The "proof of space" Chia cryptocurrency:
I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth".
In all seriousness, I'm expecting the former. With current trends, the Chia currency is going to be "farming" so much storage that reward per TB will drop below the breakeven point for computing more "plots" to farm, or for even keeping existing "plots" online and taking up storage. It's just a bit hard to predict where that point is since Chia itself is just getting started and has yet to be extensively traded.
Prices go up => bubble pops => prices make next bubble viable.. etc.
You'd hope rational critical thought would stop the second cycle but even a charitable reading would say so far crypto has shown there are plenty of people not applying it. (and an uncharitable one would say it's the reason it exists at all... but lets skip that discussion for once).
As an ISP I can say that any software that caused a large percentage of our customers to max out their downstream and upstream connections 24x7 would be cracked down on hard. ISP economics, and the reason your residential last mile service might cost $65 a month and not $400, is based on oversubscription. IF you look at a traffic chart for each customer in from a random selection of 50 homes, it's very bursty and intermittent.
You can put a lot of individual 1GbE symmetric FTTH customers on a 10Gbps uplink, because the likelihood they'll be trying to run a speed test or all transfer huge things simultaneously is low. 'proof of bandwidth' would very quickly require people to start doing their thing from 1U servers in colocation on dedicated hosting 1GbE services, which will cost at least 6-8x what a residential last mile service costs.
In general as a residential ISP the number of customers who decide to leave a system seeding many 70GB 2160p h265 torrents of movies is quite low, and small enough to not need to bother the customers about. Not many people try to do the same thing as running a hosting facility out of their bedroom closet. Less than a few percent.
Some mechanism by which to speculate on the impact or future credibility of a paper would create some kind of prediction market
Proof of impact prediction?
But yeah, there is probably lots of interesting ways such a system would fail.
Buy it now, it definitely won't last forever! :D
Bu seriously, I still don't understand cryptocurrencies. So, your X discoin is worth Y million real money. But that's only while it's in cryptocurrency form.
If people start cashing out, the value will plummet, right? Only the first few will get close to the high value?
That seems very similar to a pyramid/ponzi scheme to me.
On that note, would it survive some catastrophic event? Like the Internet going down. A bunch of gold will. Hell, invest in power generators and batteries, those will survive and be worth a lot.
Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
Make a DoomCoin! It would keep 12 difficulty counters, one for each proof of whatever, and getting farthest ahead in one of them lets you mine a new block.
That way it can distort the prices of (sorry, "effectively allocate") CPUs, GPUs, disks, ASICs, RAM... anything else you can come up with.
Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain.
>Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
Yes, but it may be very slow the first period, as it would be used to the pre-collapse difficulty level.
Or a little story in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describing how a civilization collapsed, not with weapons but by binding all their resources in a recursive speculative bubble.
When the bubble pops, a lot of people are going to discover they were always broke.
As people sell, value plummets
That doesn’t make it a Ponzi scheme
Whereas if everyone sold crypto for $0.00000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, you would gain nothing by buying them all. You can only make money in crypto if people buy it at a higher price.
I get your hatred towards crypto, but you're cherry picking. If all money is BS and made up then good ol' stocks have good company with crypto in hell.
All companies either die or eventually pay dividends in one form or another. So, just because Amazon or whatnot has yet to pay a dividend doesn’t mean it will never pay one. People judge the probability of future dividends not just the pattern of past dividends because companies can fail, but they can also grow. Handing back money in the growth phase is considered an inefficient use of funds.
Meanwhile if you owned all of bitcoin and wanted to keep the current hash rate you’d have to pay in about $20 billion a year, maybe more.
From a cashflow perspective, one is certainly better than the other to own, even if you are barred from selling.
So basically if someone invented an eco-coin, that is a well-designed project fostering technologies focusing on healing the Earth (more efficient waste recycling, green energy, better air filters, new technologies for toxic and nuclear waste removal etc.), taking into account all the consequences of extreme popularity (none of the existing coins have, or they simply don't care), I'd be the first to invest in it, knowing that even if I lose, I win.