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I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" scheme

I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes. I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth".

kylegordon 6y ago
https://pkt.cash/ https://pkt.cash/
bserge 6y ago
Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion. Buy it now, it definitely won't last forever! :D Bu seriously, I still don't understand cryptocurrencies. So, your X discoin is worth Y million real money. But that's only while it's in cryptocurrency form. If people start cashing out, the value will plummet, right? Only the first few will get close to the high value? That seems very similar to a pyramid/ponzi scheme to me. On that note, would it survive some catastrophic event? Like the Internet going down. A bunch of gold will. Hell, invest in power generators and batteries, those will survive and be worth a lot. Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
- someguyorother 6y ago
  > Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion. Make a DoomCoin! It would keep 12 difficulty counters, one for each proof of whatever, and getting farthest ahead in one of them lets you mine a new block. That way it can distort the prices of (sorry, "effectively allocate") CPUs, GPUs, disks, ASICs, RAM... anything else you can come up with. Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain. >Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it? Yes, but it may be very slow the first period, as it would be used to the pre-collapse difficulty level.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    > Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain Or a little story in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describing how a civilization collapsed, not with weapons but by binding all their resources in a recursive speculative bubble.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  You spending time on social media or driving or eating does destroy the nature too, but you somehow justify it to yourself.
  - dpatterbee 6y ago
    Negligible in comparison to cryptos waste, and provides a real tangible benefit.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    We need to be extremely careful using this kind of argument (or, in fact, fallacy). By the same token, we all get some secondary exposure to some toxic substances, we might as well not care at all and expose ourselves more. When you think about it, exactly the opposite makes sense. So basically if someone invented an eco-coin, that is a well-designed project fostering technologies focusing on healing the Earth (more efficient waste recycling, green energy, better air filters, new technologies for toxic and nuclear waste removal etc.), taking into account all the consequences of extreme popularity (none of the existing coins have, or they simply don't care), I'd be the first to invest in it, knowing that even if I lose, I win.
    - bufferoverflow 6y ago
      It exists: https://www.ecocoin.com/ https://www.ecocoin.com/
  - mrlinx 6y ago
    Hey, Any way I can email you?
- davidgerard 6y ago
  Your understanding is basically correct. The "market cap" of a cryptocurrency is a meaningless marketing number - there's very little actual dollars in the cryptocurrency system. When the bubble pops, a lot of people are going to discover they were always broke.
- sumgame 6y ago
  That’s true for stocks too. As people sell, value plummets That doesn’t make it a Ponzi scheme
  - graeme 6y ago
    Stocks confer ownership of a company. If Apple remained the same, but everyone went insane and started selling Apple Stocks for $0.0000000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, I would buy every one and then collect the dividends. Whereas if everyone sold crypto for $0.00000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, you would gain nothing by buying them all. You can only make money in crypto if people buy it at a higher price.
    - kemonocode 6y ago
      Except many stocks do not, in fact, pay dividends. Amazon doesn't and it's one of the most highly valued companies in the world. Meanwhile, just as a lot of crypto does not pay dividends I could make use of DeFi platforms to get it on the crypto I do own, or simply get Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies, then you can see the staking process as paying dividends of a kind. I get your hatred towards crypto, but you're cherry picking. If all money is BS and made up then good ol' stocks have good company with crypto in hell.
