Fictional Cryptocurrencies
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
I also have a cryptocurrency, it's called IdiotCoin. Only a single idiot exists and I own it. It can be divided into 2^64-1 dolts. If you want to buy a dolt from me, the cost is one US cent, however, for every dolt purchased I will double the price of the next dolt. So you see, the value of dolts will always exponentially increase, provided the US dollar doesn't inflate even faster. This is great because it means that no matter when you purchase a dolt you are guaranteed to see the value double as soon as someone else buys a dolt from me. If you buy a dolt from someone else the price could of course be lower, and they'll be giving you one hell of a deal!
Banned because: The pyramid scheme was too obvious
What are the chances that you won't create another IdiotCoin out of air tomorrow, thereby inflating its value and decreasing the value of my dolts?
> What are the chances that you won't create another IdiotCoin out of air tomorrow, thereby inflating its value and decreasing the value of my dolts?
By the time the last dolt is sold, I will have made more money than actually exists in the world many times over. I'm not that greedy.
If we can print money to bail out the hedge funds, we can print it to buy up Dolts!
1. It’s an investment of money. 2. It’s a common enterprise. 3. You can expect to make money from the efforts of others.
It's also not a security because it's a token.
I made it recently, after having the idea years ago when I worked at Coinbase. I didn't do it then because I wasn't sure that the SEC would get the joke. It seems like maybe they would have, because they would later make a site for HoweyCoins[2]
I published the site and made a post on LinkedIn. I also had an accompanying joke startup persona. It did not really go as I hoped. No one got the joke. People commented on my pivot, or asked to buy. Old coworkers I emailed about it ignored it, assumably numb to crypto announcements.
I might as well dump the rest of the content here[3].
[1]https://orangegrovecoin.com/ [2]https://www.howeycoins.com/ [3]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q1zkWGth2xcg581K81S4X6-P...
Now if we can just get Masayoshi Son on board and use the word "quantum" a lot!
I may even be mistakenly referring to the satoshi nonces
[1]: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about
[2]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5218972
[3]: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/08389f34c98c606322740c0be6...
This coin’s value is related to how much energy you drew from the power grid in order to mine it. More power? More money!
But yes I see what you are saying.
As I said, this is rather well discussed by various economists. See for example https://mises.org/wire/inflation-beginners
There's been an uptick of crypto fanboys coming to this forum lately. I'm fine with that and the technology is interesting. However, if you try to pollute our space with ideologies and conspiracy theories about the fed, you will not be unchallenged. Just like USD, crypto has downsides. Do not sweep the downsides of crypto under the rug for some utopiaic ideology. Be reasonable.
If somebody steals your crypto and you know her/his identity, you can still go through courts to get it back (provided you are paying your taxes; which you can pay today in crypto in some jurisdictions).
Now, before you tell me: but most of the time when someone steals your crypto you don't know who is it. Well: you need better IT security/know-how (same as when people were starting to use the internet on the late-80s or 90s).
PS: Cryptocurrency is not about not paying taxes. In fact I think taxes would be easier to collect if every merchant implemented this payment system.
BTW I had my doubts about if it's true that the state can incarcerate you for not paying taxes, and it turns out that if you are considered a person to be in a state of bankruptcy, some laws such as the 14th Amendment prevent you to get jailed. Read more about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors%27_prison#Modern_debto...
But you're missing the point about "automatic conversion": the USD has to come from somewhere. Converting from BTC isn't transmutation - the BTC is sold for USD. The transaction happens in USD and must come from available USD for BTC sellers.
So what? So long as the USD exists, there will always be liquidity in the BTCUSD orderbooks. And the conversion can be done by the state itself when getting paid (see my link about Miami).
There is only liquidity in the order book if more people wish to obtain BTC in return for USD at the price you wish to sell at than wish to sell at that price. There is no particular property of Bitcoin that ensures this will be the case (the "it will hold its value because people will want it as a store of value" reasoning is entirely circular).
