isn't that obvious? it is of utility of verifying that candidate can't secure the ledger.
this really comes down to question whether you think the distributed, writable by anybody ledger is useful to humanity. personally i think it absolutely is. do you?
Not quite. It most certainly doesn’t come down to that, and it’s a reduction of what I’m saying. I’m drawing a distinction between the specific way bitcoin verifies its ledger versus cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers themselves. I took pains to enunciate that repeatedly, so let me try to illustrate with an example:
Say I have one watt of power. I apply it to a computer for however long and it spends that energy folding a protein, simulating a gravitational system, or modeling a hurricane. I apply it to another computer and it spends that watt for however long computing a double SHA256 and throwing away the result. If, at the end of both calculations, I have worked toward proof of work on a secure ledger, which energy was better spent for humanity? That’s the difference: while the secure blockchain is a noble goal, what the computer is doing during that time is something we badly need to rethink. “The double-hash of these bytes is <foo>” isn’t even useful if we collected it. It’s meaningless computing. Yes, we ascribe meaning when blocks are made, but it’s a very irresponsible technical decision to waste energy in order to prove that work was done.
This would be fine if it were a low amount of energy, but it isn’t. We are talking gigawatts that are potentially being spent on this, which is part of the point I was trying to make. Electricity isn’t free, and it’s important to consider our planet. Bitcoin essentially puts computers in a busy loop, and it’s a very hamfisted means of achieving its goal. We have already seen alternative concepts, including this one, that illustrate there is potentially another way to achieve what we want without throwing a small star’s worth of energy at the computing infrastructure behind it.
Coming after people and assuming they’re criticizing cryptocurrency as a concept whenever a specific piece is questioned is tough to discuss against. I think cryptocurrency can do better, and there are undoubtedly better ways to come up with to secure a distributed ledger. I’m alarmed that the adoption of bitcoin has exploded our utilization of resources and that people feel that worry about this is an indictment of the whole concept; this polarization makes it difficult for all of us to improve.
So, no, it isn’t obvious what value I should see out of a computer spinning itself through SHA2 for no benefit aside from securing a ledger. In any other domain, we’d consider such a design ridiculous. There has to be another way, one where that same (intensive) calculation can benefit humanity for the power that we are throwing at it, and we still end up with a secure blockchain. I’m not smart enough to invent it. I hope we can support the people who are, and perhaps admit that bitcoin’s proof of work scheme is a mistake in the larger landscape.
I worry that given how deep we are into ASIC development, arguments against what I’m saying are only going to get louder as time goes on. We are probably long past the point of no return with bitcoin already.
There is no other way to secure a distributed ledger at the moment other than using large amounts of power. That leaves two choices:
1. Admit that you think that crypto currency is not worth the energy cost. Even if you believe that, it's just wasted breath on your part because they are absolutely not going to go away.
2. Propose another solution. No one else on earth has found a better solution than proof of work. Do you have something better?
It’s not wasted breath to say it’s not worth it. The point is that distributed ledgers will not be the future of currency and banking - they’re not worth it. They’ll surely exist as a niche technology or religious artifact for the libertarian set.
Wrong question. It implies energy can only be used exclusively for single purpose. The right question is given X watts, what is the ideal distribution for Y purposes and the answer is that we dont know but we tend to value some things more than others and that will be reflected in the distribution
> no benefit aside from securing the ledger
This is the crucial point that many who raise the same objection dont get: proof of work has to be futile by design. In fact it is misnomer and the correct name should be Proof of energy spent, as the energy is the ultimate resource we’re paying for security of the ledger. If we accept that ledger security must be tied to solving some more “important” problem, and there indeed was a non futile problem space, some f(candidate) that yields two results: (candidate-ok?, problem-solved?), the incentive to search that space drops to zero because it is no longer tied to solving the “important” problem. And suddenly the ledger is useless.
If you know how to resolve this conflict - publish a paper and you will be the next Satoshi.
> Wrong question. It implies energy can only be used exclusively for single purpose.
No. Both computers did hard work, and earned credit toward proof of work in my example. I’m rather repeatedly saying energy can be used for two purposes (securing a ledger with a difficult computation that also means something), and I have no idea how else to explain this.
I’m not sure why your incentive would drop to zero. Say I swap in a universal simulation from the Big Bang instead of SHA2. A miner simulates a portion it chooses, which involves quintillions upon quintillions of gravitational fields. Eventually it simulates a rare event, like two black holes colliding or something. It somehow notates this as proof that it worked on the problem for a while, hashes that proof combined with the transactions, and boop, mined a block. Meanwhile, all along, we have learned science. I could think of other problems that work: SETI@home and the other BOINC apps come to mind, as does LHC analysis. Large search space, demanding algorithm, rare thing to find (SETI/Higgs candidates), and valuable science along the way. Some issues I could see are unpredictable nature of block time, verifiability being expensive, and problem spaces that move forward in time, like my first example. But I don’t see those as insurmountable.
Why would incentive drop to zero to search the space? I’m not following that claim, nor why you’re scare quoting important.
> earned credit toward proof of work in my example
they both did work, they didn't yield any proof of it.
> Say I swap in a universal simulation from the Big Bang instead of SHA2
if you have an idea - express it in pseudocode. what is your `f(candidate)` here? what is the return value? how does return value ties in "is candidate valid" and "simulation data" in a way that prohibits modifying source code to only do "is candidate valid" part?
you're trying to handwave your way through some of the most complex questions in computing. "what if we just swap sha2 for blah, where blah is something that solves humanity's problems" - well sure, let's do this, show me the code.
> Why would incentive drop to zero to search the space?
because the axiom we're operating with is: though shalt not run ledger security code without "useful" code. as soon as the problem is solved - nobody secures the ledger anymore.
> why you’re scare quoting important
because you're forcing upon me what i should consider important problems humanity has to solve. your opinion is that distributed ledger isn't one of them. your opinion is wrong.
