4 ms·

(2015)

• flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
  Yea... when the author started complaining about Peercoin and that somehow being related to what Ethereum is working on today... he lost all credibility with myself at least.
• lalaland1125 9y ago
  As far as I can tell, almost all of the arguments in this piece are still valid. Is there any recent work which argues that it is possible to have something cheaper than proof of work?
  • rspeer 9y ago
    Not using cryptocurrency is cheaper than proof of work.
  • annywhey 9y ago
    The article is based around bundling together a lot of small points and backing it up with shaky analogies to economic theory(e.g. an undergraduate course would probably focus on utility instead of rent). It's framed in a way that I would consider more persuasive than academic. It has a general point, in that the ultimate direction of cryptocurrency systems is towards energy efficient systems of value and transaction, but this goal tends to lead towards a spectrum of trusted/delegated behavior where proof is not a hard requirement. Much of the argument rests on trust costing as much as work, and I don't buy that. It defies what technologies do: let you leverage effort in a particular direction and get a resulting overall productivity benefit.
• sctb 9y ago
  Thanks, updated!