On the other hand, the USD has the property of being legally guaranteed to be able to settle 1USD worth of debt (and the design of the financial system ensures there will always be people who need dollars to discharge their debts). So it's "backed" by mountains of debt.
46k USD has the unique property of being sure to be able to pay a $46k bill on a future date. $46k worth of anything else relies on your ability to swap it for at least $46k actual dollars closer to that date. Some of those non-dollar things have other useful properties like being able to live in them that compensate for the downside risk of losing money in a future exchange, others directly pay you coupons and/or have collateral associated with them. A BTC has no consumption benefit, legal claims on anything or coupon payment to compensate you for the risk you might not be able to exchange it for $46k when that bill is due - it's as pure an example of "fiat" creation of assets not backed by anything at all as you're ever likely to see. The only thing it's really got going for it is being more durable than, say, $46k of fruit, but that applies to a lot of other physical and financial products.
Some people have devised contracts whereby they owe others Bitcoins, but those obligations are comparatively tiny in comparison with the quantity of Bitcoins out there, Bitcoins are not legal tender anywhere, and the issuing of new Bitcoins is not backed by BTC-denominated debt, or anything else.
It is possible for a sufficiently incompetently managed central bank to create an asset almost as unlikely to be needed to make payments as your average cryptocurrency.
Dubious. I've had the police tell me or others I know something to the effect of 'let us know if you find anything out, we will never catch them' half a dozen times across both coasts. Teams of investigators on your case for long periods of time is a privilege generally reserved for the rich (or the big cases if you're more generous than I). If you have a good enough case to get a refund through the courts they will order a refund of crypto just the same as with USD, a PlayStation, or a stolen motorcycle.
>You can pay taxes with it.
This it a truism. The state that issues a currency lets you pay taxes with it? I Don't think that's slipping by anyone talking about bitcoin.
>It is backed by a strong authority
It is backed by the trustworthiness of the US government and financial system, which is debatable at best.
>is used as the reserve currency/economic driver of the world's countries.
Is now doesn't mean it will continue to be. The US continues to print money and sell off gold reserves in staggering numbers. Maybe it will work out, but I'm not holding out hope. China is buying gold in huge numbers, and look to be positioning themselves to be the new reserve currency.
I've also read some compelling arguments that the USD as a reserve currency is propped up by US militarism and geopolitical games with oil pricing but I haven't done enough research to come to that conclusion myself.
>It is stable and does not suffer price volatility.
Discussed ad nauseum. Change from buying a sandwich with bitcoin a few years ago can buy a nice used car now, while the value of the dollar has dropped for decades. Short term volatility averages out pretty well into the long term trend, especially against a currency that is trending in the opposite direction. If volatility is an issue, dollar cost averaging is a simple and effective way to mitigate it.
>Fortunes do not get lost if they are in cash at the bank.
This happens regularly throughout history though. You also assume that they are "in the bank". As of March the Fed lowered reserve requirements to zero.[1]
We are only a decade into cryptocurrency, the technology is still moving very fast. With things like hardware wallets, M of N keys, and social recovery wallets it's getting harder and harder to lose it all. It's programmable, you could write something cool to help prevent it like time-locked or time-unlocked transactions?
>There's been an uptick of crypto fanboys coming to this forum lately.
Your account is only a month old. Presumably you've been lurking for a long time. Maybe you should give the same benefit of the doubt to others? Lots of old hands don't talk about it from their primary accounts because the fun money they put in it years ago is worth millions.
>if you try to pollute our space
This entire paragraph is polluting HN.
1: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
That's something you read on the internet and that people keep repeating without having any understanding of. In reality it's quite far from the truth, because most fraudsters don't just steal your money and keep it on their accounts. They use fictional shell companies, they move the money around, they steal identities etc... The money is just not there to be returned.
Yes, you can go to the courts, but they are not going to magically give you some new money if there is none to be taken back, or none to be found. This is a very common occurrence.
Also courts only even help when there are very large sums involved. In all other cases it still costs more to go to the court than there is money to be saved, so it's a oot point.
