It's worse than that.
It's worse than that. To me, the biggest flaw of bitcoin is that you have to constantly spend energy on it (as in computation power / burn coal) for it to remain viable. As soon as enough people get tired of throwing away money at their miners someone can pull a 51% attack, so everyone must put more energy into their miners to protect their investment... forever. Over time the amount of energy wasted by bitcoin could become stupendously dumb. We could be using our spare processor cycles to fold proteins or aid in numerous other research, and yet we're using it to allow people to send bits of data to each other without a need for centralized trust. Compare that to the centralized bank where you have a single centralized trusted source which allows transferring money from one person to another to take no more energy than a modest server and some backups -- far less than the power consumption of a single GPU miner. The above problem also won't get better. Even after you're no longer mining for new coins, you must keep up the mining volume to protect existing coins and allow transactions to occur at all. I personally find the above to be a fundamental problem with the "proof of work" solution. Sure, on paper you've solved the General's problem, but the reality is that you're throwing massive amounts of energy out the window. Because of that, I think this proof's place should have been to remain on paper.
Posted by TheDong on Jan 14, 2015, 9:48 AM
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Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.8,000 issues0 comments
hackernews (FinTech)
It can be a nightmare to sell a chunk of your business to outside investors.
NewCongrats on the move to Google!
The federal government hasn't even lifted a finger to control undergrad education costs.
Nice to see someone addressing this annoying problem, I'm seeing first hand bot traffic go up as they are just gobbling up data.
Why is there no standardized e-ID in the US?
There's an unmet need in social networks for "identity verified and protected", wherein the social network proves to a reasonable^ degree...
The reason to create a new category is because the current categories don't solve the problem for a specific target audience.
Unfortunately in the enterprise, the purchasing decision maker is usually not the user, and may not even use the invoice screen before de...
It's worse than that.
It's worse than that. To me, the biggest flaw of bitcoin is that you have to constantly spend energy on it (as in computation power / burn coal) for it to remain viable. As soon as enough people get tired of throwing away money at their miners someone can pull a 51% attack, so everyone must put more energy into their miners to protect their investment... forever. Over time the amount of energy wasted by bitcoin could become stupendously dumb. We could be using our spare processor cycles to fold proteins or aid in numerous other research, and yet we're using it to allow people to send bits of data to each other without a need for centralized trust. Compare that to the centralized bank where you have a single centralized trusted source which allows transferring money from one person to another to take no more energy than a modest server and some backups -- far less than the power consumption of a single GPU miner. The above problem also won't get better. Even after you're no longer mining for new coins, you must keep up the mining volume to protect existing coins and allow transactions to occur at all. I personally find the above to be a fundamental problem with the "proof of work" solution. Sure, on paper you've solved the General's problem, but the reality is that you're throwing massive amounts of energy out the window. Because of that, I think this proof's place should have been to remain on paper.
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