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> Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations. Unfortunatly BTC mining now runs almost entirely on ASICs that can't be used
by iak8god 9y ago
> Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations.
Unfortunatly BTC mining now runs almost entirely on ASICs that can't be used to compute anything but SHA-256.
- anigbrowl 9y agoImagine and equivalent amount of computer power in an alternative future. I mean, you're right, and this limitation is a flaw in bitcoin, but you've also missed the point.
- iak8god 9y agoNo, I'm imagining, and I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but BTC has a lot of inertia at present.
- oh_sigh 9y agoIt's also hard to call it a flaw in Bitcoin, considering it was an intentional design decision.
- ben_w 9y agoEven intentional design decisions can be flawed.
- westurner 9y agoThere's a pretty hard limit bounding the optimizability of SHA256. That's why hashcash uses a cryptographic hash function. There may be - or, very likely are - shortcuts for proof of research better than Grover's; which, when found, will also be very useful for science and medicine. However, that advantage is theoretically destabilizing for a distributed consensus network; which is also a strange conflict in incentives. Sort of like buying "buy gold" commercials when the market was heading into the worst recession since the Great Depression. SSL accelerators may benefit from the SHA256 ASIC optimizations incentivized by the bitcoin design. """The accelerator provides the RSA public-key algorithm, several widely used symmetric-key algorithms, cryptographic hash functions, and a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator""" GPU prices are also lower now; probably due to demand pulling volume. The TPS (transactions per second) rate is doing much better these days. How would you solve the local daretime problem in order with Git and signatures?