Crypto-currency craze 'hinders search for alien life'

Ironically if you draw a Venn diagram of "people who are worried about a dystopian future in which badly-designed AI reallocates enormous portions of the world's resources to an utterly useless end" and "people really into promoting and mining crypto" you might not need a second circle

That's just a side effect that prevents us from discovering them. The true purpose is to accelerate the process of making Earth more habitable to alien life (and less habitable to us). Apparently aliens like CO₂ and hot climate (makes me wonder why they don't just settle Venus, but maybe it's too warm for them there).

Proof of Stake, though, worries me. It's a very "the rich get richer" solution trying to prevent the rich getting richer. Less electricity, sure, but it feels like it deepens the economic wedge between classes. If you stake 1 coin and I stake 100 coins and there's a 10% reward, after payout you'll have 1.1 and I'll have 110. How is that decentralizing? And you can't put tiers in the system because people will just install a thousand wallets/nodes and split their coins until they fall into the highest paying bracket.

I really like what the Monero folks are doing. They announced that they'll be making small changes to their PoW algorithm a few times per year in order to deter ASICs (no point to spending time and money on a super specialized machine that will be worthless in 2 months). It doesn't deter GPU mining too much, though I'd imagine that it's more of a hassle keeping a swarm or systems up to date than one rig. Ideally, they would release tweaks that reduce GPU efficiency, like highly serialized computations with lower difficulty (so the payout is similar).

And then you have Gridcoin, Curecoin, and the AI focused coins that give something back to the world, forcing a charitable donation. It's a shame that they aren't more popular/valuable. They're kneecapped by academia's schizoid relationship with computing in too many ways, but seem to have good teams and communities behind them.

My amateur opinion is that the flexibility of shown by Monero (changing their PoW algorithm) should be standard for all coins, as should the usefulness of work, like Gridcoin and Curecoin (not just 'securing the network'). Maybe something like a carbon tax, where exchanging the currency carries a contract to provide some proportional amount of work in a scientific project. Use a reverse Proof of Stake with a generational memory so that stake weight follows a coin for a while after each trade. The generational weight can be reduced by performing useful work. That useful work itself could be bought and sold, but disappears when spent maturing the traded coin.

I guess I'm trying to brainstorm a system that requires everyone to participate in useful work of unpredictable efficiency, where stability is added by punishing frequent exchanges, and holding the coin heals the wealth gap. Basically, if you're just acquiring money to 'have money' the system will deem you less important than someone acquiring money to 'use money', but forgives somewhat if you give back in computing power.

Just spitballing. I'm sure I'm missing a ton of details, but it was a fun exercise for me.

When the EFF commissioned the DES ASIC system for bruteforcing DES encryption in 1998, it only cost $210k [2]. I can only imagine design and fabrication costs have declined over 20 years.

"The whole project was budgeted at about US $210,000. Of this, $80,000 was used to design, integrate, and test the EFF DES Cracker. The other $130,000 was for materials including chips, boards and all other components on the boards, card cages, power supplies, cooling, and a PC. The software for controlling the EFF DES Cracker was written separately as a volunteer project that took 4-5 weeks. The entire project was completed within about eighteen months, with much of that time being used for preliminary research. The core team contained fewer than ten people, none of whom worked full-time on the project. The final cost came in at well under $250,000."

[1] https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_glossary/fft.php

[2] https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTM...

[+] Entire book on the subject the EFF published for the intellectually curious: https://archive.org/details/crackingdessecre00elec

EDIT: @fundemental: Would love to hear more about this if you're willing to share and have the time. Contact info is in my profile.

Most profits are reaped by retailers and resellers

-Actual rational behind letting people investing their savings in crypto be from an article I read

By the time we find out this isn't true, they will have successfully taken cash away...while we were all distracted. Can't wait for total financial surveillance. So excited. It's going to make the Big Dildo Refund joke completely non-understandable.

To be entirely safe when I go to the grocery store I could drive a tank, but a cost-benefit analysis reveals that I shouldn't.

As a thought experiment, what would happen right now if the mining incentive went to 0 and miners subsisted entirely on transaction fees? Would the system still be secure? (It's an important question since that's what will eventually happen with difficulty adjustments)

I don't understand how making it so energy intensive will level the playing field. Wouldn't that favor the existing financial authorities since they already have so much computing power and resources to begin with?