Oh, and above all, the courts work exactly the same way with crypto, haven't you noticed this? Stealing is illegal and can be dealt with in courts, whether it's USD or BTC, it doesn't matter to the court. So what is the point of mentioning this?? If your fraudster still has their BTC, the court will get them back. Government has also seized a lot of BTC from criminals, so again, it's working exactly as USD in this regard.
Me: "There's been fraud on my card." (to the tune of $1000)
Teller: "Are you sure it wasn't a family member or a mistaken purchase?"
Me: "Yeah, the charges were in Texas and I haven't been to Texas in years."
Teller: "Great. hands me a printout of recent charges and a highlighter Can you highlight all of the unauthorized charges?"
Me: "Sure."
Teller: "Ok, we'll provisionally credit you the amount back to your account, while your claim gets reviewed; you'll have access to it immediately, but will be liable to pay it back if the claim gets denied. We'll let you know when the claim approval is finalized, which usually takes 2-3 weeks. We'll get you a new card, which should arrive in 2-3 days, if you don't get it by the third day, let us know."
Me: "Thanks!"
The merchant usually CAN make the bank eat the losses, nit that requires pre-approving each transaction and higher fees, so many merchants skip it (at least until bitten hard)
They don't, they pass it on to the merchant. This is why working with credit cards or paypal is a pain for a lot of merchants and that's why you as a user have to sometimes jump through hoops to just verify yourself. Merchants have to do this because they know that they will be paying in case of you getting defrauded.
Revise this scenario with cash money and notice the similarities.
(A bit black humor, but since it's not a serious topic anyway, I think it's ok for HN for once).
Is it weird that I translate this as military empire?
... the governing authority is constantly managing supply to ensure a 2% level of average inflation :) thereby ensuring resiliency to shocks like global pandemics, and varying population and productivity.
It's also digital, and thankfully, not programmable, because DAO. There's a reason there's no "USLaws.exe" - the vast majority of contract law is about figuring in externalities that failed to be included in the original contract.
The downside of course is the conspiracy theories.
Reasonable people can differ on whether capitalizing an internet currency is productive or not.
Makes me wonder, does hacker news have a minimum age policy? I think there would be few younger readers..
You are allowed to double spend as long as the two expenditures are outside each other's light cones.
The technolibertarian ideology that was in some of his earlier writing were replaced with more authoritarian & leftist views so he said "BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions." as if it was a bad thing.
P.S, what's the basis of your username? Any relation to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross ?
Future generations may look back on mandatory financial surveillance the same way we look back on general warrants.
Especially because the claims don't match the requirements. If you want to make sure someone is paying their income tax, you don't need to know who the buyer is. But the same is true of sales tax, which is likewise collected by the seller.
And it's the buyer who most needs privacy. The mosque or synagogue or gay bar or abortion clinic or adult book store may not be hiding what it is from the government, but their patrons shouldn't have to reveal that they're patrons.
Yet if you try to activate a prepaid credit card, they want your name. For what?
And, no, FINCEN DGAF if you spend it at any of those places. They DO care if it turns out some of those places are laundering a lot of crime money, and they DO care if you get dozens of those cards and spend 90% of it at one of the launderer's places. they will also care if you are working in a scam organization that convinces marks to send payment as prepaid card codes, and you are cashing those cards...
If it is untraceable and at all scaleable, you can guarantee that organized crime is using it to launder money, and that there will be real efforts to make it traceable.
The problem is that it doesn't actually work for organizations with that level of resources.
A multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise doesn't need prepaid cards to launder their money. They can buy arbitrary amounts of soybeans or crude oil or laundry detergent. There is nothing suspicious or even illegal about a shipping container full of soybeans. Anybody can cook up some books that say that Alice paid Bob a billion dollars for soybeans and Bob paid Alice a billion dollars for licensing intellectual property netting to zero, when it was really a billion dollars under the table and the intellectual property was worthless. Then the commodity goes to whatever country, get sold on the commodity market there and turns back into money.
