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When I first heard of cryptocurrency I was reminded of when people started idling in Team Fortress 2 to get content drops. It was such a daft cart before the ho
by knolan 5y ago
When I first heard of cryptocurrency I was reminded of when people started idling in Team Fortress 2 to get content drops. It was such a daft cart before the horse approach, but of course those dropped items could be sold for fractions of a penny and people can be dumb.
It also reminded me of Folding at Home. Here people completed by virtue of their personal compute resources.
Of course crypto serves as neither a form of entertainment or scientific discovery and is just a massive waste of resources to create artificial wealth. If only all that computation did something useful.
- michaelmrose 5y agoIsn't there some way to combine proof of work and actually useful work?
- ctchocula 5y agoNo, there's not. It's a fundamental principle among PoS cryptocurrencies that the work needs to have no additional utility or else it will help the attacker "subsidize" 51% attacks against the cryptocurrency you've built, because now they can both launch 51% attacks which cost $X abut subsidize it by selling the useful compute for $Y they've gotten by launching the attack, which ends up costing $X - $Y. Compared with a PoS cryptocurrency yielding no useful compute as a side effect, it costs $Y cheaper for someone to 51% attack.
- michaelmrose 5y agoThe work doesn't have to be economically useful to the miner to be useful to society.
- captn3m0 5y agoI’ve come to the conclusion that Bitcoin was a perfect “isolated” P2P currency system. If it was just considered Monopoly money, that is. The moment you try to find its worth by buying/selling it against Fiat - you get the exact same thing you get when you allow real world trading on any game currency - scams.