Can #crypto hobbyists still make money with #mining? Whether it’s mining with ASICs, GPUs or even CPUs, professional participants have captured the market and priced out hobbyists. When it comes to earning staking rewards, even running a mining node at home has become less accessible for most blockchains. As a result, most hobbyists just stick with stake delegation but delegators don’t provide much added-value to the network so there isn’t much value to extract through stake delegation. However, the risk of not delegating is for your savings to get eroded by the #blockchain’s token issuance. So stake delegation is more akin to a punishing rather than rewarding mechanism. So can profitable mining be made accessible to the plebs again? If we look at what’s is being done on #ProofOfPersonhood blockchains, I would say that it’s possible. Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) blockchains allow to prove that a node is run by a unique human and that this human isn’t running multiple nodes. Rather than consuming energy or staking capital, PoP blockchains are fighting sybils by proving that a given participant is a unique individual. It’s easy to see how this feature cannot be easily captured by commercial entities to outcompete the plebs. Although in some cases, it is possible for businesses to hire and use humans as a proxy to run multiple nodes, the value added by the commercial entities would be negative. PoP blockchains use various systems to prove the uniqueness of a human such as biometrics, ID checks, #WebOfTrust, or proof-of-human-work. Although biometrics and ID check systems are often critized for their dystopian nature blockchains like the #Idena network uses proof-of-human-work which has the advantage to not require any personal data. All you need is to complete some tasks that can only be solved by humans. PoP blockchains are an interesting area of growth for a plebs-friendly distribution of the block subsidy. Plus, the PoP capabilities aren’t restricted to fair mining as they can be extended to fair launch, fair faucet distribution, fair voting and more. When enhanced with proof-of-stake, PoP blockchains can also prevent the concentration of the token issuance among whales by assigning a higher staking yield to smaller stakers. So why haven’t PoP blockchains gained more traction yet? One reason is that the space is often associated with dystopian narrative due to the use of biometrics or IDs. However, as said earlier, not all PoP blockchains rely on those mechanisms and even those that do, can obfuscate personal data through the use of ZK proofs. That said, even if PoP blockchains are still under the radar (the Idena network has a market cap below $500k), the concept is being mentioned more and more especially in the context of being used as a tool to combat #AI generated frauds or bot spam, a use case that could certainly be applicable to #nostr.

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On AI & personhood credentials: a new paper - a16z crypto