9 ms·

“Proof-of-work” proves not to work for spam prevention (2004) [pdf]

66 points by bravogamma 5y ago

debacle 5y ago
For everyone who is a big fan of crypto, what is the next "big step" after PoS. I am more than happy to use a cryptocurrency where I can take 1 USD and receive a coin that is worth ~1 USD, without needing the promise that it will be a moonshot "investment," merely a vehicle for value. When is that coin coming our way?
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  Other than proof of stake I've heard of two validation systems: 1. Proof of space and/or time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space#:~:text=A%20proof%20of%20space-time,keeping%20the%20reserved%20space%20unchanged.&text=It%20is%20related%20to%20a,tradeoff%20between%20space%20and%20time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space#:~:text=A%20pro.... 2. Proof of authority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_authority Not sure either makes a huge difference
  - skerit 5y ago
    Helium network's proof of coverage is also interesting.
  - CuriousCosmic 5y ago
    Proof of Authority is extraordinarily useful but it's not inherently complex by any means (really it's just the old school consensus problems). I'd argue though that Proof of Authority definitely is the most useful outside of Proof of Stake and the slowly maturing Proof of Useful Work consensus systems. It's simplistic but it perfectly covers the needs of a lot of government systems.
  - noxer 5y ago
    Before these and even before PoS there was FBA consensus which is the true successor of PoW designed by ex-BTC devs who saw the problems with PoW and actually came up with something better rather than just replacing the worst part of PoW with something else.
- ChrisClark 5y ago
  DAI has remained stable, even when ETH crashed 90%, Maker worked perfectly and DAI remained $1 USD.
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    This is an honest question, and I'm not trying to pour cold water on DAI. What would happen if DAI had a single centralised source of truth which could be mirrored as needed if people lost faith in the central entity? This is a bit like what Wikipedia has, which is a fully open database that can be mirrored ad infinitum -- but still remains the central source of truth as long as people respect the organisation that runs it. More broadly, does DAI really need to be on a blockchain*? Are there efficient non-blockchain ways to make verifiable stablecoins? I ask this question because a lot of things that are run on blockchains seem like they're losing more than they're gaining. It makes me suspicious of even DAI. When I say "fully open database", you might object that this compromises a person's privacy in order to make the database mirror-able. But then again, all blockchains are fully open and public, so there's nothing more to be lost there. * - By which I mean the Ethereum blockchain, which is inefficient like all blockchains currently are.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      Ethereum is going to stop being so inefficient in about six months. The proof-of-stake migration will reduce its energy usage by about 99.95%. So that will make it an efficient way to make verifiable stablecoins. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/
    - cvdub 5y ago
      The US government could make a centralized digital currency without a blockchain. That makes way more sense to me than dealing with all the overhead associated with a trustless decentralized ledger.
      - zie 5y ago
        They are working on it. they call it a "digital dollar".
- Kranar 5y ago
  https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-dai/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-dai/
- intunderflow 5y ago
  Delegated Proof of Stake is pretty cool, particularly as its applied in Nano (instant and feeless transactions), if someone manages to combine that with the transaction privacy of Monero that would be awesome in my view.
  - 0x64 5y ago
    There is nothing cool about dPoS. Compared to PoS, it's an objectively worse system in terms of decentralization.
- zenogais 5y ago
  What you're looking for exists today and is called a stable-coin (for example, USDC).
- vmception 5y ago
  MIM - Magic Internet Money, a stablecoin that just leans into the meme because the space is big enough to just ignore crypto/blockchain skeptics (and maxis) as you dont need buyin from them anymore to attract billions of dollars for validation. It competes with DAI, same system just natively crosschain (via AnySwap bridging function added to the erc20 class) and potentially maintains better collateral choices. Right now they use yield bearing collateral like liquidity pool shares which earn enough to reduce loan to value ratios and even pay interest on their own. In comparison, DAI was released in a world without onchain distributed asset backed securities and its users eventually picked completely centralized assets like USDC for collateral. This limits that communities’ risk tolerance for raising debt limits. That part of your question about stablecoins doesn’t have much to do with a Proof of Stake though-a consensus model.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    DAI is still an extremely important in decentralized finance. It is simply easier to scale a centralized stable coin than a collateralized one as the collateralized one is less capital efficient. The centralized coin has different risk parameters though, such as a bank run scenario or the fact that USDC funds can be frozen at will by Circle.
