Proof of Prime Chain

This is an example Proof of Work Chain with a client/server application for rewarding miners who can solve real-world solutions like finding the next prime.

The main idea is to use the processing power from mining to contribute towards useful calculations like calculating prime numbers. Other ideas that can be implemented in future are reinforcing machine learning algorithms and rewarding miners who can successfully label an image properly and such.

I just feel like it is inefficient that proof of work makes miners spend so much energy and processing space / power to solve a puzzle that has no real significance outisde of the chain of blocks.

Server

First you'll want to start the server. You'll want to install all the dependencies with npm i from the root directory in the terminal.

Once you've installed the dependencies you can run the server with node index or nodemon index (the latter of which will restart the server if you make any changes!). This currently starts your server at port 3032 by default.

Client

To start the client application you'll need to install parceljs.

Once you have done that you can navigate to the /client folder in a terminal and run parcel index.html which will start your client at port 1234 by default.

Utilities

There are some /scripts/ which you can use as utilities for your Proof of Work chain. Inside the scripts folder you'll find a few files:

• generate.js - This will generate you a new public/private keypair node generate
• getBalance.js - This will get the balance of a public key passed in from the command line: i.e. node getBalance --address 049a1bad614bcd85b5f5c36703ebe94adbfef7af163b39a9dd3ddbc4f286820031dfcb3cd9b3d2fcbaec56ff95b0178b75d042968462fbfe3d604e02357125ded5
• startMining.js - This will start the miner on the server node startMining
• stopMining.js - This will stop the miner on the server node stopMining