
BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia - chriskanan
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network-cryptocurrency
======
goodroot
I understand the argument regarding power consumption.

However, if we're going to green wash
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing))
a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption.

Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is
asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form
of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubious to assert such.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/solar-
pow...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/solar-power-to-
grow-sixfold-as-sun-becoming-cheapest-resource) [2]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-
cheap...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheapest-
power-on-earth-look-skyward-as-coal-falls-to-solar)

~~~
xelxebar
I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various
nuclear fuel cycles.

AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio. For certain,
salt reactors need a lot more research, but so do many of these other "green"
energies. Are we even clear on the full environmental impact of the various
"green" energies when factoring in secondary and tertiary costs?

I feel like China probably has the right idea of dumping a bunch of R&D into
LFTR and whatnot instead of riding the Eco Friendly TM train.

~~~
whyever
> AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio.

Does that include the uranium miners?

~~~
eeZah7Ux
More importantly, does that includes the projected fatalities due to power
plants being destroyed and nuclear waste being unearthed and released in the
environment?

Given the half life of waste, ignoring that risk is ludicrous.

------
mangecoeur
I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy
transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch
of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green
buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just
burn energy for nothing.

~~~
kenpomeroy
It doesn't sound like you really understand how Bitcoin works. If Bitcoin were
to become widely adopted and supplant traditional financial institutions, the
environmental impact would be enormously net positive. Sure, it takes energy
to confirm transactions. But, we could massively decrease energy consumption
by eliminating the need for: bank buildings, armored vehicles, physically
printing money, etc.

~~~
simias
I don't believe that at all. The idea that everybody would walk around with
their own hardware wallet and sign transactions directly when buying bread
seems as likely to me as having the average public drop facebook chat for IRC.

People want simplicity, people want convenience. People don't want to risk
losing their life savings because they get scammed or because their secret
keys become compromised or destroyed.

People want banks, or at least a subset of what banks do. People want
insurance, people want chargeback. People want to get loans to buy houses and
cars.

Bitcoin solves a tiny portion of the service provided by banks.

A lot of what bank does is getting automated anyway, now you have banks that
are only available online who probably need a lot less personnel and obviously
fewer buildings. Armored vehicles and printing money can be replaced by credit
and debit cards, no blockchain needed. I personally use cash less and less,
and I know it's a trend in many (albeit not all) countries.

~~~
teekert
The wallet app I use is the very definition of simplicity, both paying and
receiving are as simple as scanning a QR code, many people already do that
when paying with the European Ideal system. As for safety, central storage
with insurance and a police that understands cyber crime will still have a
role in a BTC(-like) economy.

~~~
simias
>The wallet app I use is the very definition of simplicity

Simpler and more convenient than Visa? What if I buy something online and the
other party scams me by not delivering the goods?

There's more to the economy as a distributed ledger. If bitcoin was to replace
fiat entirely it'd still need 3rd parties to settle disputes, provide
insurance, distribute the risks etc... In other word banks, or "central
storage with insurance" as you prefer to call them.

The cost of the PoW algorithm is on top of all of that, not an alternative to
it. It's not the problem it's solving.

PoW is there to solve the "distributed ledger without trust" issue. Except
that if you end up having to trust your bitcoins to a "central storage with
insurance" anyway I'm not sure I see the added value over the current
solution.

------
kiddico
One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is
the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything.

With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power
cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either...

Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

~~~
Squithrilve
> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything.

I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't
display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits
transmitted every second ([https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-
covert-00](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00)) that also waste
power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees.

This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computationally expensive and
therefore plain HTTP is better. 10 years ago of course.

~~~
gtrubetskoy
> Why won't you complain about monitor pixels

or the Sun, what a waste of energy that is

~~~
traverseda
Yeah, we gotta get on that dyson {sphere,swarm,etc} thing.

------
craigc
There are already blockchains that do not require proof of work (Lisk, Nav,
Dash, NEO, etc) and already storage based blockchains (Filecoin, Storj, Sia,
Maidsafe, etc).

