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Comment by bigdubs | Hacker News Reader

Not sure the parallels are as strong as you're making them out to be; there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the energy consumed.

There will probably be a better end state for distributed trust, but we're legitimately not there yet.

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> there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the energy consumed

What is the energy consumption of all the bank offices and computer systems in the world? Even without this comparison, I think the amount of energy required is not a flaw in itself, but rather an aspect of the technology we should seek to improve upon (for instance, proof of stake is an attempt at this). I don't think it's sustainable long term (2400 baud internet wasn't sustainable long term either), but that doesn't mean we don't have the kernel of a great idea today. I agree with you 100% that we're not there yet, but I disagree with those who say this road leads to nowhere.

Bitcoin mining (not even counting other cryptocurrencies) uses more electricity than most countries in the world. If you look at transactions per Watt, I would guess that the banks are doing better by multiple orders of magnitude

If reports are to be believed, the entire sum total of energy consumed by banks, credit card processors, their computer systems, offices, and personnel...is dwarfed by the amount of energy wasted on Bitcoin alone.

Banks and credit card processors can handle billions of transactions per day. Bitcoin, ethereum, and the other cryptocurrencies struggle to handle a few thousand, and are technologically incapable of non-linear scaling.

They already exist. Check out the stellar consensus mechanism.

https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...

Stellar is not decentralized.

The energy consumption of the bitcoin network is not inherent to proof of work as a consensus mechanism. Bitcoin uses a difficulty setting to keep the rate of block creation relatively constant even as the hashing power dedicated to it increases. The reason so much energy is being used boils down to speculation in the price of bitcoin. At $10,000 per coin and with a block reward of 12.5 coins, successfully mining a block yields $125,000. That means that for each individual miner it would be profitable to spend up to that much per block they win. $125k can buy a LOT of electricity. But on the other hand, if the price of bitcoin were closer to $1 again and nobody expected it to appreciate very much then the level of investment, and thereby power usage, would go way down.

Proof of Stake is already on the horizon for 2018 for Ethereum.

PoS doesn't solve the problem of concentrating power on miners

Is it just me, or do people keep staying "proof of stake" as an answer to the proof of work concept, when it's not even a given that such a thing is a feature as opposed to completely undesired?

That’s a separate issue. The comment I replied to is concerned about the energy consumption, and that’s what i’m Addressing.

> because of the energy consumed.

> but we're legitimately not there yet.

Maybe Directed Acyclic Graph technology (instead of blockchain), such as iota and raiblocks? Iota seemed to make its enterence into the top 10 of cryptocurrency, so I guess we're there.

proof of stake.

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