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If you can invent a reliable alternative to proof-of-work distributed consensus there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity there. It’s inefficient, but before

by ozmbie 8y ago

If you can invent a reliable alternative to proof-of-work distributed consensus there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity there. It’s inefficient, but before bitcoin came along there was no way to even do it. An inefficient way is better than no way at all. Some other cryptocurrencies are trying alternatives. But none have been as “battle hardened” as bitcoin. Follow the core developers and you’ll see their focus is on creating an open distributed platform. It’s up to us to figure out what to use it for.

KirinDave 8y ago
Can I also invent a system that's been proven to not safely guarnatee consensus for years, and trust everyone to ignore it? If so, I've got a thrilling investment opportunity for you.
curun1r 8y ago
> An inefficient way is better than no way at all Really, why? IMHO, there's a pretty compelling argument to be made that Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies have had a significantly net-negative impact on the world, from facilitating scams and other illegal activity to now having to worry that sites we visit will monetize by stealing CPU cycles to the significant impact on climate change, these technologies have caused a lot more harm than benefit. And all the while, they haven't even figured out how to build a ledger that can scale to day-to-day transactions. My bet is that the whole thing ends up being a tax on people who've forgotten their 17th century Dutch history.
- __s 8y ago
  We should've drawn the line in the sand back with 56 bit key limits
- knocte 8y ago
  > from facilitating scams and other illegal activity The same was said over and over on the nascent days of the internet, about how it facilitated anonymity so easily and how it would be used by criminals. > by stealing CPU cycles Difficulty in bitcoin mining is raising all the time (because of the competition among miners). This is why nobody mines nowadays with CPUs or GPUs but with ASICs. The fact that some sites are trying to achieve some decent mining hashrate by pulling the amount of visitors of a website is a naive move that will soon be off-set by even more raising levels of difficulty. Soon this will not be profitable at all, even if your website was the 1st in Google's page rank. > to the significant impact on climate change I like that skeptics raise this point, because: 1) The cryptocurrency mining industry is the fastest one to chase energy-efficient solutions. As soon as a device consumes less electricity, it's adopted widely because of the huge incentives to do so (e.g. CPU->GPU->ASIC). 2) Compare the electricity spent by the entire banking industry with the electricity spent by the entire crypto-mining industry. Now guess what's more efficient.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    > The same was said over and over on the nascent days of the internet, about how it facilitated anonymity so easily and how it would be used by criminals. There's 2 things I want to say about this comment: 1. Those accusations were not wrong. In the same sense that we have pretty clear evidence that a lot of the value injected into bitcoin and stored there is via money laundering. 2. Unlike proof of work currency blockchains, the internet clearly delivered and had no direct theoretical challenges to its very existence that people subsequently and fervently denied. Proof of work is a bad idea. It's been discredited. It doesn't do what people thought it did. And it's MUCH too expensive to keep doing.
    - siwatanejo 8y ago
      Proof of Work is the only way for people to transact in which they don't have counterpary-risk problems before transacting. Before PoW was invented, there was no way of doing this. Now, thanks to layer2 technologies, PoW will start becoming much more (orders of magnitude more) energy efficient. How is that a bad idea? Make something possible, and later make it sustainable. So long as there's demand for that something, then it's a good idea.
      - skybrian 8y ago
        There are two sides to a trade, and typically Bitcoin only handles one of them. Buy some food with Bitcoin and it still might taste bad or make you ill. Even for purely financial transactions, any kind of loan or investment still has counter-party risk. So even if a crypocurrency worked perfectly, it doesn't solve very much.
        siwatanejo 8y ago
