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Other than making some people really rich, what problems would it solve that aren’t better solved by existing solutions which don’t burn energy to create secure
by toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
Other than making some people really rich, what problems would it solve that aren’t better solved by existing solutions which don’t burn energy to create secure entropy?
- gamma-male 8y agoDNS
- coralreef 8y agoYou kind of asked a loaded question, but to answer your question; whatever thing needs decentralization.
- alexkcd 8y agoPoW will centralize towards cheap energy access. PoS will centralize to majority stake holders. I would bet that such energy access or stake follows a power law distribution. So long as that is true, neither system will ever provide decentralization.
- coralreef 8y agoOkay, but what happens to energy prices when enough miners flock to low-cost centers? Prices go up. In a long enough time horizon, opportunity to take advantage of energy prices basically gets competed away. I haven't read much on energy production, but as far as I know there are many places on the planet that cheaply produce renewable energy.
- alexkcd 8y agoEnergy production is heavily regulated and centralized to a few entities. Very much like financial institutions. It's highly unlikely that the free market somehow sorts this out in the future, considering that it's the free market that gave rise to these power law distributions to begin with.
- coralreef 8y agoI get your point, but I'm not really sure what the purpose behind your argument is. There will always be some limiting factor or theoretical vulnerability. If it's not ISPs/Internet infrastructure, then its the exchanges and fiat on ramps. But yet, its been pretty hard to kill illegal filesharing, VPNs, etc. It's even harder to stop those things when the population doesn't believe in legislating against it, at least in a democracy.
- alexkcd 8y agoMy point is that neither PoW nor PoS are decentralized. Which was in response to the original comment. I’ll let other people prognosticate as to what, if anything, that means for their future.
- nonbel 8y ago> "existing solutions which don’t burn energy" Like what?
- yoshuaw 8y agoMost computer programs don't rely on brute-forcing hashes to produce results. Programs that don't require brute-force commonly use many times less energy than programs that do rely on brute force. This extra cost is often seen as wasteful.
- nonbel 8y ago>"Programs that don't require brute-force commonly use many times less energy than programs that do rely on brute force." Can you give an example of a program that gives similar results?
- antonvs 8y agoMany of the things that people want to use smart contracts for can be implemented using a model involving some degree of trust between vetted participants. Anything involving a distributed value chain for an industry, for example.
- nonbel 8y agoHow much energy does generating this trust require?
- maxxxxx 8y agoDo you think these questions are clever? How about YOU give an example for a crypto use case that can't be achieved with traditional methods?
- nonbel 8y agoIt is a currency that acts like gold over the internet, ie no chargebacks and (is expected to) appreciate over time as more dollars/etc are created.
- jazzyjackson 8y agoRemittances without high fees. I think as entropy becomes very inefficient to produce (difficulty multipliers increasing on crypto as the network expands...) it will become more clear that the expensive part about sending money internationally is trusting all parties involved. You pay VISA/MASTERCARD a 3% fee because you trust them to protect your account in the case of fraud. Moneygram takes 2% of all transcations over $900 because you trust them to move money from your account to the recipients account without losing it. Even in computer security, you have to put your trust in something. Somebody picked cryptography and high numbers of CPU cycles. Anyway, you asked what problems crypto could solve, and I guess my answer is, maybe it will cost less to send money around the world. As it turns out, there's not necessarily a way to make it free.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoI don’t pay a fee on my credit cards, the merchant does, and in case of fraud I can issue a chargeback to boot. As long as I pay my balance each month, my credit card is free, plus generating rewards. That’s almost the opposite of cryptocurrency, where far from being able to tackle fraud, it makes theft or loss nearly impossible to remediate. A credit card is also one of the easiest things to use, and all of the hard work on security is undertaken by merchants and the credit card issuer.
- StavrosK 8y agoIf the merchant pays something, you pay something. Where do you think the merchant gets the money from?
- yebyen 8y ago> I don’t pay a fee on my credit cards, the merchant does While that may be technically correct, it's ignorant of the fact that costs are always passed down the line in any economic relationship like you're describing. That fraud protection costs the card issuers, which is the basis for that merchant fee, and the merchant passes the cost on in the form of higher prices. (Merchant accounts with higher fraud rates will pay higher fees!) So from another perspective, you actually are paying the bill for those unknown percentage of frauds, which you wouldn't be as much on the hook for so directly if only everyone was responsible for their own individual security.
- arisAlexis 8y agoseems that you like many people are very preoccupied that some people that took a huge risk got back a huge reward. This is totally irrelevant but keeps coming up in arguments stressed like in your sentence.
- DennisP 8y agoA simple one already deployed on Ethereum: online gambling, where you don't have to trust the casino to run fair games or hold your money. As with most things, this can be sort of solved with heavy regulatory structures and enforcement, but I would argue that it's not better solved, especially once proof of stake eliminates the problem of burning energy.