91–100 of 204 posts
Because I have yet to find an actual legitimate use-case for a blockchain. Every task in our modern business world actually requires a central trusted authority. Edit: not to mention that mining is an incredible waste of time and energy that can instead be put to good use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, your argument is: "you say our thing sucks at X, but if you really think so, why aren't you trying to fix it?" Filling in the variables differently, we could construct an argument like "If civil engineers really cared about structural stability, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on my bridge made out of playing cards." It's not their job to fix someone else's bad idea.
Cryptocurrencies aren't going away. Which means that if your primary motivation to not work on cryptocurrency is that it wastes energy, then there's a whole lot of room for you to be making it better, and that is a stupid motivation. I'm not saying that they are obligated to work on it because it wastes energy. But the comment I was responding to implied that distributed systems engineers didn't want to work on block…
Distributed consensus algorithms are super interesting, but most distributed databases run in a trusted context. So instead of spending time optimizing a trustless system, database engineers optimize commit protocols like Calvin[1], because high-throughput scalable consistency solves so many business problems. When you have a general purpose globally consistent distributed database, many of the problems that look lik…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the bitcoin researchers have thoroughly convinced themselves that Proof of Stake is not achievable with acceptable levels of security, and for good reason. The reason you don't see more active research on Proof-of-Stake is that it is thought to only lead to dead ends.
The Ethereum team is serious about proof of stake.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a per-transaction basis? No. Those costs specifically end up being reified in the fee those processors charge to their customers, so we can determine an upper limit to how much is spent on energy in that way.
The same is true of bitcoin transaction fees, no? Miners set the minimum fee that they will accept, and people tack a fee onto a transaction, large enough that a miner will likely process it.
We don't really know the relationship between transaction rate and electrical usage in a mature BTC system, because mining is mainly used to prevent double-spends and the minimum required mining rate to support a given transaction rate is a game-theoretical concern and not a technical one. We can only really observe what has happened so far in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
>The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. >It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant sta…
Even if the tech is "legit" it's encredibly inefficient. We're spewing off tons of CO2 just to verify the block chain, but we have plenty of technologies that can do the same with a minuscule amount of energy. The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
Does it solve the problem? Or did it just make a step in the right direction?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system. Visa, MasterCard, AmEX, &c along with each individual bank, not to mention the intermediaries and gateways all of them use also consume a tremendous amount of power. It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power, not to mention the number of steps and entities a transaction needs in order to be f…
> It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power Our current system does in fact use a negligible amount of power. Each $2 latte you put on a credit card uses an amount of electricity so infinitesimal that it can only be measured in the aggregate. The percentage of the power used to generate a single bitcoin block for a single transaction can power an average US household for (approximately) an e…
Bitcoin network scaling has to do with transactions per second, and it is a protocol problem, and an storage problem, but it is independent of the hash capacity of the system.
We can theoretically improve the Bitcoin network capacity to handle 100x the number of transactions, while having the same hash rate.
In fact, if hash rate were halved each month, and the protocol unchanged, Bitcoin network transaction capacity would still be the same after Bitcoin difficulty is auto adjusted.
Hash rate and transaction capacity are orthogonal issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Bitcoin and Blockchains are an opt-in rule system. You literally subscribe to the rule set (called consensus) that you wish to participate in. No one coerces you into participating in a rule system you do not want to participate it. Your capitalist||socialist country is invaded by socia…
And if there's a fork? As I see it, either you follow the fork supported by the majority of miners, or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless, because everyone else is on the other fork.
>either you follow the fork supported by the majority [...], or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless
Any thing is only worth what others will pay for it. This is the case regardless if you are using a blockchain or not. If the world suddenly decided USD were worthless and you held lots of USD, yes you would find that your USD are now worthless.
The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the tech is "legit" it's encredibly inefficient. We're spewing off tons of CO2 just to verify the block chain, but we have plenty of technologies that can do the same with a minuscule amount of energy. The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't this why LiteCoin was created by a Google Engineer? Does it solve the problem? Or did it just make a step in the right direction?