POW.co is a website from The Proof-of-Work Cooperative that enables users to upvote content using Bitcoin's proof-of-work function.
There is no institution that curates the content with the power to manipulate numbers or use artificial intelligence against you. All content and engagement data is referenced on-chain and there are no moderators or moderation other than the legal system. Due to the economics of the Handicap Principle, engagement in terms of ⛏ is expected to predict the relevance of the content. Thus, content at POW.co is both unmanipulated and relevant.
BoostPOW is protocol defined using Bitcoin transactions that categorizes the relevance of content via the market-driven moderation of proof of work. BoostPOW is backed by the economics of the Handicap Principle, which means that the content is expected to be relevant. When content is boosted, funds are locked in a hash puzzle. Behind the scenes, someone with hashpower can redeem the funds to create a proof-of-work string. When the puzzle has been solved, the content appears on POW.co with the additional ⛏ added to its total.
⛏ is a unit that is proportional the expected amount of energy spent for each ranked content. Bitcoin miners know it as difficulty, which is equal to the expected number of SHA2_256 hash operations of the Bitcoin genesis block. Approximately 2^32 hashes have been performed recently on any meme at POW.co for every unit of ⛏ reported. ⛏ is known by evaluating proof-of-work strings that other users have ordered which can be read directly from the blockchain. This means that you do not depend on us to know how much people have engaged with the content at POW.co.
⛏ matters because it is a measure of provable waste, which is the definition of a handicap and therefore an honest signal of fitness. It is attached to proof-of-work strings that are associated with memes, which are therefore expected to be fit. If you ignore ⛏, you are ignoring information that is easy to find and expected to be relevant, which is something that you cannot afford.
The Handicap Principle is an idea from Zahavi which says that the only honest signal of fitness is provable waste. The idea was originally proposed to explain sexual signals in biology such as the peacock’s tail but the principle is general and has applications anywhere that the members of a large group need to find mates or make good allies quickly. In human society, think about how business suits can separate those who are serious from those who are just playing a commercial typically has higher production values than the content it appears with. The Handicap Principle says that someone with a good product can much more easily afford to distinguish himself using a costly advertisement than someone with a bad product because he will have more accepted offers and can therefore make up the cost more easily.
Proof-of-work is a meme with antlers. In other words, it is a message that includes a solution to a cryptographic hash puzzle. Such a solution functions as a handicap and therefore as an honest signal of fitness. Memes with antlers are superior candidates for reproduction than those without. As Graffen has shown, males with no advertisement deserve no attention by females. In the same vein, memes without antlers don’t deserve attention from Internet users.