    - vmception 5y ago
      I didn't write that anything was wrong with any of the three assets mentioned I wrote how they compete on collateral choices which lets people predict their growth/issuance trajectory. MIM grows faster than DAI for a variety of reasons that DAI didn’t have when it launched, which is not likely that DAI can replicate now or at least not quickly.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 0x64 5y ago
  On Ethereum the three most popular ones are DAI, USDC, and USDT. All are pegged to $1. There are also more niche stablecoinds, such as RAI. https://ethereum.org/en/stablecoins https://ethereum.org/en/stablecoins
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Worth to keep in mind is that USDT is involved in a lot of shady stuff (and run by Bitfinex), USDC is run by a centralized organization (and Coinbase is involved in that too) while DAI is based on algorithmic stability/stableness. Which one is the best choice for the normal user is left as an exercise to the reader.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  the moonshot premise is the growth hack - a reason for people to want the coin. anything stable is unlikely to find widespread adoption, unless it’s introduced by central banks, in which case it’s called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
- analog31 5y ago
  PoD = Proof of Dollar. ;-)
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    That’s what Tether is… ostensibly
- 0x4d464d48 5y ago
  "When is that coin coming our way?" My guess is around the time central banks start issuing it.
- PKop 5y ago
  Really? Stable-coins as a concept have existed for years, and in practice have blown up in trading volume and circulation the past 2 years. USDC stable-coin [0]($34 Billion in circulation) is arguably the most trustworthy in terms of having a 1 to 1 exchangeable backing through a regulated centralized custodian (Circle/Coinbase primarily but also BlockFi and other entities that hold USD reserves for exchange). Many of these entities (as well as "DeFi" decentralized finance platforms that use Ethereum or similar smart contracts to decentralize the process) allow for various forms of deposit and lending accounts that provide a whole range of yields way way above traditional banking deposits. On top of this, some of these custodians add an additional layer of payment ability to these deposit accounts. Crypto.com[1] for example has a Visa debit card that ties into your USDC/stable coin deposits that you can transact from, in theory avoiding needing to use fiat at all. As well as "CD-like" 3-month lockups where you can get 8-12% yield. There are also many decentralized stable coins that have various forms of over-collateralized crypto-asset reserves backing the coin and algorithms to stabilize the value by buying or selling from these reserves, trading off possible volatility and uncertainty around peg to avoid centralization and KYC and other regulations of 1:1 backed coins.[2] [0] https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc [1] https://crypto.com/us/earn https://crypto.com/us/earn [2] $MIM dollar stable-coin: https://cointelegraph.com/news/magic-internet-money-races-past-1b-sets-sights-on-makerdao https://cointelegraph.com/news/magic-internet-money-races-pa...
- rvz 5y ago
  > When is that coin coming our way? Today. It is called USDC; but on the Stellar Blockchain. [0] You will always know that 1 USDC will always be worth 1 USD and you won't have to deal with ridiculously slow transactions or incredibly high gas fees for every operation and it is not using PoW. [0] [0] https://stellar.org/usdc https://stellar.org/usdc
- chrisco255 5y ago
  There is already nearly $100B worth of stable coins available on the Ethereum blockchain (and other EVM chains such as Polygon): https://defipulse.com/usd https://defipulse.com/usd.
- adhoc32 5y ago
  Proof of work is the only system where you can look at the blockchain data and figure out the consensus. All other systems depends on people agreeing on what is the truth. PoW is not just superior, it's essential for true decentralized crypto.
- 1ark 5y ago
  From an consensus perspective PPoS (Pure Proof of Stake) and PoH (Proof of History) are next steps. If you want to send around USD you can use UST for example, an algorithmic stablecoin.
larsiusprime 5y ago
For context, Bitcoin launched in 2008, and this paper, concerning proof-of-work as an anti-spam prevention measure, launched in 2004. Question: has any email system attempted proof of work? Did it run into the problems this paper predicted?
- max_ 5y ago
  > Has any email system attempted proof of work? You might want to have a look at hashcash[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
  - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
    > For email uses, a textual encoding of a hashcash stamp is added to the header of an email to prove the sender has expended a modest amount of CPU time calculating the stamp prior to sending the email. In other words, as the sender has taken a certain amount of time to generate the stamp and send the email, it is unlikely that they are a spammer. I can see exactly why this wouldn't work - nowadays wouldn't spammers have enough processing power to just do this for every spam email? And how does this not slow down email processing for the end-user, sending an email now requires me to brute-force a hash, right?
