4 ms·

And if Satoshi hadn’t thought “how do I make this hard? I know: spin a computer through SHA2 as fast as possible until it finds a magic hash,” we would be havin

And if Satoshi hadn’t thought “how do I make this hard? I know: spin a computer through SHA2 as fast as possible until it finds a magic hash,” we would be having a much different conversation because Bitcoin and it’s derivatives wouldn’t consume a medium-sized nation state’s worth of electricity. It was a bad decision. Satoshi fucked up. Please stop justifying it as a community, I beg you. Now we are all paying for that incredibly stupid design, and any criticism is being bearish on cryptocurrency itself. It’s an important learning experience. Decentralization made a brilliant engineer reach for a brute force hash, and what seemed to be a pedestrian decision while writing a paper now has gigawatt ramifications and a comment section advocating for alterations to world energy policy. Hold the paper another year and come up with something more reasonable and respectful of the world around you; there’s already other currencies attempting proof of work without plugging in a billion hair dryers around the world. Now the cat’s out of the bag, so to speak, so let’s call it a cat. Bitcoin is one of the most inefficient, wasteful computing systems ever developed. It happens to produce value.

ktta 9y ago
>Decentralization made a brilliant engineer reach for a brute force hash This isn't about SHA-256. This about the concept of Proof of Work. This applies to every coin based on Proof of Work out there. What I'm saying is that the entire concept of Proof of work is dependent on people 'wasting' energy to prevent an attacker from taking over the network. It has to be so expensive that someone can't just spend a million dollars and be able to take over the network. I think of it has a bank spending a couple million on a secure safe to prevent breaking in. What you're saying is "Banks are spending lots of money on safes, and that's bad". Safes' value is nothing unless an attacker tries to get in. The bitcoin network's mining seems worthless until someone tries to take over the network. This is a very new thing, but I'm surprised HN is still struggling to understand. Every news outlet parroting the same thing as if the bitcoin community is stupid is what gets me the most. I'm almost beginning to think there's a PR campaign going on against bitcoin. I'm all for the environment. So let's get rid of the wasteful safes, cameras, lasers and guards protecting pieces of paper. Let's get rid of cash counters, counterfeit currency detectors, cashiers at banks who take money to deposit all day long. I assure you, that'll result in less wastage of resources. >there’s already other currencies attempting proof of work without plugging in a billion hair dryers around the world. Take a different proof of work algorithm. The same thing will happen. People will buy and build computers to do the same thing. The resource consumption is a factor of the value of the coin, not the PoW algorithm. The power consumption might vary a little depending on the exact algorithm, but the net total of resource spent will be similar. Take some time to understand this. There are better alternatives people are really trying to come up with. Proof of Stake, Proof of Space, etc. But the thing is, no one is sure about their validity. Ethereum has been talking about Proof of Stake for a long time now, but there still isn't a sure schedule. This isn't great, but it is the best we have. If you have a better idea, I'm all ears.
- mitchellberry 9y ago
  AMD already building coin mining optimised gpu's, making the algorithm memory-hard to exempt asic's doesn't really change much except the direction of hardware manufacture
jobigoud 9y ago
> And if Satoshi hadn’t thought “how do I make this hard? I know: spin a computer through SHA2 as fast as possible until it finds a magic hash,” Hashcash algorithm used in Bitcoin predates it by about a decade, it was used for spam detection for example. Approaches to secure a blockchain are an active area of research, did you have a better idea to propose?

ktta 9y ago

>Decentralization made a brilliant engineer reach for a brute force hash This isn't about SHA-256. This about the concept of Proof of Work. This applies to every coin based on Proof of Work out there. What I'm saying is that the entire concept of Proof of work is dependent on people 'wasting' energy to prevent an attacker from taking over the network. It has to be so expensive that someone can't just spend a million dollars and be able to take over the network. I think of it has a bank spending a couple million on a secure safe to prevent breaking in. What you're saying is "Banks are spending lots of money on safes, and that's bad". Safes' value is nothing unless an attacker tries to get in. The bitcoin network's mining seems worthless until someone tries to take over the network. This is a very new thing, but I'm surprised HN is still struggling to understand. Every news outlet parroting the same thing as if the bitcoin community is stupid is what gets me the most. I'm almost beginning to think there's a PR campaign going on against bitcoin. I'm all for the environment. So let's get rid of the wasteful safes, cameras, lasers and guards protecting pieces of paper. Let's get rid of cash counters, counterfeit currency detectors, cashiers at banks who take money to deposit all day long. I assure you, that'll result in less wastage of resources. >there’s already other currencies attempting proof of work without plugging in a billion hair dryers around the world. Take a different proof of work algorithm. The same thing will happen. People will buy and build computers to do the same thing. The resource consumption is a factor of the value of the coin, not the PoW algorithm. The power consumption might vary a little depending on the exact algorithm, but the net total of resource spent will be similar. Take some time to understand this. There are better alternatives people are really trying to come up with. Proof of Stake, Proof of Space, etc. But the thing is, no one is sure about their validity. Ethereum has been talking about Proof of Stake for a long time now, but there still isn't a sure schedule. This isn't great, but it is the best we have. If you have a better idea, I'm all ears.

mitchellberry 9y ago
AMD already building coin mining optimised gpu's, making the algorithm memory-hard to exempt asic's doesn't really change much except the direction of hardware manufacture

jobigoud 9y ago

> And if Satoshi hadn’t thought “how do I make this hard? I know: spin a computer through SHA2 as fast as possible until it finds a magic hash,” Hashcash algorithm used in Bitcoin predates it by about a decade, it was used for spam detection for example. Approaches to secure a blockchain are an active area of research, did you have a better idea to propose?