It is unclear to me what Chia brings to the table that is really new.

~~~
mandelliant
The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of
verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage
space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems
like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's
the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia,
Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't think they're trying to be
that).

While Lisk, Nav, Dash, etc do use alternatives to proof of work, what Chia is
doing, from my understanding of what they're saying, is using the _lowest_
cost alternative to proof of work, which is proof of storage (disclaimer, I
don't know the math behind proof of storage, just that it's their alternative
to PoW). However, proof of storage alone has some inherent vulnerabilities so
they compensate with another mechanism, proof of time (again, not sure of the
math).

Edit: punctuation

~~~
craigc
Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more
sense.

When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the
storage based tokens.

Curious to read about and see how that works

~~~
dpiers
My understanding is that your computer computes the answer to a difficult
calculation ahead of time and stores the output up to a specified size (ex.
1GB worth of digits of pi) . Proof-of-Space asks you to respond with a segment
of the output at a certain offset. The amount of time given to respond is less
than the amount of time it would take to calculate the output, and so by
replying you prove that you had it stored already.

~~~
mandelliant
Thanks for this, I'm planning on watching Bram's talk but haven't had the time
just yet. It's definitely an interesting idea, so I'm eager to see how it
plays out.

------
lossolo
This is a copy of Burstcoin[1], this "inventor" had many other "ideas" in last
years that all were copies of other people ideas and were total disasters, he
is riding his reputation he got from bittorrent. It will probably end with
ICO, people will invest money treating that just as financial instrument that
you can speculate on, then when implementation will come it will end like all
those others alt coins.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstcoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstcoin)

------
corford
Just the fact it's Bram Cohen behind this is enough to get me excited.

Watching
[https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...](https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271/)
I love when he talks about the off by one error in Bitcoin's difficulty reset
calculation and how almost all other blockchains have mindlessly copied this
:)

~~~
marknadal
Hey, I was there at the event (I did the lightning talk at the beginning).
Would love to answer any questions about Chia that anybody has, that I learned
first-hand from Bram.

~~~
apexalpha
Going to watch the video in a bit but I've got a question: could I turn my
home NAS into a farmer for this blockchain simply by reserving some of my
storage space for it or does it still require a lot of computing power
(CPU/GPU)?

~~~
marknadal
That should work :) although it would need to be connected up to the network
so it could reply to proof queries and "thread the needle" of the time
servers.

------
marknadal
I met Bram just last week (and had the honor to do a lightning talk before his
Chia presentation _!), and I want to clear up some things that people seem
confused about:

1\. Power consumption. Bram brought up a good point if we take Bitcoin to its
ultimate extreme, that it will be people with access to nuclear energy (aka
governments) that will take over mining bitcoin, since that is the cheapest
route. This does not look like a decentralized future, exactly the opposite.

2\. Proof of Time. There are attacks that can happen against purely storage
based proofs. Bram's brilliant addition here is a proof of time to get around
those problems. I can explain more if people want. NOTE: Filecoin's "Proof of
Time and Space" has nothing to do with, nor is remotely related to, Bram's.

3\. Decentralized Storage. Despite Bram's prolific work in decentralized
storage systems, Chia has nothing to do with storing end user data (like
Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc.). The data that is stored is junk, but that is okay
(see below).

4\. Storage waste. One of Bram's points is that this will start an arms race
to build better harddrives. If people are successful at that, this will only
make Chia better, and also make storage in general cheaper for everyone. So
sure, maybe the proofs are wasting storage space, but it will make storage in
general more economical.

Anything else I can answer in more detail?

_Here is the presentation he (and I) did at Berkeley:

[https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...](https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271)

~~~
cstork12
One fundamental question, whose answer I must have missed:

What's the incentive to process transactions?

------
durkie
so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really
understand the issue.

* As others have asked, how much is bitcoin _supposed_ to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure?

