
Powering down Bitcoin with silicon photonics: Low power PoW algo and HW - mzdubrov
https://sciencex.com/news/2020-05-powering-bitcoin-silicon-photonics-power.html
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Sir_Substance
>To decentralize Bitcoin mining once more and eliminate its massive
electricity consumption, a proof of work decoupled from energy-intensive
computation is clearly needed.

Here's the central thesis and there's so much wrong with it.

Leaving aside the topic of whether you think the way bitcoin requires the
consumption of electricity is good or not, the consumption of electricity is
not a side effect, it's the whole point.

You must burn electricity to be part of the game. If you are part of the game,
you have a chance to win. If you win, you will well and truly cover your
electricity costs. If you cheat, you will be ejected from the game, and lose
all the money you've spent on electricity. It is to your advantage to discover
other cheaters so you can eject them, as that will allow you to win more.

Bitcoin 101. Reducing the energy consumption of the hashes will not
decentralize the network more.

The reason the bitcoin network is less decentralized today than it was in 2010
is because ASICs are hard to manufacture, which means they are only made in a
few places and are very expensive per unit. That makes them hard to buy in
small batches, and near impossible to buy in many countries.

This situation will not be improved by making photonic ASICs.

There's more nuance to this, and that nuance makes this proposal even worse,
but lets leave it at that.

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mzdubrov
It's pretty well established that CAPEX is the source of security in PoW not
OPEX. See our paper and papers like

httpss://uncommoncore.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/A-model-for-Bitcoins-
security-and-the-declining-block-subsidy-v1.06.pdf

~~~
Sir_Substance
>It's pretty well established that CAPEX is the source of security in PoW not
OPEX

You're literally the first person I've ever heard express such an opinion.
Could you give citations for "pretty well established"?

Multiple, please, since it's "well" established. Preferably ones that have
citations at the bottom? The document you linked contains no citations and is
thus an opinion piece, not an academic paper.

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tromp
> It is to your advantage to discover other cheaters so you can eject them, as
> that will allow you to win more.

Are you talking about miners constructing invalid blocks? Their blocks would
simply be rejected by everyone else. And no miner is stupid enough to waste
electricity producing invalid blocks. This whole paragraph seems irrelevant to
the issue at hand...

