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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

Are there any successful cryptocurrencies that aren't based on proof-of-waste? El Salvador's and Panama's moves seem like the start of a bad trend.

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nano is interesting to watch. it is one of those DAGs/lattices, like stellar. they were vulnerable to spam and got written off after a couple exchange scams soured the early adopters and ddoses brought the network to a halt, but years later they’ve patched the place up and maybe it’ll work

there’s even a cute/terrifying faucet app, “wenano”, where people can setup a geofence and disburse funds to anyone who shows up, pokemon go style

mostly a dollar or two for being in a certain city, but I can imagine the chaos that allowing more specific geofences and higher bounties can cause.

on the other hand, humanitarian crisis on the turkish border? some benevolents can set up a free-money faucet right in the middle of the refugee camp, people around the world can “top off” the faucet and keep the the funds flowing

freaky future coming up quick

> there’s even a cute/terrifying faucet app, “wenano”, where people can setup a geofence and disburse funds to anyone who shows up, pokemon go style

How does that work, can't you just fake the location service on your phone and "be" there? Or do they require 24/7 tracking and checking whether you've been a the airport etc?

I’ll try it tomorrow and let you know, I was looking up ways to spoof gps through devtools but I can imagine some countermeasures, namely, comparing your location when you try to claim a faucet and deciding you arrived awfully fast from newfoundland to the maltese islands.

If I can only teleport my location as fast as I can drive, it would hardly be worth it.

Create a million accounts, each spread out in a grid around the world. Then, as soon as a claimable geolocation appears, you use the closest to claim it!

That is why developing proof-of-location is important.

what’s the state of the art? I always imagined you could just have some random number generator sunk into concrete somewhere and do kind of like the authenticator apps do: turn the crank on the RNG to produce the next key. except instead of having 30 seconds to type it in, your phone would have like .3 milliseconds to communicate that to the geo-beacon to prove that you’re nearby, then the geobeacon can sign your attestation and you can use that proof however you want

Aha, they have no verification or captcha even for creating accounts. I’m sure its already being done.

Ethereum is right now in the process of migrating to proof-of-stake.

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/

Miners are already staking using the more energy-efficient validation.

Running a T-account in Excel is even more energy-efficient.

A recent report "Energy Footprint of Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms Beyond Proof-of-Work" (http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/UC...) has estimated (Table VI) the energy consumed per transaction of leading proof-of-stake and found that some exceed the efficiency of VisaNet (including Eth 2.0 on a high-throughput projection):

  Platform | Per transaction (kW h/tx)
  Eth. 2.0 |   0.00009 – 0.00286 (High throughput projection)
  Eth. 2.0 |   0.01823 – 0.55713 (Low throughput projection)
  Algorand |   0.00017 – 0.00534
  Cardano  |   0.01239 – 0.37854
  Polkadot |   0.00378 – 0.11556
  Tezos    |   0.00036 – 0.01096
  Bitcoin  | 360.39300 – 3691.40700
  VisaNet  |   0.00358

Yes.

There are a number of "Level 1" blockchains[1] that are proof-of-stake.

Ethereum is moving to PoS. Algorand was just announced as the level 1 chain for the El Salvador[2], while Cardano and Solana are both pretty big chains. Other contenders include NEAR.

[1] https://medium.com/the-capital/layer-1-vs-layer-2-what-you-n...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/el-salvador-develop-blockchai...

If you count market cap as success, the PoS protocol Cardano (ADA) is currently at #3, right behind the two big ones (BTC and ETH).

If you mean successful adoption as a currency, there is no such thing yet, PoW or PoS.

Market cap is a useless metric. All altcoins without exception are a leveraged way to play Bitcoin.

You’re free to offer your definition of success, then.

Don't know, perhaps decentralization?

What about it?

Well I guess bitcoin remains the most established. I guess they could switch to ether at some point if it goes well, but I remember something about ether not being fully decentralized? I'm not even a crypto nut but these are pretty interesting developments

Indeed: https://bitcoinera.app/arewedecentralizedyet/

Why would anyone look beyond Bitcoin defeats me

Monero is far superior with regards to anonimity, if that’s what you’re looking for.

*anonymity

Bitcoin's Lightning Network is private enough, thank you very much.

It's great if it's private enough for you, but not everyone is satisfied with LN's level of privacy. Your original question was why anyone would use a different cryptocurrency.

Thank you for correcting me, but since you yourself wrote a comment saying "Why would anyone look beyond Bitcoin defeats me", I’m wondering if you really corrected me because you believe spelling and grammar are important.

Are you personally not satisfied with LN's level of privacy? If you're not, mind explaining why?

Mozilla wants the W3C to reject any proposals that rely on Bitcoin because of the energy use: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2021Sep...

Solana has had quite a month.

https://www.notboring.co/p/solana-summer

>Solana uses a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism plus Proof of History, a decentralized source of time that Solana Labs CEO and founder Anatoly Yakovenko told me is “the implementation of the arrow of time in math.” Sounds mind-bending, and it is, but what it means is that transactions on Solana are verifiably ordered without all nodes needing to agree simultaneously. That’s what makes it so fast.

At the rate it's been growing, relative to other major coins, it could be a top 4-5 coin very soon. It currently sits right behind Binance Coin and Tether at #6. https://www.coingecko.com/en

Can you define proof of waste? I haven't heard of that protocol?

My money is on Ethereum getting there first while pointing out it's unfair to call something creating value pure waste. Siding with gold miners and bloated corrupt banking systems as the future on a tech site seems weird.

There are many alternatives to the proof of work concept. Cardano uses proof of stake with a fraction of energy cost and is academic proven with 100+ peer reviewed papers. Beautiful project

I read a interesting take on this, in case you're interested: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/daa93b9686f554ac7097158383b...

That article performs some sleight of hand, where nodes "control" the currency. Nodes sign transactions publicly, they don't control anything. They can't covertly pick the wrong transaction to sign, if they do it will be very visible.

I mean, I may be wrong, but don't consensus between miners determine whether a block is valid or not? Specifically, 51% of mining power determines this, AFAIK.

Yes, but you can verify blocks independently and see that someone verified a block that was actually invalid. It's not something that can remain secret.

But you won't verify the blockchain and call every node to say "hey! big corp X is cheating". The consensus protocol is what it is and if 51% agree on anything it will go on. We are at the mercy of 4 giants messing with the chain. Also probably simple double spending could be noticed and proven wrong but, for instance, rolling back a transaction would still be possible breaking the immutability of the blockchain.

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