this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Not correct.
Mining is a "proof of work", in the case of Bitcoin it's competing to be the first to find a hash that meets certain parameters (difficulty), for a block referencing the previous top one. Whether the new block has transactions in it or not, you get the same reward for being the first one to find and broadcast it.
Verifying is done by every node in the P2P network, both when deciding whether to relay candidate transactions, and when checking whether a new block's hash meets the mining requirements.
The Bitcoin blockchain has plenty of valid blocks with no transactions in them (part of a speculative mining strategy used by some to get the block reward faster than others).
The whole scheme works the same with any other kind of "proof of work", as long as the nodes relaying the new block can check whether the work happened or not (there are many ways in which that could be accomplished for AI training, the easiest of them by publishing the new model and having nodes check whether it meets some quality parameters).
I mean, yeah. I knew most of that, but I just wanted to keep it short and simple.
I don't really understand how it would work with AI training. If your computers are working on training AI instead of finding blocks, I don't see how you can support transactions. Just sounds like distributed computing with rewards to me, where you might be able to cash out at some central portal or smth, but you can't send other people that money directly (at least not over a blockchain, but would be possible vis that portal maybe, although, again, that wouldn't be a blockchain).
Proof of work need not be useless. E.g. https://primecoin.io/
The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I'm not sure AI tasks fall into that category.
The transaction verification is separate to the work.
Huh, neat. Thanks for the info!