That's assuming they don't just use Bitcoin.
That's assuming they don't just keep doing this:
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...
Anti-money laundering laws are a failed experiment. They don't work. They cost far more than they're worth.
Obviously, this is not their sole means of laundering, and your other examples are some likely ploys at other scales. But any large scale organized crime venture is fractal, it goes from the global scale, all the way down to the entry-level neighborhood crooks, and your shipping or IP ploy doesn't work for a wide range of scams, but $billions in small-scale cards do. Same for BTC, where you can transfer billions, but how do you smurf out $1billion into $USD? it's got to be 101K++ transactions under $10K, and widely distributed.
What your article proves is that your last line is completely wrong. The criminal breaking the law again means that the applied penalty was an insufficient deterrent. The prosecutors and judges did not apply sufficient penalties. Cutting the profits of HBSC is insufficient, they need to apply the tracking and *jail* the mgt/execs that allow it.
The Anti-money laundering laws work *to the extent that they are enforced*. Lack of enforcement does not mean the law doesn't work.
Your small desire to evade a nonexistent and ineffective scrutiny about where you spend your VISA gift card does not outweigh the need for the still-democratic countries to attempt to survive an onslaught of transnational organized crime attempting to implement autocracies to enable their crime.
But there are thousands of other methods, arbitrarily many, for doing the same thing at any scale.
> Same for BTC, where you can transfer billions, but how do you smurf out $1billion into $USD? it's got to be 101K++ transactions under $10K, and widely distributed.
I'm not really seeing the difference.
Option one, the dealers make $9000 in cash, go buy $9000 worth of some non-perishable commodity and put it in a shipping container. Repeat until the shipping container is full, then ship it to the place they want the money to end up.
Option two, do the same thing with Bitcoin. All they need is someone willing to sell Bitcoin for cash.
> The prosecutors and judges did not apply sufficient penalties.
The War on Drugs fallacy. "The problem isn't that the entire thing is an exercise in futility, it's that the penalty isn't high enough."
The criminals discount the penalty regardless of what it is because they don't expect to get caught. They're often right.
> Your small desire to evade a nonexistent and ineffective scrutiny about where you spend your VISA gift card
You've being overly flippant about the legitimate concerns and chilling effects of surveillance on vulnerable populations who have to worry about not only what the data is used for today, but what will happen to them if the winds change and the data on what they do today is still in the database five years from now.
> the need for the still-democratic countries to attempt to survive an onslaught of transnational organized crime attempting to implement autocracies to enable their crime.
Or you could just decriminalize drugs and put them all out of business.
However, if you think that will put them out of biz, think again.
Start with the RUS govt which is a straight-up kleptocracy, a trans-national crime syndicate, which has literally stolen 90%+ of the nations wealth into the hands of a few dozen oligarchs (start reading up a bit on Simeon Mogilevich). Their biggest problem is laundering money, and they are exporting authoritarianism. We are currently under Asymmetric Warfare attack, and it is on all fronts.
Meanwhile, there is no govt agency FINCEN, NSA, or otherwise that is authorized or even GAF in the slightest about any marginal person. Your propposed threat model is just silly in the real world. What, some agent with terabytes of data streaming in is going to do what, find some trans person buying a dildo and send a local cop out to bust their taillight? Seriously, they've all got better stuff to do.
None of us are that important, unless we start using those cards to smurf funds for terrorists or foreign powers -- THEN we WANT them to notice.
BTW, if you think it is bad here, go check out the rights marginalized people have in RUS or similar authoritarian regimes. What is being fought for is the right to NOT have such an authoritarian govt here.
Quite the contrary, the way you fight against untaxed money is exactly by monitoring who the buyer is - you fight against the "dark economy" on the edges where it interfaces with the legitimate one, relying on the fact that most of the things one might want to buy come from the legitimate sellers, so you put up limits so that one can't buy anything for large amounts of cash or equivalent without identifying themselves and (indirectly) their sources of income. The gay bar or abortion clinic would be out of scope simply because the amounts spent there are relatively tiny, but for all the large spending (e.g purchasing property, Teslas, etc) the tax verification definitely wants to identify the buyers.
