We spent $50 to measure Pearl's "AI mining" – 320K GPUs produce zero AI
5 hours ago
- #Proof-of-Useful-Work
- #Blockchain Security
- #Empirical Study
- Pearl's Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) protocol claims to secure the network and perform AI inference, but an empirical study reveals it produces zero useful AI computation despite using inference-capable hardware.
- The network consumes an estimated 112 MW of power across approximately 320,000 GPU-equivalents, with mining software lacking inference code and the verification protocol accepting random matrices, confirmed by pool-accepted shares across various hardware types.
- Statistical distribution checks in the protocol are easily bypassed by adversarial Gaussian sampling, and mining is unprofitable at current token prices, showing negative ROI across all GPU tiers.
- The mining computation relies on commodity integer arithmetic, portable to any hardware platform, offering no vendor lock-in, and its release caused GPU rental prices to rise by 38% and utilization to surge from 57% to 94%, displacing legitimate research workloads.