    - lozenge 5y ago
      The idea was it would be adjusted to take a reasonable amount of time for legitimate users, say a second per email. The problem was it didn't predict the use of viruses to misuse computing resources of end users. Actually, nowadays this could even be done in JavaScript and pushed through an ad network.
- surajs 5y ago
  Ouch, I guess there's a bureaucracy behind the ontology of any proof of work, although spam/email was a good use case but perhaps crypto is a finer expression, so the paper's main thesis is partially right but it's still used as a spam filter so I guess there's a utility there.
max_ 5y ago
Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus". I don't think anything else can solve decentralized rate limiting more effectively than proof of work. I wrote a short blog post about the use of Proof of work beyond crypto mining [0] [0] https://as1ndu.xyz/2019/11/proof-of-work-on-layer-two/ https://as1ndu.xyz/2019/11/proof-of-work-on-layer-two/
- delusional 5y ago
  > Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus". When you use "but" it's customary for the following statement to disprove or argue against the previous statement. How does it being applicable to more stuff stop it from being a gigantic waste of energy?
  - max_ 5y ago
    >How does it being applicable to more stuff stop it from being a gigantic waste of energy? "Applicable" means that it is useful, as it solves the problems I talk about in the post.
  - wackro 5y ago
    It's all in the link he posted
  - michaelscott 5y ago
    Everything expends energy in order to solve some problem or accomplish some goal. Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. If it can solve more problems then the expending of energy becomes more justified.
    - xg15 5y ago
      > Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. No, it's very much not besides the point - and I'd argue it's one of the core issues with PoW and the reason why people are so appalled by it. Yes, everything expends energy, but the special property of PoW is that the energy cost is intentional. Therefore it's fundamentally impossible to reduce the energy cost as that would defeat the whole point: If someone manages to find a more efficient way to mine, this is a threat to the network and has to be counteracted by raising the difficulty. Conversely, the amount of energy that can be expended for mining a single block is potentially unbounded, in contrast to other problems ehere the energy actually perform useful work. This leaves belief whether or not the problem is worth pursuing as the only measure about the energy cost of PoW. And this belief is influenced by all kinds of factors from technical to financial to psychological. But it is generally not influenced by the amount of energy already spent.
shimonabi 5y ago
I'm "old" enough to remember Bill Gates talking about getting rid of spam with puzzles in 2004: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/jan/25/billgates.spam https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/jan/25/billgates...
jancsika 5y ago
Ben Laurie posted a link to this paper in response to Satoshi's posting his first version of Bitcoin[1], with this comment: > Richard Clayton and I claim that PoW doesn't work: > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf It's in the context of a discussion about why PoW-based tokes are a bad idea in terms of burning CPUs and their carbon footprint. The generous interpretation is that he was claiming that this discussion was moot because the bigger issue was that PoW wouldn't actually work as a feature of Bitcoin. The less generous (but probably accurate) interpretation is that he posted that without reading either the Bitcoin whitepaper itself or the abstract of the whitepaper. IIUC his paper is about how PoW applied to email would either break a lot of the desirable features or the difficulty would be too low to prevent spam. I'm not sure why this bothers me enough to post about it on HN-- I'd actually prefer it to be true and Bitcoin fanbase never to have existed. Nevertheless, his paper wasn't really relevant to that discussion and I'm not sure why he posted it there. 1: https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10225.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10... Edit: clarification
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  >Bitcoin fanbase never to have existed. why, only because of carbon footprint?
  - colecut 5y ago
    I'm not op, but as someone who is pro bitcoin, I will readily admit that it has not created a very nice "culture". Most of the fanbase is focused on greed rather than potential good.
    - spiorf 5y ago
      It wouldn't work without greed. Same as any other form of money.
      - geoduck14 5y ago
        >It wouldn't work without greed. Same as any other form of money. I'm not so sure about that. I've seen plenty of people at the grocery store spending USD in exchange for food who don't appear greedy. I haven't actually ran a survey, though. But I'm mostly confident that USA doesn't run on greed.