How would you value non-monetary assets? And let's say I hated someone, could I get a group of assessors to overvalue their house and put them into bankruptcy?
One cool idea I've seen proposed is mandatory sales. So maybe once a year, you have to specify a value for everything you own, and people can buy it from you for that value. So you can set your sentimental value as high as you like, and make it impossible for anyone to buy your valued property. But then taxes are calculated off that value...
To start, it shows a complete lack of respect for the right of ownership. Under this system you wouldn't own anything and would be subjected to compensated theft regularly. This system would simultaneously represent the worst ideas of what Socialist and capitalistic life can be.
To an anti-socialist, socialism represents theft. The problem is the forcible reappropriation of assets. The justification for this is twofold: property being theft in itself & it being immoral to deprive the in-need of assets you don't need. Private property represents theft since claims must begin somewhere and that somewhere is the state of nature, the commons. In our imagined socialist commonwealth, goods ought to be for the benefit of all. The problem with this is that some goods are exclusive by nature. Only I can wear the clothes on my back, it's more hygienic if we have a toothbrush each and frankly we should have enough goods that, in general, we don't need to argue over use. For this socialists make a distinction between private and personal property. This distinction diminishes possession but at least it comes from a place of wanting help for others. Mandatory sales mean your rights are trumped by capital, or more accurately those holding it.
If mandatory sales apply literally to all goods then go ahead and take the clothes off my back. There's little room for dignity when those richer than you can take even the most sentimental of belongings. Why don't we go a step further? Apply the concept the any service a person may provide, recognise that sex work is real work and you've just legalised rape.
This may seem a disproportionate response but I'm sick of people being so detached that they think reengineering society is something to be taken lightly. Reminds me of a sketch which had the line
> Have you tried 'raise VAT' and 'kill all the poor'?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg
I'm sure any objection I have could be rebutted with something which amounts to 'there are loopholes'.
Yo I see your point but that simply logically doesn't work. You can't get taxed for a service that you don't provide, so just set your rate to infinity.
This would make sense in a world where skills themselves were commodities that could be straightforwardly bought and sold...? But I think such a world would have a very different take on prostitution.
(Sometimes I wish they were blandly tagged at the end like Aesop's Fables to avoid some of these conversations, because we're living in a post-Poe's Law Singularity and subtlety is all too often easily overlooked.)
Pertinently, he just wrote about Neptune's Brood and medium money recently:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central...
That sounds like the currency in Artemis by Andy Weir (of The Martian fame) which used "slugs" as a currency on Luna:
> “It’s short for soft-landed grams. S-L-G. Slug. One slug gets one gram of cargo delivered from Earth to Artemis, courtesy of KSC.” “It’s technically not a currency,” Trond said from the credenza. “We’re not a country; we can’t have a currency. Slugs are pre-purchased service credit from KSC. You pay dollars, euros, yen, whatever, and in exchange you get a mass allowance for shipment to Artemis. You don’t have to use it all at once, so they keep track of your balance.” ... “It ended up being a handy unit for trade. So KSC is functioning as a bank. You’d never get away with that on Earth, but this isn’t Earth.”
> One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies – and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day – has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful.
> Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours.
> The lawsuits are ... random. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age discrimination – against companies with no employees – complaints about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.
> Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds – up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing for companies – and they've chosen him as their target.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
I feel like he contributed a lot to gelling those ideas together, but he didn't really predict them so much as extrapolate them out -- plus, as others have said, sketched out their downsides. Which is what SF authors are meant to do! Everybody on those lists thought that they would become world-changing technologies -- Later Charlie carefully added the "...and what if that was a really bad thing". Chaumian e-cash had already launched and gone bankrupt by the time Accelerando was being written.