* We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ([https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-impo...](https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-important-as-saudi-arabia-at-1-79%c2%a2-kwh/)) incredibly low bids for solar projects were submitted in Chile at 2.15c/kWh. That's insanely cheap. We're not there yet in having ubiquitous cheap clean power obviously, but neither is bitcoin "there" in being able to replace much of traditional financial infrastructure. But the point still stands: will bitcoin's energy usage still matter in the not-too-distant future?

~~~
paulgb
The problem is that with a competitive mining market, Bitcoin energy use will
rise until the cost of mining a block is equal to the reward for that block
(i.e. market equilibrium). So if the cost of energy goes down but the price of
Bitcoin stays constant, the amount of energy expenditure will be
(approximately) equal.

Likewise, if the price of Bitcoin goes up, the amount of energy used will go
up accordingly.

The reward amount will decrease over time and mitigate this, but not enough by
a long shot IMO.

~~~
nas
This is a key observation. Now apply it to the "eco-friendly" and PoS schemes.
The same economics apply. For Bram's coin and PoS systems, the costs spent
will rise to equal the block reward. So, you are basically doing something
more complicated to end up with the same amount of economic waste. In the
proof of space version, maybe you will be building millions of hard drives,
running them to failure and then throwing them away.

~~~
mopierotti
This answer written by the Ethereum team addresses why cost spent won't
necessarily rise to equal block reward in their PoS formulation.
[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-
FAQ#doe...](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doesnt-mc
--mr-mean-that-all-consensus-algorithms-with-a-given-security-level-are-
equally-efficient-or-in-other-words-equally-wasteful)

------
mrb
« _A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an
American home for a week_ »

This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not
consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's
shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of
transactions in the block is independent of energy use.

For example the transaction rate could double tomorrow, without increasing
energy consumption.

[¹] Also, this metric is derived from Digiconomist, which is flawed as it
overestimate consumption by a factor of 2: [http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-
faults-in-beci/](http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/)

~~~
SilasX
You're right, in a sense. However, mining is using a certain amount of energy
per block, and each block has a limited amount of transactions. So it's
reasonable to amortize the cost of the bitcoin network over the transactions
and so, in another sense, each transaction maps to its share of the power
consumed in a block.

It would be equally fair (and it would be fair) to say that the shipping cost
of a CD is equal to its mass- or volume share of the cost of the truck
delivery, and indeed, that's how you'd correctly quantify e.g. the
environmental cost of Netflix's DVD-by-mail (it doesn't work to just say "one
more disc doesn't cost any more so the environmental cost is zero"):

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2008/08/video_stores_vs_online_rentals.html)

~~~
mrb
But the limit in the number of transactions is not a _technical_ limit, it's a
_political_ limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit
weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy
consumption.

Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is
increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption.

~~~
SilasX
>But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a
political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit
weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy
consumption.

It's at least _partly_ a technical limit, because there are technical issues
faced by scaling the Bitcoin network to the arbitrarily large number of
transactions/sec you think it can handle. Each scaling solution has its
tradeoffs[1][3], and therefore, to the extent that there's no "free [scaling]
lunch", then there is inherent scarcity to what the miners can support, and
therefore transactions _should be_ attributed their proportional share of that
limit when accounting for them.

It only appears as a political limit because a) users generally don't want a
fragmented network, and b) there's persistent disagreement on what tradeoffs
are acceptable when scaling.

>Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is
increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption.

What is that responding to? The issue was how to account for the cost of one
unit that takes up a scarce slot in a known-cost thing. The fair (IMHO)
solution, per previous comment, is "blame" each unit for its share of the
total cost.

How does an increase in the truck's capacity refute the analogy? The same
logic would hold: if trucks could carry more Netflix DVDs at the same
[environmental or whatever] cost, it would be reasonable to say that the cost
per DVD shipped _also_ went down. If trucks had infinite capacity, _then_ it
would be fair to say that the DVDs have no cost, since the cost inputs are
independent of problem size (number of DVDs to ship). But -- per [1] and above
-- we don't live in that world.

