude more than the 200 petaflop power of the world's most powerful supercomputer. The work presented here describes how a simple soft fork on Bitcoin can adapt these incomparable resources to a global distributed computer. By creating an infrastructure and ledger fully compatible with blockchain technology, the hashes can be replaced with stochastic optimizations such as Deep Net training, inverse problems such as GANs, and arbitrary NP computations.