When my start-up was failing, the team decided to diversify and explore new ideas. The CEO called me one day and said "RenlyCoin" I said, no thank you. The CTO called me later and he said it's actually a pretty good idea. I said no thank you. We met with our investor and turns out they had already pitched it to him. I said we have no business doing crypto. We should instead try to figure out why things are not working. Yes, among the co-founders I held the title Naysayer.
Turns out the CTO didn't come up with the idea. It was not the CEOs idea either, well it was a new friend of his that proposed it. He would create the coin for us for only $25k. he would take care of everything.
They did, they gave him the money.
Banned because: Well not banned really, because they never saw him again. I only learned about it two weeks after they couldn't get a hold of him. I left the start-up.
Would require high conviction by the first participants.
edit: Hm, maybe you could use nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers for the public addresses, like a hash of that day's closing prices.
This is not true. Bitcoin energy consumption is somewhere between Chile and Argentina.
Fictional because they never issued it
2.) I truly enjoyed that, especially how it's interlinked with your other satire to create this dumb little alternate universe. Thanks for the laugh, you're funny, keep it up.
They even have merchandising (I don't think that's real, but at least they seem to have paid some models to pose with the masks, t-shirts and so on).
And of course, it includes a whitepaper (link at the bottom) to add credibility!!! I didn't click anything on this website for obvious reasons, but would be curious to know what's in that whitepaper.
It was only then I learned that all processes are mere pretext for the discretion of the people who control them. How naive I was. :)
Why do you feel this way? Couldn't there be a democratic mechanism to asset allocation? A democratically master-planned community wouldn't be unfathomable. Issue municipal debt with GovCoin serviced by taxes generated by the community.
An internal GovCoin would technically work very well, as unincorporated project billings and budgets aren't real money inside large organizations. The main question is, for who? It would obviate layers of management in organizations whose main purpose is to generate layers of management. The only time real money gets exchanged is during settlement with outside vendors, otherwise, it's fiat funny money run through multiple inconsistent departmental ledgers.
Imagine it working inside a university, and then expand that to government ministries, as they're organized in essentially the same way. They don't want a means of exchange based on consumer need or desire, they want to decide based on narrative discussions.
Perhaps there's value in sidestepping the institutions entirely. The bitcoin playbook if you will. Cutting out layers of management seems to be a popular idea.
Nevada recently passed a law that would allow companies to incorporate towns that have the authority of a county.
Would love to see a kick-started GovCoin like the DAO where investors and future residents can collaborate on a brand new government tailored with the customers -- I mean "citizens" interests in mind. Start with a clean slate and build a new model society that can be forked and cloned globally.
EMACoin: proof-of-stake, the more swap used, the more one can stake. Use M-x C-mine. Supports smart contracts using a LISP dialect.
EdCoin: proof-of-standard. It is the one standard coin, that raises above all others. Its only block can be mined but the output is always the same, always consistent, by standard. There is only one coin, labelled `?`. It is the one true coin, the path to Nirvana. See `man coin`.
I'd like to add one I just thought off in the same vain.
Sudokucoin, where the chain is advanced by the first person solving a complex puzzle (by hand) which the hash of which generates the next complex puzzle, using added skull chips accelerating the trans-human evolution.
And Properdogecoin, where the first dog bringing the ball back shows proof of work and is a good boy. May lead to a lot of puppy death by fatigue though so I'm not on board with this one.
When the endorphins kicked in my poor brain would start spewing ever more tenuous ICO concepts.
IIRC that was right about when I was not buying $BTC because "18,000 is nuts!" Clearly the endorphin-high brain was on the right track.
OCEAN’S ELEVEN: Danny Ocean, The Organizer, gets a crack team back together to pull off One More Big Heist—of an online casino. He recruits The Acrobat, The Demolitions Expert, The Pickpocket, The Two Expert Mechanics, The Inside Man Who Works At The Casino, and The Hacker—and then he fires everyone but The Hacker, sits in a Starbucks for twenty minutes guessing the right password, and makes off with millions of bitcoin. Or, rather: logs off with. The End.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: Captain Jack Sparrow, drunkenly interrogating an ancient mariner at a pirate speakeasy, hears tell of a USB stick with millions of bitdubloons that the Dread Pirate Blackbeard had on him when he sank in the Bermuda Triangle. As everyone knows, USB sticks aren’t waterproof, and those funds are mathematically impossible to recover. The End.
