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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

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Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#121
post #87
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 stor…

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.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#122

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( 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 dubiou…

When there are no more bitcoins to mine, will the power consumption drastically fall? There will be fees to mine, but I can't imagine everyone is going to be fighting that much on fees, but I don't really know..

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#123
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t doubling the transaction rate require forking the network?

No. If segwit use jumped to 100% (currently stands at ~10%) then the transaction rate capacity would roughly double.

Didn’t segwit result in a fork?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#124
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

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#125
post #2

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?

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

This point keeps getting brought up and is patently ridiculous. It is computing something - a hash that is not easily reproducible that prevents attackers from modifying the ledger. And there is no other known way to do this, including proof of stake.

I think people who say this are just naysayers that are implying that crypto currencies have no use or value.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#126
post #67

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.

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 thi…

burstcoin does proof of storage already.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#127
post #2

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?

There were some attempts at actually doing useful work with all that proof of work: https://curecoin.net/ http://foldingcoin.net/ https://golem.network/ http://primecoin.io/ and a detailed article about it https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocur...

Aren't curecoin and foldingcoin both centralized? Isn't that a bad property to have as a cryptocurrency?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#128
post #2

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?

> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. This point keeps getting brought up and is patently ridiculous. It is computing something - a hash that is not easily reproducible that prevents attackers from modifying the ledger. And there is no other known way to do this, including proof of stake. I think people who say this are just naysayers that are implying that crypto currencies have no use o…

And that hard to reproduce hash represents computational trust, which is a new type of resource that just happens to be very expensive in energy cost using our current technology.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#130
post #118
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

>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

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