[1] For example, if you simply said "each block can hold as many transactions
as miners are willing to tolerate" [2], that risks making the ledger
(blockchain) freakishly large. Since each node has to store the full ledger,
that blowup, in turn, risks [excessive] centralization, where only a few
miner-datacenters can run nodes, defeating the (or a major) point of Bitcoin.

[2] which you think would make transaction capacity non-scarce

[3] Wiki page for discussing the issues:
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability)

~~~
woah
The limits are primarily political, as there are other blockchains doing
thousands of times more transactions.

~~~
SilasX
Which ones are you talking about? Litecoin and ETH, the closest PoW
competitors, are on the same order of magnitude as Bitcoin. (Ripple might do
more but is not PoW.)

------
sschueller
Sounds like IPFS.

Why do we need an ICO. Can't we just do it like bitcoin and download a client
to start 'mining'?

~~~
ringaroundthetx
Because nobody skilled is going to build this without payment? this thinly
veiled criticism of ICOs has that obvious logical flaw.

Computational proofs take a long time for the development team to get funded,
and this delays go to market strategies. Look at the graveyard of mineable
projects before this year's ICO boom, broke underfunded devs with no ability
to mobilize a community to fund the tiniest things. Pitiful bounty systems
where the payouts can't even motivate the imagined Indian developer.

If you don't think current ICOs align economic incentives well ENOUGH, then
discuss that particular nuance instead.

~~~
jameskegel
Also, mining implies PoW, whereas this is not always guaranteed to be the
case. It's my favorite, but it's falling out of fashion, unfortunately.

------
gzou
What are "proof of space"/"proof of work" ? How do they compare to proof of
work/proof of stake ?

~~~
kanzure
"Beyond Hellman's time-memory tradeoffs with applications to proofs of space"
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf)

~~~
oh_sigh
Any ideas about the proof of time which Bram references?

------
pmlnr
Yay, after pushing GPU prices into madness, now we push storage prices there
as well!

~~~
Houshalter
In the long run it will make them both cheaper.

~~~
akerro
YAY a GPU from a year ago that had 100% GPU usage for full 11months with cheap
cooling is on sale now for 20% of its initial price!

~~~
dharma1
I think s/he means more volume leads to lower prices (in the long run)

~~~
akerro
and we see that on GPU marker were prices are going up all the time since 2
years ago...

------
amenghra
Relevant talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYG0NxoG7yw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYG0NxoG7yw)

------
jparse
I don't see how this is better. It sounds like we have to waste power running
hard drives now. Isn't Ethereum's Proof of Stake better?

~~~
bglusman
I thought so too until I read this [http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-
cheapest/#is-a-work-indep...](http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-
a-work-independent-protocol-possible) and, maybe there's counter arguments?
But it seemed like a pretty good argument to me.

~~~
1053r
Your linked argument is poorly formed. It's true that any system which
periodically emits value will cause people to work towards achieving that
value. However, it's not true that the work in question will necessarily be
wasted in an arms race.

Specifically, a (well constructed) Proof of Stake system will cause people to
work to get a piece of the value by having them purchase the coin used for
staking. This will cause the value of the coin on the open market to rise,
which will increase the equilibrium market cap of the coin in relation to the
world.

Because "money is a veil" [1], this won't create or destroy any actual goods
or services. It will just transfer value from some persons to other persons.
Therefore, Proof of Stake is more efficient than Proof of Work, because it
moves cryptocurrency from negative-sum (electricity wasted) to something
that's approximately zero-sum.

Another way of saying this is that you can't PRODUCE value by creating any
currency with zero intrinsic value. However, you can WASTE value in this
activity, and Bitcoin, as currently constructed (along with all possible Proof
of Work systems) is wasteful. Proof of Stake wastes less value than Proof of
Work.

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_money)

~~~
deevolution
How does proof of stake prevent double spending if there are no miners to
validate blocks? I must be missing something here...