THE MATRIX: Nothing changes for Neo one day when he learns that he lives inside The Matrix, a new virtual currency. While he admits that such an existence has no intrinsic worth, he is afraid to leave “because what if the price skyrockets, and I miss out?” And besides, getting in or out of the Matrix entails a small fee. The End.
SCARFACE: Cuban ex-con Tony Montana arrives in ‘80s Miami with dreams of both being a drug kingpin AND snagging a hot wife to match. Unfortunately for him, the Silk Road—a site on the dark web where people can anonymously buy illegal substances via bitcoins—has long run mom-and-pop drug empires out of business, Amazon-dot-com style, through a combination of customer convenience and economies of scale. Tony works, peacefully, as a dishwasher in a diner. The End.
ALADDIN: Jafar, advisor to the Sultan of Agrabah, marries the Princess Jasmine after many years of canny political maneuvering against her dim-witted father. There was a magic cave full of legendary treasure that could have shaken things up, but it’s protected by strong encryption and no one can open it. The End.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD: Prospector Daniel Plainview discovers a bitcoin mine in his computer. He doesn’t go crazy or anything, because everyone’s computer can be a bitcoin mine—you just download the program. No one gets hurt, especially not Paul Dano. The End.
BREWSTER’S MILLIONS: Montgomery Brewster is in the bathroom one day when an email tells him he’s inherited 7 million bitcoins from his uncle—but there’s a twist: he only gets the 7 million if he can spend a separate, 1 million bitcoin inheritance from his grandfather within one year, under strict stipulations in the relatives' respective wills, both of which were implemented as “smart contracts” on what is known as “the blockchain”. There’s a bug in grandpa’s smart contract which makes the rules trivial to circumvent, and the anonymized nature of bitcoin makes it impossible for the ludditical old executor to enforce the will via his normal legal means. Brewster does some cursory googling, launders the first million bitcoins through a server in the Cayman Islands, and inherits all 8 million of the bitcoins before he gets off the toilet. The End.
I could envision a special new processor, eg something neuromorohic, that can perform unique algorithms at low power that are expensive to simulate on cpus or GPUs. Then if these are cheap enough to manufacture, the mining must be done on the special device to be worthwhile, and then the mining would have tiny energy impact. I would hope it would be a milliwattcoin. It would only take a milliwatt to mine a block and create a coin, but it could still take 10 mins.
Somehow I think there is a contradiction here, but at the same time it sounds alluring.
Proof of work does this since it takes a lot of money to buy and run miners, the mining proves you spent this money so you get your votes.
The idea behind proof of stake is that you skip the mining entirely and just say the users with the most coins under their name get the most votes in the system. It achieves the same result without having to buy hardware or electricity.
While this is definitely better than the outrageous waste of energy promoted by BitCoin and other proof-of-work crypto coins, the fact that BitCoin has been so popular for so long proves that it doesn't matter if it actually is "good" as a crypto coin or not: all that matters is whether people believe its price will keep going up - even on HN you see people who couldn't care less if its energy consumption is on par with Argentina's as long as they can make a few bucks betting on it.
Each attack vector and its risks are addressed in detail: https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/attack-vectors/
Sending money is instant (as in, sub-second), doesn't require confirmations or mining. It seems too good to be true, but I've read the white paper and can't find a flaw (doesn't mean there aren't any, of course).
My only criticism is that running a validator node isn't incentivized, which might be an issue, but due to the design of the coin you only need people to choose enough different validator that one doesn't have a significant percentage of people on it.
Early in the project there was even an effort to create a different kind of specialized processor like you mention, something low-power that could be used in the wild in sensors and whatnot.
Proof of work: reading random bullshit on the internet about fictional cryptos.