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Comment by DINKDINK | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't you mad about all the gigawatt hours that are wasted powering banks, bank servers, armored trucks silly moving fancy paper from business to banks, printing presses, the distruction of various ecological areas to take the mineral gold out of the ground, VISA servers, printing Visa cards etc.

Just because the method to defend against unmodified database entries in the Bitcoin blockchain is very evident and the evidence of ecological cost to our current financial system is largely silent doesn't mean one can ignore those costs.

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Not being able to easily quantify the inefficiency of one kind of waste is a very simple reason to not be mad about it.

And, of course, one can express a desire to want to fix one problem without being obligated to express the desire to fix problems many orders of magnitude larger ("You don't want our town to cut down the trees in the park? Why don't you care about the destruction of the rainforests?"). You don't even know that the person you're talking to doesn't want to fix those problems.

It's the nature of the computation that bugs me.

We have a network growing exponentially relying on the fact that we're hashing random numbers. Academic research aside, it sounds very useless.

That has nothing to do with the way banks are doing their maths or maintaining their infrastructure. Again, I'm also very grateful of bitcoin demonstrating we can exchange value without a 3rd party, but it looks like nowadays we could do better.

Now in regard of the destruction of ecological areas, mining gold etc... I simply agree with you.

Some people have looked into securing a blockchain currency with some other more useful computation. So far nothing much has come out of it, and there are some theoretical reasons why we shouldn't expect too much.

So there were attempts to make the calculations more useful, but that's not the only way to avoid this 'wasted energy'.

One alternative idea is 'proof of stake'.

And then it always seemed to me, also, that some kind of strategic partial centralisation could help make cryptocurrencies much more efficient..

No PoS system has emerged that can both remain perfectly distributed while also preventing double spend chain forks. If the cost to participate in multiple conflicting histories is effectively 0 (as it isn't with PoW, but is with PoS) then you can prioritize a history most beneficial to you instead of the reality.

Honestly, if you are going "big leagues" in cryptocurrency, I don't think having a central authority is bad as long as procedures are in place to contest flawed histories. Peercoin does its PoS through the developers signing key locking history - as long as people trust the devs, they trust the blockchain. If someone can prove the Peercoin blockchain is manipulated, the chain and project can be forked and someone else can be given confidence by whatever measure the community wants to use.

> Peercoin does its PoS through the developers signing key locking history - as long as people trust the devs, they trust the blockchain.

If trust in devs is sufficient, why bother with a blockchain? Just store the history in Git.

You might trust different people with different things.

> And then it always seemed to me, also, that some kind of strategic partial centralisation could help make cryptocurrencies much more efficient..

Yes, and you could implement that specialisation on top of bitcoin. Just imagine eg one of the bitcoin exchanges that hold your balance for you allowing you to send money to other account holders (even at other exchanges) without that ever hitting the blockchain.

The control to keep that kind of company honest is that people will occasionally demand their balances be paid out in bitcoin.

> That has nothing to do with the way banks are doing their maths or maintaining their infrastructure. Again, I'm also very grateful of bitcoin demonstrating we can exchange value without a 3rd party, but it looks like nowadays we could do better.

If you have a better idea, we're all ears.

computing prime numbers, searching new decimals of pi, folding proteins or whatever useful calculation there is to do out there.

I once suggested protein folding on bitcointalk.org. The thing is : it's easier said than done. Folding protein can not trivially be used to mark data as a cryptographic hash does, and you need this for the whole protocol to make sense. But if someone can come up with a proof of concept, we'd all be happy to look at it.

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