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Worth mentioning the cryptocurrency that Bram Cohen (inventor of bittorrent) is creating that is explicitly designed to be low-energy usage and more distributed

by Glench 6y ago

Worth mentioning the cryptocurrency that Bram Cohen (inventor of bittorrent) is creating that is explicitly designed to be low-energy usage and more distributed: https://www.chia.net/ https://www.chia.net/ It uses "Proof of Space" (proof that you're allocating a certain amount of storage space) instead of Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. Pretty interesting and they're coming out of beta into their mainnet in the next few weeks. Their on-chain programming language is even Lisp-based!

dwieringa 6y ago
I mined BURST for a while, another PoS coin. It's been around for 7 years, works great, and solves the PoW power problem. It's got a lot of functionality built in for the nodes, like messaging and marketplace functions. And nobody cares. If I had to guess, I'd say the attractiveness of mining the PoW coins is that it's very expensive, but accordingly very rewarding. When the coins are cheap and easy to secure as a node, people seem to not be as interested, which means the coin doesn't get used. Chia, Sia, Filecoin all are trying to do similar, but have added in a "distributed Dropbox". There are some interesting challenges there, like quintuple redundancy and having your files stored across multiple nodes in shards for privacy. But in the end, they seem to suffer from the same issue as BURST: their feature set struggles to create popularity because they're not Bitcoin.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Any of these coins could have linked themselves to bitcoin. Ie. They could have issued coins at the start to all bitcoin holders. If they did that, they'd get over the "we're not bitcoin" hurdle, assuming the tech was any good.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    The best way is to have a way to "lock" bitcoin which can then be "imported" with a 1:1 exchange rate into your new altcoin. That way there is no proliferation of coins, and people will have trust knowing each of your altcoins is backed 1:1 with bitcoin.
Nursie 6y ago
If that takes off, aren't we liable to see a rocketing demand for storage, doing to the storage market what PoW does for the graphics card market? And while it may be low energy to run, creating hard drives just to prove you have space seems a less than environmentally friendly activity. It looks just like another proof of waste
- londons_explore 6y ago
  The main cost of compute is electricity. The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside). It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    I was more thinking of the waste involved in manufacturing. If there's suddenly a much more direct profit motive to buying drives it's going to push more manufacturing, which is not the same as ongoing burning of energy for PoW, sure, but it's not going to be without side effects.
    - novok 6y ago
      overall it would be significantly less, that is the point
      - Nursie 6y ago
        I'm not convinced it would. Just like PoW it makes sense to spend enough until a breakeven point. In thise case there is a direct incentive to buy as much storage as possible.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    This doesn't sound right, it's very doubtful that all storage tech has royalty (unit-based) license terms. Instead of electricity consumption the limiting factor will be raw materials to manufacture storage. Likely even worse for the environment given the energy and raw material cost to manufacture storage devices.
monopoledance 6y ago
Isn't that riddled with the same problems ultimately? You set up a system, which inherently ensures a certain resource will remain/become scarce (...for all of humanity), or fail. That's just super counter-productive for human prosperity...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
beambot 6y ago
How does this differ from Filecoin?
pseudozach 6y ago
main issue OP and other "I have a version of bitcoin that doesn't uses less energy/faster/cheaper etc." people have is that these existed before bitcoin and didn't work. They were shut down/coerced/coopted. Bitcoin ensures decentralization and finality via PoW. This new coin will take its place under bitcoin amongst 3000+ abandoned and newly released ones.

by Glench 6y ago

dwieringa 6y ago

I mined BURST for a while, another PoS coin. It's been around for 7 years, works great, and solves the PoW power problem. It's got a lot of functionality built in for the nodes, like messaging and marketplace functions. And nobody cares. If I had to guess, I'd say the attractiveness of mining the PoW coins is that it's very expensive, but accordingly very rewarding. When the coins are cheap and easy to secure as a node, people seem to not be as interested, which means the coin doesn't get used. Chia, Sia, Filecoin all are trying to do similar, but have added in a "distributed Dropbox". There are some interesting challenges there, like quintuple redundancy and having your files stored across multiple nodes in shards for privacy. But in the end, they seem to suffer from the same issue as BURST: their feature set struggles to create popularity because they're not Bitcoin.

londons_explore 6y ago
Any of these coins could have linked themselves to bitcoin. Ie. They could have issued coins at the start to all bitcoin holders. If they did that, they'd get over the "we're not bitcoin" hurdle, assuming the tech was any good.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  The best way is to have a way to "lock" bitcoin which can then be "imported" with a 1:1 exchange rate into your new altcoin. That way there is no proliferation of coins, and people will have trust knowing each of your altcoins is backed 1:1 with bitcoin.

Nursie 6y ago

If that takes off, aren't we liable to see a rocketing demand for storage, doing to the storage market what PoW does for the graphics card market? And while it may be low energy to run, creating hard drives just to prove you have space seems a less than environmentally friendly activity. It looks just like another proof of waste

londons_explore 6y ago
The main cost of compute is electricity. The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside). It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.
- Nursie 6y ago
  I was more thinking of the waste involved in manufacturing. If there's suddenly a much more direct profit motive to buying drives it's going to push more manufacturing, which is not the same as ongoing burning of energy for PoW, sure, but it's not going to be without side effects.
  - novok 6y ago
    overall it would be significantly less, that is the point
    - Nursie 6y ago
      I'm not convinced it would. Just like PoW it makes sense to spend enough until a breakeven point. In thise case there is a direct incentive to buy as much storage as possible.
- aeternum 6y ago
  This doesn't sound right, it's very doubtful that all storage tech has royalty (unit-based) license terms. Instead of electricity consumption the limiting factor will be raw materials to manufacture storage. Likely even worse for the environment given the energy and raw material cost to manufacture storage devices.

monopoledance 6y ago

Isn't that riddled with the same problems ultimately? You set up a system, which inherently ensures a certain resource will remain/become scarce (...for all of humanity), or fail. That's just super counter-productive for human prosperity...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

beambot 6y ago

How does this differ from Filecoin?

pseudozach 6y ago

main issue OP and other "I have a version of bitcoin that doesn't uses less energy/faster/cheaper etc." people have is that these existed before bitcoin and didn't work. They were shut down/coerced/coopted. Bitcoin ensures decentralization and finality via PoW. This new coin will take its place under bitcoin amongst 3000+ abandoned and newly released ones.