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DollarCoin is the best summary of proof-of-work that I've ever seen. Just replace "burning US $1 notes" with "burning [x] Watts-hour of electricity" and it desc

• kurisufag 4y ago
  that isn't actually at all the function or purpose of PoW though. in the example, the burning of "real" dollars represents the validity of a single "DollarCoin" existing. the "burning" of electricity for bitcoin is the result of finding a schema that promotes verification of the network by awarding coins by consensus. PoW is a /validation/ pattern, and while burning dollars on video and linking the hashes together can comprise a blockchain, there is no actual decentralized validation going on. it's alright as a snarky line, but outright saying "the best summary of proof-of-work that I've ever seen" is misleading to people that didn't actually know, and now have a completely incorrect idea of what it is.
  • blintz 4y ago
    This is maybe a bit of a tangent, but the fact that transaction validation happens as part of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work process is incidental. It’s perfectly fine to mine an empty block, and the only incentive to include transactions is transaction fees. You earn rewards even if you conduct no transaction validation. The analogous option for DollarCoin would be letting you put a placard in the video with some (valid) transactions on it and recoup a fee from each. The point is that, it’s not such a bad analogy of just “proof-of-work”, which is a meaningfully separate concept than decentralized transaction validation. Though I agree, I mean a regular person might definitely be more confused than helped by the ‘dollars on fire’ analogy.