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In my opinion, the most notable innovation of Bitcoin is the incentive and PoW-reward for the continued upkeep and health of the network, and I often wonder why
by niftich 8y ago
In my opinion, the most notable innovation of Bitcoin is the incentive and PoW-reward for the continued upkeep and health of the network, and I often wonder why so much of the literature around blockchains misses or glosses over this fact.
The scheme neatly solves the free-rider problem that plagues other distributed systems, where your continued usage of the network can be ensured by your active participation within it.
- Laforet 8y ago>The scheme neatly solves the free-rider problem that plagues other permissionless systems. FTFY A parallel example would be various P2P filesharing protocols which was plagued by freeloaders from day 1, and had to come up with various schemes to regulate the user's contribution. The simpler solutions are not exactly Byzantine fault tolerant (user profiles in ed2k) whereas the more elaborate mechanism typically requires a centralised record keeper(private trackers, etc). A lot of the inefficiencies of PoW are necessary to keep the network permissionless, and conversely you don't need PoW if the system has any kind of entry requirement.