~~~
AgentME
Stakers take act like miners, but instead of staking computation time through
proof-of-work, they stake an amount of cryptocurrency which gets burned if
they ever double-vote (and maybe if they vote for the losing chain, etc,
depending on the scheme).

It's not very obvious how exactly a proof-of-stake scheme should work though.
Many past attempts have been pretty flawed. I'm excited to watch Ethereum's
progress in this area.

------
jancsika
The incentives seem designed to make it not-so-profitable to have big rigs
with lots of hard-drive space. That design seems to be an effort to keep the
mining fairly decentralized so that it happens across a greater number of
commodity machines.

But if available drive space and, as Bram says in his talk, even unallocated
space, can be efficiently leveraged to back this cryptocurrency, this suddenly
creates an incentive for the companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or even
Symantec to start doing shenanigans in the background in order to mine Chia
coins on billions of machines.

The only thing currently stopping them is the egregious resource-usage of
extant POW-based cryptocurrencies. Plus, there are already cases where all
those companies take advantage of users resources like screen real estate,
installers, usage data, etc., when the resource usage is minimal (or, in some
cases with Windows 10, even above minimal).

So if you make a fungible cryptocurrency that consumes less power and targets
commodity machines, aren't you essentially asking the big players to battle it
out to control the unused space across billions of machines? Imagine the
annoying oscillation between browsers for default primacy, except that battle
is now between language vendors, os vendors, device vendors, etc.

------
kentiko
Paper on proofs of space:
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf)

------
dynofuz
so we are going to go from spending energy for "work" to spending energy
producing drives for "space". Time to buy some digital storage stock ;)

~~~
quickben
Or gridcoin. At least Science is advancing with hydro bills there.

------
Pirolita
Filecoin and Burst already do that

------
petre
If you think video cards are more expensive due to Bitcoin, just wait and see
hard drive prices skyrocket if this cryptocurrency gains popularity. It isn't
exactly eco friendly because hard drive manufacturers will try to fill that
demand by producing more drives that will end up empty.

------
codazoda
I'm trying to understand...

"The three best proofs of space rapidly the propagated through the whole
network and proofs of time servers start working on top of them."

Should that read, "The three best proofs of space rapidly propagate
through..."?

~~~
nashashmi
... rapidly _get_ propagated ...

------
oever
Is there an incentive to store the blockchain itself? A proof of space might
be derived from the blockchain history. The would create an incentive to store
the blockchain. That way the proof of space is a useful use of space.

------
apexalpha
So could I run a node on my Home NAS/server thathas some TB left for storage?
Or would it still require a decent GPU and or CPU to make it viable?

Is there any site with more technical details?

------
giancarlostoro
So... One thing I missed is, how do you mine Chia? Do you mine it? How much
will there be... these are the questions, is it technically a cryptocurrency
or just a digital currency?

------
m3kw9
The power needed to create a HD need to be accounted for and the metal supply
that it lowers could create issues that needs electricity to make up for, just
a theory.

------
visarga
Fun to see the heated Bitcoin discussion and imagine that much of that heat
comes from people having invested previously and now defending their decision.

------
orionblastar
This sounds like what Richard proposed for Pied Piper in the HBO series
Silicon Valley?

Instead of power, use storage instead. Get a cheap PC, install Linux on it,
get a 16T hard drive to store the Chiacoins and blockchain.

------
c-smile
Can we just use IP addresses (or similar finite at time set) as coins then?

And torrent alike distributed network that will support proof of ownership and
transactions.

Like I am owning 123.245.189.123 address and tons of peers nearby know that...

------
vorotato
If this is open source, I'll use it and if it's not I won't.

------
imron
I could have started mining Bitcoin back when you could mine them on a desktop
PC, but never did.

I think I'll try my hand at Chia farming until I have 1,000 or so on the off
chance it hits $7,000 one day too.

------
placeybordeaux
So instead of running through circuits that are stateless you'd run through
circuits that are stateful. I don't see how this would assuredly reduce the
total energy used.