        > There are two sides to a trade, and typically Bitcoin only handles one of them. Buy some food with Bitcoin and it still might taste bad or make you ill. You have this same problem with any form of money. The problem I raised is counterparty-risk when holding your assets (before transacting). > Even for purely financial transactions, any kind of loan or investment still has counter-party risk. Yeah, that's why maybe loans should have higher interest (right now, the low interest is artificial, because the bank is really making more money from the fact that it's working as a fractional reserve, not from the interest it gathers from loaning you money). > So even if a crypocurrency worked perfectly, it doesn't solve very much. It solves just one thing. Granted, it's not a silver bullet. But there are never silver bullets. Every single invention that humanity achieves, just improves the world a little tiny bit. Cryptocurrency does this as well.
- LAMike 8y ago
  > My bet is that the whole thing ends up being a tax on people who've forgotten their 17th century Dutch history. Tulip Mania lasted 6 months
  - bonesss 8y ago
    I have a sneaking suspicion that if tulips allowed masses of investors in less-than-open markets around the world to stash/protect assets from their overbearing governments, as well as facilitate the purchase of AK47s and money laundering, that the online tulip trade would be ongoing. Fundamentally: people aren't buying BTC because online coins are pretty, they're investing in an alternative distribution model whose value is 'fixed' by willing parties on the other side who also rely on that distribution model. Yes, it is the Tinkerbell Effect, but a Tinkerbell Effect backed by centuries old markets of surprising strength (weapons and drugs, just to start with). The value isn't the thing being exchanged, it's the ability to exchange.
buckie 8y ago
Or you can just use graph theory to make PoW efficient & more secure[1][2]. Skip to page 11 of [1] for a quick visual summary. [1] http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb.pdf http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb.pdf [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1OFJOrgRWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1OFJOrgRWw
- ozmbie 8y ago
  This looks really interesting. Thanks!
wpietri 8y ago
> creating an open distributed platform. It’s up to us to figure out what to use it for. This is putting the cart very much before the horse. I have no objection to people researching, experimenting, playing. Godspeed. Spending billions creating a technology that sounds cool but may be useless, though, is absurd. We didn't get the Internet because somebody said, "Hey, let's spend billions wiring up a lot of computers and see if it's good for anything." The Internet's growth was driven by an expanding set of very specific use cases.
lightedman 8y ago
"It’s inefficient, but before bitcoin came along there was no way to even do it." Wrong, we did literally this exact same thing in the 70s with what were then-called "Permissionless Distributed Databases" History repeats itself. Going to be fun watching "blockchain" die the same death it had already did in the 70s when mathematics and hard physics comes to kick the database in the nuts. The growth rate is wholly unsustainable at any scale, inefficiences aside.
Scarblac 8y ago
> If you can invent a reliable alternative to proof-of-work distributed consensus there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity there. Trust. Just use any authentication/authorization solution, contracts, the rule of law, reputation, everything we've always used to deal with varying degrees of trust. Utter lack of trust is not a problem people have. If you want to apply blockchain technology to anything real world (as opposed to coins that only exist _in_ the blockchain), then you need trust anyway whenever there is interaction (e.g. when someone inputs data, you need to trust its true anyway). It's really only useful for coins, that are themselves less useful than existing money. It was an interesting mathematical puzzle to solve, shouldn't have been made reality.
- tardo99 8y ago
  This is the right answer. It's frustrating that folks can't see it.
- ric2b 8y ago
  And how is that working out? I agree that it doesn't seem useful outside of money, but when it comes to money, feel free to trust this. I don't: https://global.spdrs.com/content/dam/spdrs/etf-blogs-images/the-markets/2017/aug/Estimate_of_Federal_Reserve_Balance_Sheet_Reduction_Plan_080717_1160x730.jpg https://global.spdrs.com/content/dam/spdrs/etf-blogs-images/...

