11–20 of 822 posts
PoW is apparently bad for the environment. So it leaves us in an interesting situation.
The Ethereum project has shown that the concept of decentralization only applies when it's on their terms. It's not a true principle.
PoW systems rely on the "phone a friend method" as well. When you download a Bitcoin client from a "friend", you are trusting them to honestly introduce you to the network. If you fall asleep for a period of years, you have to trust your friends to honestly inform you of all of the PoW forks and policy changes that have occurred over that interval. The only difference is that PoS blockchain clients must be bundled wi…
You mention “POW forks”, but Bitcoin’s POW has never been hard forked: you’d need to trust a Bitcoin expert to tell you if it was a good idea.
The most important part of this post doesn't even have anything to do with cryptocurrency: > If the broad masses of people disagree with the platform landlord, their opinion will be altered to conform with the rules, or else they will no longer have a voice. We really need to fix that problem.
It’s already fixed to some extent. On Reddit, you make a new subreddit of your own. On GitHub, you fork. The problem is that some projects are too big to effectively fork (or forking would over leverage the community) or people are lazy and don’t want to do the forking themselves despite accurately identifying the presence of a problem.
Reminds me a bit of the "free speech zones". It's a poor facsimile of true freedom of speech.
Seeing as the new public squares are, by and large, digital spaces controlled by megacorps, we need to expand the first amendment to apply to private enterprise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s already fixed to some extent. On Reddit, you make a new subreddit of your own. On GitHub, you fork. The problem is that some projects are too big to effectively fork (or forking would over leverage the community) or people are lazy and don’t want to do the forking themselves despite accurately identifying the presence of a problem.
So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions. Reminds me a bit of the "free speech zones". It's a poor facsimile of true freedom of speech. Seeing as the new public squares are, by and large, digital spaces controlled by megacorps, we need to expand the first amend…
proof of work proves that not just one miner had sufficient hash power, but that the entire network had a certain aggregate hash power that was required to mine the block.
can't this be emulated by requiring all major stakers to sign the block? (so rather than one miner staking being enough, all the aggregate staked was required to mine the block)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions. Reminds me a bit of the "free speech zones". It's a poor facsimile of true freedom of speech. Seeing as the new public squares are, by and large, digital spaces controlled by megacorps, we need to expand the first amend…
Freedom of speech is not the same thing as requirement that others listen. If someone has no audience, with all the platforms that are available, it's not because they're being censored. It's because nobody cares what they have to say.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s already fixed to some extent. On Reddit, you make a new subreddit of your own. On GitHub, you fork. The problem is that some projects are too big to effectively fork (or forking would over leverage the community) or people are lazy and don’t want to do the forking themselves despite accurately identifying the presence of a problem.
Have we already forgotten what happened to youtube-dl at the hands of GitHub? I know GitHub were only following the DMCA but it shows they have the capability to not only remove the project but also all of its forks.
This is just evidence that this particular slope isn't as slippery as some thought.
To be honest, I don't understand why it hasn't been banned already.
Sweden has recently called for a EU wide ban because it identified PoW mining as a threat to transition their economy to renewable energy.
https://www.fi.se/en/published/presentations/2021/crypto-ass...
PoW systems rely on the "phone a friend method" as well. When you download a Bitcoin client from a "friend", you are trusting them to honestly introduce you to the network. If you fall asleep for a period of years, you have to trust your friends to honestly inform you of all of the PoW forks and policy changes that have occurred over that interval. The only difference is that PoS blockchain clients must be bundled wi…
Bitcoin for example still relies on a list of hardcoded nodes for bootstrapping clients. Not to mention very few people actually bother to verify the full chain (360GB and counting) from genesis.
As for auditing the the integrity of the code or binary, it is signed by GPG keys hosted on public key servers accessed using X509 certificates pinned by a a couple of trust anchors preloaded in your OS. So much for distributed consensus...