66 points by bravogamma 5y ago

For everyone who is a big fan of crypto, what is the next "big step" after PoS. I am more than happy to use a cryptocurrency where I can take 1 USD and receive a coin that is worth ~1 USD, without needing the promise that it will be a moonshot "investment," merely a vehicle for value. When is that coin coming our way?

larsiusprime 5y ago
Other than proof of stake I've heard of two validation systems: 1. Proof of space and/or time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space#:~:text=A%20proof%20of%20space-time,keeping%20the%20reserved%20space%20unchanged.&text=It%20is%20related%20to%20a,tradeoff%20between%20space%20and%20time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space#:~:text=A%20pro.... 2. Proof of authority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_authority Not sure either makes a huge difference
- skerit 5y ago
  Helium network's proof of coverage is also interesting.
- CuriousCosmic 5y ago
  Proof of Authority is extraordinarily useful but it's not inherently complex by any means (really it's just the old school consensus problems). I'd argue though that Proof of Authority definitely is the most useful outside of Proof of Stake and the slowly maturing Proof of Useful Work consensus systems. It's simplistic but it perfectly covers the needs of a lot of government systems.
- noxer 5y ago
  Before these and even before PoS there was FBA consensus which is the true successor of PoW designed by ex-BTC devs who saw the problems with PoW and actually came up with something better rather than just replacing the worst part of PoW with something else.
ChrisClark 5y ago
DAI has remained stable, even when ETH crashed 90%, Maker worked perfectly and DAI remained $1 USD.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  This is an honest question, and I'm not trying to pour cold water on DAI. What would happen if DAI had a single centralised source of truth which could be mirrored as needed if people lost faith in the central entity? This is a bit like what Wikipedia has, which is a fully open database that can be mirrored ad infinitum -- but still remains the central source of truth as long as people respect the organisation that runs it. More broadly, does DAI really need to be on a blockchain*? Are there efficient non-blockchain ways to make verifiable stablecoins? I ask this question because a lot of things that are run on blockchains seem like they're losing more than they're gaining. It makes me suspicious of even DAI. When I say "fully open database", you might object that this compromises a person's privacy in order to make the database mirror-able. But then again, all blockchains are fully open and public, so there's nothing more to be lost there. * - By which I mean the Ethereum blockchain, which is inefficient like all blockchains currently are.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Ethereum is going to stop being so inefficient in about six months. The proof-of-stake migration will reduce its energy usage by about 99.95%. So that will make it an efficient way to make verifiable stablecoins. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/
  - cvdub 5y ago
    The US government could make a centralized digital currency without a blockchain. That makes way more sense to me than dealing with all the overhead associated with a trustless decentralized ledger.
    - zie 5y ago
      They are working on it. they call it a "digital dollar".
Kranar 5y ago
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-dai/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-dai/
intunderflow 5y ago
Delegated Proof of Stake is pretty cool, particularly as its applied in Nano (instant and feeless transactions), if someone manages to combine that with the transaction privacy of Monero that would be awesome in my view.
- 0x64 5y ago
  There is nothing cool about dPoS. Compared to PoS, it's an objectively worse system in terms of decentralization.
zenogais 5y ago
What you're looking for exists today and is called a stable-coin (for example, USDC).
vmception 5y ago
MIM - Magic Internet Money, a stablecoin that just leans into the meme because the space is big enough to just ignore crypto/blockchain skeptics (and maxis) as you dont need buyin from them anymore to attract billions of dollars for validation. It competes with DAI, same system just natively crosschain (via AnySwap bridging function added to the erc20 class) and potentially maintains better collateral choices. Right now they use yield bearing collateral like liquidity pool shares which earn enough to reduce loan to value ratios and even pay interest on their own. In comparison, DAI was released in a world without onchain distributed asset backed securities and its users eventually picked completely centralized assets like USDC for collateral. This limits that communities’ risk tolerance for raising debt limits. That part of your question about stablecoins doesn’t have much to do with a Proof of Stake though-a consensus model.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  DAI is still an extremely important in decentralized finance. It is simply easier to scale a centralized stable coin than a collateralized one as the collateralized one is less capital efficient. The centralized coin has different risk parameters though, such as a bank run scenario or the fact that USDC funds can be frozen at will by Circle.