      - johnbcoughlin 6y ago
        Hopefully everyone can see that there is a difference between being a 75% shareholder of Amazon, and being a 75% shareholder of dogecoin, in terms of the real assets that allows you to bring to bear. Regardless of which one is paying dividends.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Proof of stake crypto doesn’t pay a dividend. Stock splits where you hold more shares but total number of shares double are effectively a null transaction. It’s only the underlying value that matters not the number of tokens. All companies either die or eventually pay dividends in one form or another. So, just because Amazon or whatnot has yet to pay a dividend doesn’t mean it will never pay one. People judge the probability of future dividends not just the pattern of past dividends because companies can fail, but they can also grow. Handing back money in the growth phase is considered an inefficient use of funds.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
Ironically I was speculating the other day if not this whole peer review thing would be a good candidate for a crypto currency Some mechanism by which to speculate on the impact or future credibility of a paper would create some kind of prediction market Proof of impact prediction?
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  Just what we need... more incentives for scientists to game the system.
  - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
    Ideally the scientists would be left out. Leaving the gaming as such to the reviewers. But yeah, there is probably lots of interesting ways such a system would fail.
zozbot234 6y ago
> I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes. In all seriousness, I'm expecting the former. With current trends, the Chia currency is going to be "farming" so much storage that reward per TB will drop below the breakeven point for computing more "plots" to farm, or for even keeping existing "plots" online and taking up storage. It's just a bit hard to predict where that point is since Chia itself is just getting started and has yet to be extensively traded.
- Griffinsauce 6y ago
  The problem is that it could be a self repairing system though right? Prices go up => bubble pops => prices make next bubble viable.. etc. You'd hope rational critical thought would stop the second cycle but even a charitable reading would say so far crypto has shown there are plenty of people not applying it. (and an uncharitable one would say it's the reason it exists at all... but lets skip that discussion for once).
marvin 6y ago
Is it possible to create a «proof of pain» cryptocurrency, where holders repratedly stab themselves with sharp objects to increase their cryptocurrency balance?
- shard 6y ago
  Sounds like the perfect scenario for the creation of torture farms.
  - marvin 6y ago
    That would be the unstated subtext. Maybe I should write a whitepaper.
walrus01 6y ago
> I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth". As an ISP I can say that any software that caused a large percentage of our customers to max out their downstream and upstream connections 24x7 would be cracked down on hard. ISP economics, and the reason your residential last mile service might cost $65 a month and not $400, is based on oversubscription. IF you look at a traffic chart for each customer in from a random selection of 50 homes, it's very bursty and intermittent. You can put a lot of individual 1GbE symmetric FTTH customers on a 10Gbps uplink, because the likelihood they'll be trying to run a speed test or all transfer huge things simultaneously is low. 'proof of bandwidth' would very quickly require people to start doing their thing from 1U servers in colocation on dedicated hosting 1GbE services, which will cost at least 6-8x what a residential last mile service costs. In general as a residential ISP the number of customers who decide to leave a system seeding many 70GB 2160p h265 torrents of movies is quite low, and small enough to not need to bother the customers about. Not many people try to do the same thing as running a hosting facility out of their bedroom closet. Less than a few percent.

