Intellectual Positioning, Novelty Claim, and Relationship to Prior Work
Author: Shobikhul Irfan
Part of the series: Redefining Proof of Work #part5
Why This Claim Must Be Explicit
In distributed systems and cryptographic research, ideas rarely emerge from a vacuum.
However, there is a crucial distinction between:
repeating existing ideas, and
reframing how we think about them.
This article explicitly states what is claimed as novel, and what is not.
What Is Not Claimed as New
Several ideas are acknowledged as prior art:
Proof of Work as a consensus mechanism
“Useful Work” and proof-of-computation
Verifiable computation and probabilistic verification
Memory-hard functions (scrypt, Argon2, etc.)
Critiques of hash lotteries and ASIC centralization
These belong to the shared foundation of the field.
What Is Claimed as New
The core claim of this series is not an algorithm, but a conceptual reframing:
Proof of Work = Verifiable Distributed Work (VDW)
From this reframing follow several design consequences that were not previously treated as a unified perspective:
PoW work is treated as verifiable distributed computation,
not merely a stateless hash puzzle.Production and verification are made explicit design axes,
not implicit assumptions.Work need not be externally “useful”,
only expensive to produce and cheap to verify.The PoW design space is expanded,
from “hash + difficulty” to classes of computation.
This is the central intellectual claim.
On Sorting Race
Sorting Race is not claimed as a final protocol.
It is:
an instantiation example,
an existence proof,
and a thinking tool.
If Sorting Race is:
replaced,
refined,
or abandoned,
the VDW claim still stands.
Relationship to Academic Literature
Many papers demonstrate that:
“useful work” is fragile,
shortcuts emerge,
verification can be costly.
This series does not dispute those results.
Instead, it absorbs the key lesson:
The problem is not “the work”,
but how work is defined within PoW.
VDW is an attempt to:
consolidate those lessons,
into a single conceptual framework.
On Attribution and Evolution
This work does not ask for authority.
It asks only for timestamped recognition.
If, in the future:
VDW-inspired systems are built,
successful protocols emerge,
or formal theories are developed,
this series serves as:
an early trace of the idea.
Open Invitation
This is not the end of the discussion, but an invitation:
to critique honestly,
to develop seriously,
or to falsify with better research.
If Proof of Work is to evolve,
it requires a shift in perspective,
not just constant-factor optimizations.
Closing
The largest claim here is simple:
Proof of Work need not mean hash lotteries.
If this claim is wrong,
it should be refuted with a better framework,
not merely by pointing to failed instantiations.
And if it is right,
then it deserves serious debate.
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