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Comment by akerro | Hacker News Reader

There are a few cryptocurrencies out there on market and usable with big communities that use 99% less energy and data that bitcoin

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I should do my own research but I’d appreciate if you can name a few of them.

I would name Nano, a very underrated cryptocurrency. Uses DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) instead of Proof of Work, so it doesn't do mining, also it has zero fees and minimal transaction times.

I've ran a full node for some time to support the network, the whole blockchain size was about 5GB, but the downside of zero transaction fees is that there is less incentive for people to run full nodes. I stopped mine out of boredom when the market crashed.

Unfortunately the market is so full of overhyped projects and buzzwords that people are no longer interested in something that just works.

If no fees, what are the incentives to accept transactions in a block?

Also, what stops you from spamming the network?

I've had concerns in this area as well, as far as I know the team performed some stress tests and the network can do 100+ transactions per second, maybe more. There is also a small computation that the hardware needs to perform before sending the transaction, which is only a small guard against spam but pretty useful.

afair peak of stress test on main network was >300TPS, on test network is was >1500TPS. there exists dedicated software to create wallets and transaction using GPU, just for stress testing.

A small PoW on each block, however for some reason it can be precomputed which allows you to precompute a spam attack (which has happened from the CEO of BrainBlocks recently..)

It's an interesting issue, although it's a good question if it is possible to stop network spam. Bitcoin's solution to network spam is to limit the amount of transactions and charge a fee, with the fee going up the higher the demand for a transaction.

I don't see this setup working with Nano, as much of the protocol is designed around not having fees. After all, deciding who gets the fees and splitting it (among top representatives?) causes even more processing on the network.

The stake in the network. Each transaction is validated by representatives whose votes are proportional to their stake in the network. An attacker would need to gain 50% of the network value to be able to do some damage.

You are not answering the question.

Users with high stakes generally want the network to run so their stakes aren't worthless. At least, that's the theory behind PoS.

PoS by itself doesn't incentivize you to include transactions. That's called the "nothing at stake" problem.

Algorand

The biggest on coinmarketcap that are not proof of work:

XRP, EOS, Tether, Stellar, Tron, Cardano.

All with >$1bn cap.

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