  - vmception 5y ago
    I didn't write that anything was wrong with any of the three assets mentioned I wrote how they compete on collateral choices which lets people predict their growth/issuance trajectory. MIM grows faster than DAI for a variety of reasons that DAI didn’t have when it launched, which is not likely that DAI can replicate now or at least not quickly.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
0x64 5y ago
On Ethereum the three most popular ones are DAI, USDC, and USDT. All are pegged to $1. There are also more niche stablecoinds, such as RAI. https://ethereum.org/en/stablecoins https://ethereum.org/en/stablecoins
- capableweb 5y ago
  Worth to keep in mind is that USDT is involved in a lot of shady stuff (and run by Bitfinex), USDC is run by a centralized organization (and Coinbase is involved in that too) while DAI is based on algorithmic stability/stableness. Which one is the best choice for the normal user is left as an exercise to the reader.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
the moonshot premise is the growth hack - a reason for people to want the coin. anything stable is unlikely to find widespread adoption, unless it’s introduced by central banks, in which case it’s called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
analog31 5y ago
PoD = Proof of Dollar. ;-)
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  That’s what Tether is… ostensibly
0x4d464d48 5y ago
"When is that coin coming our way?" My guess is around the time central banks start issuing it.
PKop 5y ago
Really? Stable-coins as a concept have existed for years, and in practice have blown up in trading volume and circulation the past 2 years. USDC stable-coin [0]($34 Billion in circulation) is arguably the most trustworthy in terms of having a 1 to 1 exchangeable backing through a regulated centralized custodian (Circle/Coinbase primarily but also BlockFi and other entities that hold USD reserves for exchange). Many of these entities (as well as "DeFi" decentralized finance platforms that use Ethereum or similar smart contracts to decentralize the process) allow for various forms of deposit and lending accounts that provide a whole range of yields way way above traditional banking deposits. On top of this, some of these custodians add an additional layer of payment ability to these deposit accounts. Crypto.com[1] for example has a Visa debit card that ties into your USDC/stable coin deposits that you can transact from, in theory avoiding needing to use fiat at all. As well as "CD-like" 3-month lockups where you can get 8-12% yield. There are also many decentralized stable coins that have various forms of over-collateralized crypto-asset reserves backing the coin and algorithms to stabilize the value by buying or selling from these reserves, trading off possible volatility and uncertainty around peg to avoid centralization and KYC and other regulations of 1:1 backed coins.[2] [0] https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc [1] https://crypto.com/us/earn https://crypto.com/us/earn [2] $MIM dollar stable-coin: https://cointelegraph.com/news/magic-internet-money-races-past-1b-sets-sights-on-makerdao https://cointelegraph.com/news/magic-internet-money-races-pa...
rvz 5y ago
> When is that coin coming our way? Today. It is called USDC; but on the Stellar Blockchain. [0] You will always know that 1 USDC will always be worth 1 USD and you won't have to deal with ridiculously slow transactions or incredibly high gas fees for every operation and it is not using PoW. [0] [0] https://stellar.org/usdc https://stellar.org/usdc
chrisco255 5y ago
There is already nearly $100B worth of stable coins available on the Ethereum blockchain (and other EVM chains such as Polygon): https://defipulse.com/usd https://defipulse.com/usd.
adhoc32 5y ago
Proof of work is the only system where you can look at the blockchain data and figure out the consensus. All other systems depends on people agreeing on what is the truth. PoW is not just superior, it's essential for true decentralized crypto.
1ark 5y ago
From an consensus perspective PPoS (Pure Proof of Stake) and PoH (Proof of History) are next steps. If you want to send around USD you can use UST for example, an algorithmic stablecoin.