kylegordon 6y ago

https://pkt.cash/ https://pkt.cash/

bserge 6y ago

Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion. Buy it now, it definitely won't last forever! :D Bu seriously, I still don't understand cryptocurrencies. So, your X discoin is worth Y million real money. But that's only while it's in cryptocurrency form. If people start cashing out, the value will plummet, right? Only the first few will get close to the high value? That seems very similar to a pyramid/ponzi scheme to me. On that note, would it survive some catastrophic event? Like the Internet going down. A bunch of gold will. Hell, invest in power generators and batteries, those will survive and be worth a lot. Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?

someguyorother 6y ago
> Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion. Make a DoomCoin! It would keep 12 difficulty counters, one for each proof of whatever, and getting farthest ahead in one of them lets you mine a new block. That way it can distort the prices of (sorry, "effectively allocate") CPUs, GPUs, disks, ASICs, RAM... anything else you can come up with. Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain. >Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it? Yes, but it may be very slow the first period, as it would be used to the pre-collapse difficulty level.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain Or a little story in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describing how a civilization collapsed, not with weapons but by binding all their resources in a recursive speculative bubble.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bufferoverflow 6y ago
You spending time on social media or driving or eating does destroy the nature too, but you somehow justify it to yourself.
- dpatterbee 6y ago
  Negligible in comparison to cryptos waste, and provides a real tangible benefit.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  We need to be extremely careful using this kind of argument (or, in fact, fallacy). By the same token, we all get some secondary exposure to some toxic substances, we might as well not care at all and expose ourselves more. When you think about it, exactly the opposite makes sense. So basically if someone invented an eco-coin, that is a well-designed project fostering technologies focusing on healing the Earth (more efficient waste recycling, green energy, better air filters, new technologies for toxic and nuclear waste removal etc.), taking into account all the consequences of extreme popularity (none of the existing coins have, or they simply don't care), I'd be the first to invest in it, knowing that even if I lose, I win.
  - bufferoverflow 6y ago
    It exists: https://www.ecocoin.com/ https://www.ecocoin.com/
- mrlinx 6y ago
  Hey, Any way I can email you?
davidgerard 6y ago
Your understanding is basically correct. The "market cap" of a cryptocurrency is a meaningless marketing number - there's very little actual dollars in the cryptocurrency system. When the bubble pops, a lot of people are going to discover they were always broke.
sumgame 6y ago
That’s true for stocks too. As people sell, value plummets That doesn’t make it a Ponzi scheme
- graeme 6y ago
  Stocks confer ownership of a company. If Apple remained the same, but everyone went insane and started selling Apple Stocks for $0.0000000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, I would buy every one and then collect the dividends. Whereas if everyone sold crypto for $0.00000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, you would gain nothing by buying them all. You can only make money in crypto if people buy it at a higher price.
  - kemonocode 6y ago
    Except many stocks do not, in fact, pay dividends. Amazon doesn't and it's one of the most highly valued companies in the world. Meanwhile, just as a lot of crypto does not pay dividends I could make use of DeFi platforms to get it on the crypto I do own, or simply get Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies, then you can see the staking process as paying dividends of a kind. I get your hatred towards crypto, but you're cherry picking. If all money is BS and made up then good ol' stocks have good company with crypto in hell.
    - johnbcoughlin 6y ago
      Hopefully everyone can see that there is a difference between being a 75% shareholder of Amazon, and being a 75% shareholder of dogecoin, in terms of the real assets that allows you to bring to bear. Regardless of which one is paying dividends.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Proof of stake crypto doesn’t pay a dividend. Stock splits where you hold more shares but total number of shares double are effectively a null transaction. It’s only the underlying value that matters not the number of tokens. All companies either die or eventually pay dividends in one form or another. So, just because Amazon or whatnot has yet to pay a dividend doesn’t mean it will never pay one. People judge the probability of future dividends not just the pattern of past dividends because companies can fail, but they can also grow. Handing back money in the growth phase is considered an inefficient use of funds.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago

Ironically I was speculating the other day if not this whole peer review thing would be a good candidate for a crypto currency Some mechanism by which to speculate on the impact or future credibility of a paper would create some kind of prediction market Proof of impact prediction?

pmoriarty 6y ago
Just what we need... more incentives for scientists to game the system.
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  Ideally the scientists would be left out. Leaving the gaming as such to the reviewers. But yeah, there is probably lots of interesting ways such a system would fail.

zozbot234 6y ago

> I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes. In all seriousness, I'm expecting the former. With current trends, the Chia currency is going to be "farming" so much storage that reward per TB will drop below the breakeven point for computing more "plots" to farm, or for even keeping existing "plots" online and taking up storage. It's just a bit hard to predict where that point is since Chia itself is just getting started and has yet to be extensively traded.

Griffinsauce 6y ago
The problem is that it could be a self repairing system though right? Prices go up => bubble pops => prices make next bubble viable.. etc. You'd hope rational critical thought would stop the second cycle but even a charitable reading would say so far crypto has shown there are plenty of people not applying it. (and an uncharitable one would say it's the reason it exists at all... but lets skip that discussion for once).

marvin 6y ago

Is it possible to create a «proof of pain» cryptocurrency, where holders repratedly stab themselves with sharp objects to increase their cryptocurrency balance?

shard 6y ago
Sounds like the perfect scenario for the creation of torture farms.
- marvin 6y ago
  That would be the unstated subtext. Maybe I should write a whitepaper.

walrus01 6y ago

> I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth". As an ISP I can say that any software that caused a large percentage of our customers to max out their downstream and upstream connections 24x7 would be cracked down on hard. ISP economics, and the reason your residential last mile service might cost $65 a month and not $400, is based on oversubscription. IF you look at a traffic chart for each customer in from a random selection of 50 homes, it's very bursty and intermittent. You can put a lot of individual 1GbE symmetric FTTH customers on a 10Gbps uplink, because the likelihood they'll be trying to run a speed test or all transfer huge things simultaneously is low. 'proof of bandwidth' would very quickly require people to start doing their thing from 1U servers in colocation on dedicated hosting 1GbE services, which will cost at least 6-8x what a residential last mile service costs. In general as a residential ISP the number of customers who decide to leave a system seeding many 70GB 2160p h265 torrents of movies is quite low, and small enough to not need to bother the customers about. Not many people try to do the same thing as running a hosting facility out of their bedroom closet. Less than a few percent.