It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless".
Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
Proof of Stake can work alright in certain market conditions, but those didn't exist on any blockchain until relatively recently. Look at the utter chaos going on with Terra validators. The validating token goes to approximately zero, so bad actors can cheaply buy up the staking asset and hijack validation, further destabilizing the network, allowing the next attackers to buy in even cheaper.
It's a hard problem, and Satoshi's solution is an incredibly elegant one. If you've got a better idea than PoW, then do share. Whoever figures it out stands to make billions of dollars. You should know that it's mostly considered to be a solved problem at this point, and nearly everyone has moved on to other hard problems in the space.
PoW is not useless. Hashcash in its original form is a prime example. It’s good design/engineering that solves a problem.
Blockchains are not useless. Append only, verifiable data structures have countless applications that again, can be used to solve actual problems.
Systems which combine these to create a “trillion+ economy” that’s sole external affect appears to be inducing an obsessive overuse of the word “fiat” while consuming incomprehensible amounts of the worlds resources—not just power, but hardware, and importantly, the focus of many intelligent people—that is a venture of questionable use.
> It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless".
The calculation itself, once removed from bitcoin ecosystem, is quite useless.
> Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth.
How is "find the nonce" PoW better for democracy than "fold proteins" or "find a chain of primes" PoW? In what way does calculating primes or folding proteins require global registry of every human on earth?
> Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
What about internet and expensive hardware, don't you need those also? What would you need besides those to do "fold protein" or "find chain of primes" PoW.
See gridcoin, it is a proof of stake currency where you can additionally earn coins via mostly useful scientific computing. It's a neat project, but it gives effective control to the boinc server managers. The users have to sign up to earn that way
my understanding is that gridcoin "rewards" people participating in boinc by incrementing numbers on a blockchain that uses proof of stake. It doesn't use scientific computing, like protein folding, as a proof of work for the chain itself, which is what the parent comment was all about.
I would love to be proven wrong, to see any reference that grc provides algorithmic benefit to boinc, as in "getting rewarded with grc is proof the provided solution for the requested scientific computation is correct", or even a little thing like storing the boinc participation statistics, but those are features of the boinc network independently from grc.
What grc provides to the scientific community is a weird incentive for monkey-brains: monkey brain sees grc number go up, monkey brain releases happy hormones. It is a mirror of the participation statistic on the blockchain, not because that makes sense, but because blockchain. Sure there is some theory that some monkey may give a monkey a banana for making their number go down and its number go up, but that transaction involves no scientific computation and is purely speculative.
> PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
This is a complete, steaming, and self-serving pile of bullshit. It isn't at all democratic and you need far more than just "electricity" to participate.
Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
Proof of Stake can work alright in certain market conditions, but those didn't exist on any blockchain until relatively recently. Look at the utter chaos going on with Terra validators. The validating token goes to approximately zero, so bad actors can cheaply buy up the staking asset and hijack validation, further destabilizing the network, allowing the next attackers to buy in even cheaper.
It's a hard problem, and Satoshi's solution is an incredibly elegant one. If you've got a better idea than PoW, then do share. Whoever figures it out stands to make billions of dollars. You should know that it's mostly considered to be a solved problem at this point, and nearly everyone has moved on to other hard problems in the space.