221–230 of 246 posts
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Subsidize? I think it's the opposite. Mining parasitizes on the cheapness of electric power.
That's just how markets work right? The important thing is that these power networks are getting utilized, and that money can be reinvested in building out more green energy projects. This is a net win for everyone involved.
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Subsidize? I think it's the opposite. Mining parasitizes on the cheapness of electric power.
That's just how markets work right? The important thing is that these power networks are getting utilized, and that money can be reinvested in building out more green energy projects. This is a net win for everyone involved.
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They can't be about IRL things because those things cannot be verified in a decentralized manner.
Why not? The smart card and the lock are IRL. The smart contract knows who is allowed to open the lock. The lock can query the current state of the contract to check if the smart card being used on it is allowed to open the lock. I have heard several stories by now of renters being defrauded by fake landlords. A smart contract could actually help. Decentralized would mean everybody can check who owns a property, not…
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> With proof of stake, you can literally throw around money to gain influence over a network. But can't you do the same with PoW. You just throw money at minners and buy their rigs or rent them for a good premium.
A Bitcoin miner that can 51% attack the network will need a huge factory full of mining rigs. A proof of stake miner who wants to 51% attack doesn't need that.
Bitcoin needs a huge factory. ETH2 needs a billion dollars. I feel like a billion dollars could probably buy the factory you're talking about.
ETH2 also takes time to add new stakers to the network, but perhaps not as long as building the factory.
If you did this with BTC you'd cause a huge drop it the value of the network, and therefore your investment in miners
If you did this with ETH2 your investment would be destroyed by slashing, and the network might survive
... also keep in mind the Bitcoin factories already exist. You just need to buy one or two, or perhaps hack some of the mining pools.
I prefer the ETH2 semantics.
I'm not sure I've gotten a clear answer to this before, so someone please help me understand: I can see how smart contracts might be useful in contracts that involve other assets that are directly connected in the same decentralized context (i.e., other bitcoin transactions or blockchain entities). However, for anything else in the real world, they always (from what I've seen) require an "oracle" of some kind. True,…
Hi! Larry, Founder of New Internet Labs, building in the Stacks ecosystem here. Your understanding of smart contracts is correct - whenever smart contracts deal with stuff in the physical world you need to have an oracle. In my experience over past half decade, there's been a lot of misleading information spread by people about smart contracts with schemes like claim to be a good use for smart contracts that suffer f…
They are just now disclosing their finances to the feds, you might want to change your sales pitch...
Who here things blockchain as a planet wide computing system will take over the world ? I had a feeling that this would be the actual shift in use of computing. Unlike the e-commerce, cloud .. which are structurally similar to the previous world. I'm not preaching for blockchains, it was just a feeling that it could be an actual paradigm shift.
I firmly believe this. It is taking the digitization of the world to the last economic layer: governance and law. But I also believe we are very very early, and it will take maybe 30 years to develop to start massively transforming industries.
from the very few I know, I didn't see governance and law in blockchain projects. What I perceived is a never ending shared network of operations that can basically replace companies.
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Why not? The smart card and the lock are IRL. The smart contract knows who is allowed to open the lock. The lock can query the current state of the contract to check if the smart card being used on it is allowed to open the lock. I have heard several stories by now of renters being defrauded by fake landlords. A smart contract could actually help. Decentralized would mean everybody can check who owns a property, not…
Until someone secures a court order transferring ownership of a property, at which point the ledger no longer reflects reality. It's an awkward problem for any distributed ledger that wants to track something that isn't intrinsically defined by the ledger itself.
Isn't there a public ledger of property ownership? In any case, there could be.
In my country, merely transferring property rights costs a lot of money. I know a friend paid 20k just for officials to make the entry in their book.
Blockchain could easily replace that.
Or the "property officials" could have a key and people could verify with the smart contract that some transfer has been signed by the right key.
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I dont follow. What does the size of either of those blockchains have to do with the discussion? What point are you making?
At the time there was the argument that larger blocks were bad because they would increase the size of the chain and prevent casual users from storing the whole chain and verifying it themselves. I think the chain was already too big for casual users at that point!
I always thought the argument that full nodes should be inexpensive to operate made a lot of sense. But keeping blocks small would obviously lead (and clearly did) to transaction costs high enough to price out most people that actually want to use it.
Wait for the lightning network is an insulting reason to kill the p2p cash use case, which in my opinion is the only thing that makes the "store of value" use case work.
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A Bitcoin miner that can 51% attack the network will need a huge factory full of mining rigs. A proof of stake miner who wants to 51% attack doesn't need that.
... and now you get to my point why I argued ETH2 is likely better on the security front. Bitcoin needs a huge factory. ETH2 needs a billion dollars. I feel like a billion dollars could probably buy the factory you're talking about. ETH2 also takes time to add new stakers to the network, but perhaps not as long as building the factory. If you did this with BTC you'd cause a huge drop it the value of the network, and…
What you don't get is what comes after that.
In PoS, once you invest a billion dollars, you're set for life. In PoW, you invest a billion dollars but still have to keep investing more and more in order to survive. If you're complacent, a new upstart miner with innovative technology could swoop in one day with 10x more efficient mining method (it could take many forms, such as a closed source bitcoin node that does things much more efficiently yet still fully follows the Bitcoin protocol, or it could be a closed source hardware that they don't sell outside of their own mining operations, like Apple does with their own chips) This way the PoW network as a whole will keep evolving because of competition. In a PoS network there is no competition once you invest the billion dollars and it's a complacent network compared to a PoW network where everyone is constantly competing and comes and goes (those who can't keep up will get left out and leave). If you join a PoS network where someone has a huge stake collectively, you're basically joining a feudalist society where you're being ruled by a king. If you join a PoW network you're being ruled by entities that keep competing to show their competency. it's like the presidential election is going on for every block.
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I really don't think that's true except in pockets of the usa or europe with free markets (the power part)
Not at all. Also very much true in China. Miners are largely concentrated around the Sichuan area, which is also well known for their massive investments in hydroelectric power.