Michael Dubrovsky; Co-Founder PoWx
It’s been a while since I’ve penned a public update on our efforts at PoWx to create a solution that decouples the scaling of Bitcoin’s security mechanism (Proof of Work mining) from energy consumption.
A lot has happened in my life personally. I almost simultaneously had a son in February of 2020 (right before the pandemic officially started) and left MIT to co-found SiPhox, a silicon photonics biosensing startup that deserves its own blog post at some point. Admittedly, I haven’t been able to put nearly as much time into PoWx as I used to, but this has been a blessing as the project has taken on a life of its own as others started contributing. While it’s hard to compete with the almost platonic way Bitcoin was launched (anonymous creator bootstraps and disappears) my belief is that successful distributed projects must mature beyond complete dependence on the original founders. Nevertheless, I am still passionate about PoWx, very much involved and am happy to report some of the progress that’s been made.
Special thanks:
I really want to thank Bogdan Penkovsky my co-founder and co-conspirator at PoWx as well as many others who have contributed and continue to do so! This is an incredibly multidisciplinary project which has required the input of experts from multiple fields.
PoWx was founded in early 2018 to address the long-term existential risk bitcoin’s energy consumption poses to its security and scalability. Our goal is to develop and implement a low-energy proof of work (PoW) algorithm that can replace SHA256 as the core workload in bitcoin mining.
The core assumption we started with is that PoW must continue to consume resources to maintain its game-theoretic security, but those resources need not be primarily composed of electricity.
To achieve this we set out to create an algorithm with provably equivalent cryptographic properties as SHA256 that would be compatible with ultra-energy efficient hardware. This would create a PoW ecosystem where miners would be spending their resources on hardware depreciation rather than electricity.