by ozmbie 8y ago

KirinDave 8y ago

Can I also invent a system that's been proven to not safely guarnatee consensus for years, and trust everyone to ignore it? If so, I've got a thrilling investment opportunity for you.

curun1r 8y ago

> An inefficient way is better than no way at all Really, why? IMHO, there's a pretty compelling argument to be made that Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies have had a significantly net-negative impact on the world, from facilitating scams and other illegal activity to now having to worry that sites we visit will monetize by stealing CPU cycles to the significant impact on climate change, these technologies have caused a lot more harm than benefit. And all the while, they haven't even figured out how to build a ledger that can scale to day-to-day transactions. My bet is that the whole thing ends up being a tax on people who've forgotten their 17th century Dutch history.

__s 8y ago
We should've drawn the line in the sand back with 56 bit key limits
knocte 8y ago
> from facilitating scams and other illegal activity The same was said over and over on the nascent days of the internet, about how it facilitated anonymity so easily and how it would be used by criminals. > by stealing CPU cycles Difficulty in bitcoin mining is raising all the time (because of the competition among miners). This is why nobody mines nowadays with CPUs or GPUs but with ASICs. The fact that some sites are trying to achieve some decent mining hashrate by pulling the amount of visitors of a website is a naive move that will soon be off-set by even more raising levels of difficulty. Soon this will not be profitable at all, even if your website was the 1st in Google's page rank. > to the significant impact on climate change I like that skeptics raise this point, because: 1) The cryptocurrency mining industry is the fastest one to chase energy-efficient solutions. As soon as a device consumes less electricity, it's adopted widely because of the huge incentives to do so (e.g. CPU->GPU->ASIC). 2) Compare the electricity spent by the entire banking industry with the electricity spent by the entire crypto-mining industry. Now guess what's more efficient.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  > The same was said over and over on the nascent days of the internet, about how it facilitated anonymity so easily and how it would be used by criminals. There's 2 things I want to say about this comment: 1. Those accusations were not wrong. In the same sense that we have pretty clear evidence that a lot of the value injected into bitcoin and stored there is via money laundering. 2. Unlike proof of work currency blockchains, the internet clearly delivered and had no direct theoretical challenges to its very existence that people subsequently and fervently denied. Proof of work is a bad idea. It's been discredited. It doesn't do what people thought it did. And it's MUCH too expensive to keep doing.
  - siwatanejo 8y ago
    Proof of Work is the only way for people to transact in which they don't have counterpary-risk problems before transacting. Before PoW was invented, there was no way of doing this. Now, thanks to layer2 technologies, PoW will start becoming much more (orders of magnitude more) energy efficient. How is that a bad idea? Make something possible, and later make it sustainable. So long as there's demand for that something, then it's a good idea.
    - skybrian 8y ago
      There are two sides to a trade, and typically Bitcoin only handles one of them. Buy some food with Bitcoin and it still might taste bad or make you ill. Even for purely financial transactions, any kind of loan or investment still has counter-party risk. So even if a crypocurrency worked perfectly, it doesn't solve very much.
      - siwatanejo 8y ago
        > There are two sides to a trade, and typically Bitcoin only handles one of them. Buy some food with Bitcoin and it still might taste bad or make you ill. You have this same problem with any form of money. The problem I raised is counterparty-risk when holding your assets (before transacting). > Even for purely financial transactions, any kind of loan or investment still has counter-party risk. Yeah, that's why maybe loans should have higher interest (right now, the low interest is artificial, because the bank is really making more money from the fact that it's working as a fractional reserve, not from the interest it gathers from loaning you money). > So even if a crypocurrency worked perfectly, it doesn't solve very much. It solves just one thing. Granted, it's not a silver bullet. But there are never silver bullets. Every single invention that humanity achieves, just improves the world a little tiny bit. Cryptocurrency does this as well.
LAMike 8y ago
> My bet is that the whole thing ends up being a tax on people who've forgotten their 17th century Dutch history. Tulip Mania lasted 6 months
- bonesss 8y ago
  I have a sneaking suspicion that if tulips allowed masses of investors in less-than-open markets around the world to stash/protect assets from their overbearing governments, as well as facilitate the purchase of AK47s and money laundering, that the online tulip trade would be ongoing. Fundamentally: people aren't buying BTC because online coins are pretty, they're investing in an alternative distribution model whose value is 'fixed' by willing parties on the other side who also rely on that distribution model. Yes, it is the Tinkerbell Effect, but a Tinkerbell Effect backed by centuries old markets of surprising strength (weapons and drugs, just to start with). The value isn't the thing being exchanged, it's the ability to exchange.

buckie 8y ago

Or you can just use graph theory to make PoW efficient & more secure[1][2]. Skip to page 11 of [1] for a quick visual summary. [1] http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb.pdf http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb.pdf [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1OFJOrgRWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1OFJOrgRWw

ozmbie 8y ago
This looks really interesting. Thanks!

wpietri 8y ago

> creating an open distributed platform. It’s up to us to figure out what to use it for. This is putting the cart very much before the horse. I have no objection to people researching, experimenting, playing. Godspeed. Spending billions creating a technology that sounds cool but may be useless, though, is absurd. We didn't get the Internet because somebody said, "Hey, let's spend billions wiring up a lot of computers and see if it's good for anything." The Internet's growth was driven by an expanding set of very specific use cases.

lightedman 8y ago

"It’s inefficient, but before bitcoin came along there was no way to even do it." Wrong, we did literally this exact same thing in the 70s with what were then-called "Permissionless Distributed Databases" History repeats itself. Going to be fun watching "blockchain" die the same death it had already did in the 70s when mathematics and hard physics comes to kick the database in the nuts. The growth rate is wholly unsustainable at any scale, inefficiences aside.

Scarblac 8y ago

> If you can invent a reliable alternative to proof-of-work distributed consensus there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity there. Trust. Just use any authentication/authorization solution, contracts, the rule of law, reputation, everything we've always used to deal with varying degrees of trust. Utter lack of trust is not a problem people have. If you want to apply blockchain technology to anything real world (as opposed to coins that only exist _in_ the blockchain), then you need trust anyway whenever there is interaction (e.g. when someone inputs data, you need to trust its true anyway). It's really only useful for coins, that are themselves less useful than existing money. It was an interesting mathematical puzzle to solve, shouldn't have been made reality.

tardo99 8y ago
This is the right answer. It's frustrating that folks can't see it.
ric2b 8y ago
And how is that working out? I agree that it doesn't seem useful outside of money, but when it comes to money, feel free to trust this. I don't: https://global.spdrs.com/content/dam/spdrs/etf-blogs-images/the-markets/2017/aug/Estimate_of_Federal_Reserve_Balance_Sheet_Reduction_Plan_080717_1160x730.jpg https://global.spdrs.com/content/dam/spdrs/etf-blogs-images/...