Today I want to share an idea that has been in the back of my mind for years. An idea involving blockchain technology, smart contracts, but most importantly, also object capabilities in order to create what would basically boil down to the creation of an automated blockchain driven worldwide market for hashing power primitives. An Idea that seemed completely out of reach and totally unrealistic until last Monday. Monday Mark Miller,the father of the undervalued amazing E programming language, posted a link to this announcement, where Mark and his associates stated:

We are developing an open, JavaScript-based, object-capability (ocap) programming layer to address both issues. The Agoric ocap layer will include robust security properties beyond anything available today, and it will provide that security across substrates, from local machines to global blockchains.

This may seem like big words coming from a small startup, but given Mark and some of the other brilliant minds involved in this venture, I think it is safe to assume that this isn't just posturing. I am 110% confident in the fact that these guys could really pull this off.

I don't think many people yet grasp how big a step forward the merger of blockchain, smart contract and object capabilities could potentially create, or this announcement and the fact that the Z-Cash Company is investing in this startup would have driven speculation that would likely have doubled or tripled Z-Cash market cap.

One thing I'm not yet sure of though, given the limited information conveyed in this announcement, is if what Mark, Dean, and Brian. will end up building something that will fully enable the creation of a free market for hashing-power primitives. What at least they are doing though is bringing together the core technologies that would be needed for doing so.

A use case: password cracking for forensics

In forensic investigations, finding passwords is becoming an increasingly more important part of investigations. Sometimes the password for a crypto container is used only for that crypto container, but more often than not, the same password will be used in multiple places. There are many situations where finding a password belonging to a given hash could be crucial to solving a case. For this reason, any computer forensic lab today will have many terra bytes of rainbow tables, password cracking GPU clusters and other, rather expensive equipment set to the task of finding that golden password. Occasionally, often as last resort, short-lived high capacity cloud solutions will get used also, all to find out what password was used to create a certain hash.

While a relatively small market, the price paid for raw hashing power for this market are orders of magnitude higher than revenues from cryptocurrency mining tend to be. Computer forensics would benefit greatly from a free market for hashing-power primitives that would compete for the same hashing capacity that mining does, and it's exactly it's relatively small size that should make this safe to do.

A vision for a free market

Now let's say the Agoric folks end up making their product as powerful and deeply integrated as would be needed for our use case, what could a free market for hashing power look like? Let's say I'm an investigator working on a case. There is a set of four SHA512 hashes found on a Linux server that survive rainbow table attacks, and that I believe might lead to a password that could also have been used for a crypto container.

First thing I do is create a description of the work I need to be done. The description is a bit of executable object capability code that defines that the input password should be 12 up to 24 characters long and should match a provided regex as to only allow characters found on a US QUERTY keyboard. I define that the (Linux style) SHA512 hash should be in my set of four targets, and that I need results before 2018-09-01-0:00 EAO.

The second thing I do is link this ocap script to a public smart contract that is defined in such a way that it offers 135% of current mining fee for not previously submitted POW on the defined problem up to a budget of, say, 200 ZEC.

Now imagine you are a miner and your mining rig is capable of handling my SHA512 primitives. You could automate responding on what boils down to smart contract based bids on your hashing power. So if at any time my 135% bid is the highest, you might temporarily dedicate for example 75% of your hashing power to obtaining part of my 200 ZEC. This would make sense to both of us, because your projected revenues would be up 35% when compared to mining, and my 200 ZEC would get me substantially more address space than renting cloud-based hashing power would get me.

Would this be realistic?

To be short, I don't know. But I do know if a free market for hashing power primitives is to ever arise, the Agoric people hold the key to making it happen. But then, given the involvement of the Z-Cash Company, a coin that has privacy as its main selling point, there might be semi-political reasons for Agoric to avoid catering to a market that might be dominated by the same types of oppressive regimes that Z-Cash type crypto solutions help to fight. Anyhow, as a forensics guy, I truly hope this vision for an open market for hashing-power primitives could one day become a reality and that the work done by Agoric will play a key role in making this happen.