Front-Running of Trades

[koeppelmann]

I read the hole thread and I mostly agree to Zacks arguments against a POW to avoide front runners.

To argue with unused CPU time of a desktop PC might help for mirco transaction but nothing more. (and even this is wrong - because if your unused CPU time is good for this you could rent it out insead)
I am not aware of any POW mechanism where the costs of work depend on the time in which it has to be done.

Just to quote it again:

What zack is saying, is that there isn't really a way to tell how long it took someone to compute a POW using the POW algos that we know of. 10 minutes of hashing on a cheap PC is a fraction of a second of hashing on a professional mining rig. A miner can still copy the contents of incoming transactions, perform his own POW, and then include his own transaction rather than the ones people send to him.

I would love to have a prediction market to predict on it. I would not hesitate to place a Bitcoin on "POW can not solve the front runner problem" Any suggestions how to resolve such a prediction?

[psztorc]

I don't think you fully understood my proposal. I address the "professional mining rig" concept, and even the "fraction of a second" concept, and even why unused CPU time would be useful even if it weren't rent-out-able.

[koeppelmann]

Might be possible that I don't understand it yes. Maybe it would be useful if you write it down again to have something concrete to discuss on.

[zack]

Paul was right, I was wrong. I was confused and said a lot of confusing stuff.

The POW makes it impossible to front-run trades.
I already wrote this feature into the python version of truthcoin.