Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment [LWN.net]

Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Posted Jan 22, 2016 3:00 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment by ken
Parent article: Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

> But you are probably right that some type of proof of work is probably needed but it has to be done in a different way I think so that its not so local as it is today.
Please, no. Then it will require not only boatloads of coal to generate electricity, but also tons of network bandwidth.

> A lot of people is thinking about this, in 2014 there was apparently about 140 papers written on consensus algorithms. Somebody is going to find a way to get around this wasteful use of energy that is the current way.
No, they won't.

It's a fundamental problem - if you want currency to be usable then it has to be scarce. And if it's decentralized then it means it should be _hard_ to get.

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Is wasting electricity required?

Posted Jan 26, 2016 14:31 UTC (Tue) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link] (2 responses)

> it should be _hard_ to get

Even so, we should still ask whether it absolutely needs to be so *wasteful* to get, as the originator of this sub-discussion wondered. Perhaps the proof of work could still *use* lots of resources, but delivering some side benefit to society that a miner can't directly monetize for themselves.

Is wasting electricity required?

Posted Jan 26, 2016 14:49 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> Perhaps the proof of work could still *use* lots of resources, but delivering some side benefit to society that a miner can't directly monetize for themselves.

Not a bad idea, in principle, but there are only so many classes of problems which are uniformly hard for computers to solve, with adjustable difficulty to account for variations in technology and computational capacity, and yet very easy for other nodes to check. The stochastic element where every potential solution has an equal chance of being valid is also desirable to ensure fairness, and any system which relies on a trusted server handing out work-packets is unworkable in terms of decentralization. So far no one has managed to come up with an alternative proof-of-work with the necessary properties.

Is wasting electricity required?

Posted Jan 26, 2016 19:31 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

There are some projects that attempt to do it, but it's hard to find suitable problems for that. Search for Mersenne primes is marginally better than finding hash codes with consecutive zeroes, but only marginally so.