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A post apocalyptic world where mining farms and the internet still function?

saalweachter 6y ago
Honestly? Depends on the apocalypse. Imagine a climate change apocalypse rather than the nuclear wasteland of Fallout or Mad Max. Let the sea levels rise enough to displace everyone who is within 30 feet of sea level, add in some famines (also brought on by climate change) and since it's the theme this year, a plague or two exacerbated by a billion climate refugees in camps and slums being ignored by anyone still prosperous. You could end up in a situation fairly apocalyptic, but still have the scavenged resources to assemble an internet, assuming there wasn't some sort of anti-tech uprising among the survivors, angry at technology for causing the disaster and determined to smash any surviving technology (and technologists) to prevent it from happening again.
- acdha 6y ago
  I could buy a network of at least regional scale but the resource constraints would prohibit cryptocurrencies with no meaningful benefits to justify the huge cost increases. It’d all come down to trust between parties anyway without a shared government legal system to fall back on, and in that case there’s be no reason not to use PKI signatures at orders of magnitude lower cost.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    I mean, as long as we're fabricating fantastic situations we can maybe come up with one where PoW actually makes sense. So the thing about PoW is that it doesn't matter how much is actually spent on the "work" part as long as you can't feasibly do more. So let's add onto our climate change apocalypse some light nuclear war -- not enough that it dominates the end of the world as we know it, but enough that it destroys the infrastructure needed to produce the most specialized mining hardware, and maybe some of the larger datacenters. Now you have plenty of scavenged ordinary hardware to keep the internet running, plentiful power (since in this hypothetical the population has shrunk dramatically without much infrastructure loss) and a finite supply of mining hardware. This last would prevent the runaway problem of PoW -- you could string thousands of regular PCs together to compete with the good hardware, but the return would be low enough that it wouldn't be worth while to try to expand the mining pool until the old hardware started to fail completely or the new infrastructure was built to fab new hardware -- you might have a few decades before the old incentives to grow the pool kicked back in. Granted, this is all pretty far-fetched, not the least the social component of people wanting to use cryptocurrency as a widespread unit of exchange, but hey, I'm work-shopping a story set in a dystopian future here, not trying to sell Bitcoin.
    - acdha 6y ago
      I guess my question remains: why? It doesn’t appear to offer anything over a signed IOU – if you don’t deliver the goods when I ask for something real, it doesn’t matter how many bits I have saying you will – and if I need more assurance I’m going to need to find a third party to broker the transaction in any case.
      - saalweachter 6y ago
        Yeah, there my powers of imagination fall short. The best I can come up with is "well, if some critical mass of people adopt it early for quirky reasons it could take off", but that doesn't distinguish it from bottle caps.
dcolkitt 6y ago
Sounds like Snow Crash

Honestly? Depends on the apocalypse. Imagine a climate change apocalypse rather than the nuclear wasteland of Fallout or Mad Max. Let the sea levels rise enough to displace everyone who is within 30 feet of sea level, add in some famines (also brought on by climate change) and since it's the theme this year, a plague or two exacerbated by a billion climate refugees in camps and slums being ignored by anyone still prosperous. You could end up in a situation fairly apocalyptic, but still have the scavenged resources to assemble an internet, assuming there wasn't some sort of anti-tech uprising among the survivors, angry at technology for causing the disaster and determined to smash any surviving technology (and technologists) to prevent it from happening again.

acdha 6y ago
I could buy a network of at least regional scale but the resource constraints would prohibit cryptocurrencies with no meaningful benefits to justify the huge cost increases. It’d all come down to trust between parties anyway without a shared government legal system to fall back on, and in that case there’s be no reason not to use PKI signatures at orders of magnitude lower cost.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  I mean, as long as we're fabricating fantastic situations we can maybe come up with one where PoW actually makes sense. So the thing about PoW is that it doesn't matter how much is actually spent on the "work" part as long as you can't feasibly do more. So let's add onto our climate change apocalypse some light nuclear war -- not enough that it dominates the end of the world as we know it, but enough that it destroys the infrastructure needed to produce the most specialized mining hardware, and maybe some of the larger datacenters. Now you have plenty of scavenged ordinary hardware to keep the internet running, plentiful power (since in this hypothetical the population has shrunk dramatically without much infrastructure loss) and a finite supply of mining hardware. This last would prevent the runaway problem of PoW -- you could string thousands of regular PCs together to compete with the good hardware, but the return would be low enough that it wouldn't be worth while to try to expand the mining pool until the old hardware started to fail completely or the new infrastructure was built to fab new hardware -- you might have a few decades before the old incentives to grow the pool kicked back in. Granted, this is all pretty far-fetched, not the least the social component of people wanting to use cryptocurrency as a widespread unit of exchange, but hey, I'm work-shopping a story set in a dystopian future here, not trying to sell Bitcoin.
  - acdha 6y ago
    I guess my question remains: why? It doesn’t appear to offer anything over a signed IOU – if you don’t deliver the goods when I ask for something real, it doesn’t matter how many bits I have saying you will – and if I need more assurance I’m going to need to find a third party to broker the transaction in any case.
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      Yeah, there my powers of imagination fall short. The best I can come up with is "well, if some critical mass of people adopt it early for quirky reasons it could take off", but that doesn't distinguish it from bottle caps.

dcolkitt 6y ago

Sounds like Snow Crash