------
scotty79
He should make a coin backed up by how much data miner shares through
bittorrent.

------
wyldfire
> A bitcoin transaction wastes

^H^H^H^H^H^Hcosts -- FTFY. It's not a waste if you actually got something for
it. e.g. your chemical ICE in your car produces heat that is useful in cold
weather. Not waste heat if it has utility. Electric cars have to spend
electrical energy to generate the same heat.

That said, the fact that this keeps coming up would indicate that there's
definitely a marketplace for a coin that costs less energy/emissions for the
same features.

~~~
wbkang
Waste: use or expend carelessly, _extravagantly_ , or to no purpose.

~~~
wyldfire
IMO it's none of those, and I think I'm being honest and fair here -- not just
a bitcoin fanboy.

What's the baseline for a corresponding transaction? Maybe that's a credit
card which will cost (not waste here either) 1-2% of the purchase price. But
even that's not quite fair because the merchant is taking some risk on this
purchase that usually amounts to some additional cost. Also credit cards can't
be used to secure transactions of >= millions of USD (and if they did it would
be at a significantly higher cost). Bitcoin transactions at the low end of
that spectrum are prohibitively expensive, though.

~~~
mrguyorama
Bitcoin doesn't replace credit card transactions or system. You have to judge
it by it's actual value, not what it pretends to want to be

~~~
wyldfire
Yes, fair enough -- it is truly unique and difficult to compare w/credit
cards.

But to further the debate, how would you evaluate it in these terms
("waste"/"extravagance")? Would you stipulate that it has value or that it at
least has utility? What sort of analogy or baseline would you compare it to,
so that we could evaluate how efficient or wasteful it is?

~~~
mrguyorama
My personal opinion is that bitcoin originally was meant as a transaction
medium, and that could have been very valuable. However, as it stands, it's
obvious to me that bitcoin cannot become that, as scaling is proving to be
very difficult, and for more reasons than technical.

Also bitcoin has heavily failed in its "decentralized" dream, as most of the
hashing power is under the control of very few individuals.

This seems to leave its only purpose as some sort of strange "HODL" and
speculation machine, and I don't believe that is worth burning an entire small
nation's worth of power to promote. In fact, my opinion is that such a system
is actively harmful.

Even if you believe that bitcoin is not some eternal pump and dump, that just
leaves it as a valid investment vehicle. I don't consider a single investment
vehicle to be worth the energy spent to maintain "trust" in the chain

------
xwvvvvwx
What is the advantage (if any) of this over proof of stake?

~~~
corford
<snark>it might actually work</snark> :)

------
DonHopkins
Proof of work is conspicuous consumption economics.

------
nickik
There already is delegated prove of stake algorithms that solves the power
consumption problem.

~~~
eof
I have never understood what stops POS algorithms from being havens for
opportunistic cheating. There is no punishment for spending energy on
attacking the network unsuccessfully because you are still also playing good
with the majority.

In POW schemes you can only use your mining power on a single chain; in POS it
seems like you can "stake" every competing chain simultaneously.

~~~
warbiscuit
Ethereum's Casper uses the solution that while validator A could double-vote
for multiple blocks, validator B could take those multiple vote messages, and
submit them as cryptographic proof of A's dishonesty. By submitting such
proof, the protocol would allow slashing A's stake, and giving some portion to
B as a reward for catching them. Thus validators are _strongly_ incentivized
to only vote for one block at the end of the chain.

------
4714
www.chia.network

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idibidiart
"Capitalizing, Capitalizing, Capitalizing." Paraphrasing Fake Yoda (Mel
Brooks) from Space Balls

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olegkikin
So it's nothing new. Ethereum and Peercoin and Nxt do proof of stake.

~~~
45h34jh53k4j
Slight correction, Ethereum _may_ do PoS in future, it currently does not, it
is a PoW CryptoCurrency like bitcoin. Because of the state of miners ETH right
now, I suspect it may take a long time to migrate, with several contentious
forks. I suspect bitcoin will always be PoW.

