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proof of work is a massive waste, it's true, but it does serve a one time valuable purpose: it bootstraps the value of the tokens by having people make real inv
by a-dub 5y ago
proof of work is a massive waste, it's true, but it does serve a one time valuable purpose: it bootstraps the value of the tokens by having people make real investments with existing currency and hardware in their creation. beyond that, it's literally insane, it only works when there's a very competitive race to burn as much energy as possible.
however, once the value of those tokens is established (as is true for most of the big cryptocurrencies today), there is really no compelling reason not to emulate the proof of work block lottery with a proof of stake block lottery. there is absolutely no reason why people can't lock up digital currency funds long term in exchange for share in a 10 minute lottery rather than lock up funds in hardware mining investments and associated power supplies for them.
i've been watching ethereum's progress on this with interest, and fully expect with time that bitcoin will follow.
- randomopining 5y agoDoesn't POS incentivize oligarchal collusion?
- a-dub 5y agono more than PoW. they're both essentially lotteries that hand out share/influence based on capital investment. PoS, done right, simply emulates PoW. what does PoS done right look like? "miners" lock up funds for 1-2 years. the amount of funds they lock up determines how likely they are to win the block lottery. the block lottery, and locking up funds for entries within it, remain decentralized. the challenge is running a decentralized lottery with distributed consensus. this is hard, but i don't think impossible.
- jtsiskin 5y agoAccording to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b..., 65% of BTC mining already happens within one country.