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Wasteful by what standard? Right now each day it consumes ~$1m worth of electricity in order to protect ~$1.5 billion of new payments. Economically, this "elect

Wasteful by what standard? Right now each day it consumes ~$1m worth of electricity in order to protect ~$1.5 billion of new payments. Economically, this "electricity safety fee" works out to less than a tenth of a percent.

110011 9y ago
Wasteful as in we can do better. Did you see the link in my comment? One of the authors of that paper is actually a Turing award winner. Ultimately we've reached a point where there are more efficient alternatives to having hundreds of people computing billions of hashes to reach consensus. To put this in perspective imagine a group of people sorting by randomly permuting and checking if it works, while stubbornly refusing to adopt near linear algorithms.
- RoboTeddy 9y ago
  Really interesting paper! +1 on trying to solve this problem, I was just trying to put the size of the problem in perspective (the house isn't really burning down). I suspect people underestimate the game theoretic consequences of stake systems like Algorand as compared to PoW. (For example, the dynamics of contentious forks may look quite different.) I don't know which is better! But those types of consequences are likely much larger (for better or worse) than the electricity savings.
nullbyte 9y ago
Well said.
tome 9y ago
0.1% per day? Are you sure? That's a 3.5% fee per year! That's astonishingly high for any sort of custodian's fee.
- RoboTeddy 9y ago
  oh it's 0.1% of new payments per day. if you wanna compare it to all stored value instead (about $100bn), then the "electricity safety fee" comes out to ~0.001% per day. (these comparisons are just meant to help put the electricity costs roughly in scale against the benefits they help provide)
  - tome 9y ago
    Ah yes, thanks, I misread. So it's 0.35% per year so still quite a lot. [My initial calculation was wrong. It would have been 35% per year, which would have been more obviously incorrect!]

110011 9y ago

Wasteful as in we can do better. Did you see the link in my comment? One of the authors of that paper is actually a Turing award winner. Ultimately we've reached a point where there are more efficient alternatives to having hundreds of people computing billions of hashes to reach consensus. To put this in perspective imagine a group of people sorting by randomly permuting and checking if it works, while stubbornly refusing to adopt near linear algorithms.

RoboTeddy 9y ago
Really interesting paper! +1 on trying to solve this problem, I was just trying to put the size of the problem in perspective (the house isn't really burning down). I suspect people underestimate the game theoretic consequences of stake systems like Algorand as compared to PoW. (For example, the dynamics of contentious forks may look quite different.) I don't know which is better! But those types of consequences are likely much larger (for better or worse) than the electricity savings.

nullbyte 9y ago

Well said.

tome 9y ago

0.1% per day? Are you sure? That's a 3.5% fee per year! That's astonishingly high for any sort of custodian's fee.

RoboTeddy 9y ago
oh it's 0.1% of new payments per day. if you wanna compare it to all stored value instead (about $100bn), then the "electricity safety fee" comes out to ~0.001% per day. (these comparisons are just meant to help put the electricity costs roughly in scale against the benefits they help provide)
- tome 9y ago
  Ah yes, thanks, I misread. So it's 0.35% per year so still quite a lot. [My initial calculation was wrong. It would have been 35% per year, which would have been more obviously incorrect!]