larsiusprime 5y ago

For context, Bitcoin launched in 2008, and this paper, concerning proof-of-work as an anti-spam prevention measure, launched in 2004. Question: has any email system attempted proof of work? Did it run into the problems this paper predicted?

max_ 5y ago
> Has any email system attempted proof of work? You might want to have a look at hashcash[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  > For email uses, a textual encoding of a hashcash stamp is added to the header of an email to prove the sender has expended a modest amount of CPU time calculating the stamp prior to sending the email. In other words, as the sender has taken a certain amount of time to generate the stamp and send the email, it is unlikely that they are a spammer. I can see exactly why this wouldn't work - nowadays wouldn't spammers have enough processing power to just do this for every spam email? And how does this not slow down email processing for the end-user, sending an email now requires me to brute-force a hash, right?
  - lozenge 5y ago
    The idea was it would be adjusted to take a reasonable amount of time for legitimate users, say a second per email. The problem was it didn't predict the use of viruses to misuse computing resources of end users. Actually, nowadays this could even be done in JavaScript and pushed through an ad network.
surajs 5y ago
Ouch, I guess there's a bureaucracy behind the ontology of any proof of work, although spam/email was a good use case but perhaps crypto is a finer expression, so the paper's main thesis is partially right but it's still used as a spam filter so I guess there's a utility there.

max_ 5y ago

Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus". I don't think anything else can solve decentralized rate limiting more effectively than proof of work. I wrote a short blog post about the use of Proof of work beyond crypto mining [0] [0] https://as1ndu.xyz/2019/11/proof-of-work-on-layer-two/ https://as1ndu.xyz/2019/11/proof-of-work-on-layer-two/

delusional 5y ago
> Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus". When you use "but" it's customary for the following statement to disprove or argue against the previous statement. How does it being applicable to more stuff stop it from being a gigantic waste of energy?
- max_ 5y ago
  >How does it being applicable to more stuff stop it from being a gigantic waste of energy? "Applicable" means that it is useful, as it solves the problems I talk about in the post.
- wackro 5y ago
  It's all in the link he posted
- michaelscott 5y ago
  Everything expends energy in order to solve some problem or accomplish some goal. Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. If it can solve more problems then the expending of energy becomes more justified.
  - xg15 5y ago
    > Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. No, it's very much not besides the point - and I'd argue it's one of the core issues with PoW and the reason why people are so appalled by it. Yes, everything expends energy, but the special property of PoW is that the energy cost is intentional. Therefore it's fundamentally impossible to reduce the energy cost as that would defeat the whole point: If someone manages to find a more efficient way to mine, this is a threat to the network and has to be counteracted by raising the difficulty. Conversely, the amount of energy that can be expended for mining a single block is potentially unbounded, in contrast to other problems ehere the energy actually perform useful work. This leaves belief whether or not the problem is worth pursuing as the only measure about the energy cost of PoW. And this belief is influenced by all kinds of factors from technical to financial to psychological. But it is generally not influenced by the amount of energy already spent.

shimonabi 5y ago

I'm "old" enough to remember Bill Gates talking about getting rid of spam with puzzles in 2004: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/jan/25/billgates.spam https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/jan/25/billgates...

jancsika 5y ago

Ben Laurie posted a link to this paper in response to Satoshi's posting his first version of Bitcoin[1], with this comment: > Richard Clayton and I claim that PoW doesn't work: > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf It's in the context of a discussion about why PoW-based tokes are a bad idea in terms of burning CPUs and their carbon footprint. The generous interpretation is that he was claiming that this discussion was moot because the bigger issue was that PoW wouldn't actually work as a feature of Bitcoin. The less generous (but probably accurate) interpretation is that he posted that without reading either the Bitcoin whitepaper itself or the abstract of the whitepaper. IIUC his paper is about how PoW applied to email would either break a lot of the desirable features or the difficulty would be too low to prevent spam. I'm not sure why this bothers me enough to post about it on HN-- I'd actually prefer it to be true and Bitcoin fanbase never to have existed. Nevertheless, his paper wasn't really relevant to that discussion and I'm not sure why he posted it there. 1: https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10225.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10... Edit: clarification

inter_netuser 5y ago
>Bitcoin fanbase never to have existed. why, only because of carbon footprint?
- colecut 5y ago
  I'm not op, but as someone who is pro bitcoin, I will readily admit that it has not created a very nice "culture". Most of the fanbase is focused on greed rather than potential good.
  - spiorf 5y ago
    It wouldn't work without greed. Same as any other form of money.
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      >It wouldn't work without greed. Same as any other form of money. I'm not so sure about that. I've seen plenty of people at the grocery store spending USD in exchange for food who don't appear greedy. I haven't actually ran a survey, though. But I'm mostly confident that USA doesn't run on greed.