Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
I can only agree here. The problem with the current implementation is that they encourage hacks, exploits and all that stuff.
This can only be combated with another approach imo: Mining is not resource but time intensive. As in: No matter how many resources you throw at it, it doesn't matter whether you run the "miner" on one or 200 computers, it will still generate the same sum.
On how to exactly implement this would be open to discussion, but it at least combats the current issues cryptocurrencies cause to the whole industry at large.
This is how staking works for some cryptos, which replaces mining for the purpose of minting tokens. also called proof-of-stake (bitcoin is a proof-of-work).
edit: furthermore, bitcoin automatically adjusts the math to mint the same "amount" per cycle which is why energy and hardware becomes more and more competitive. it literally incentivizes people to use more and more energy to be competitive for mining rewards, even if it doesn't need to be that way. if bitcoin never exploded all over social media, mining would be "cheap", relatively speaking.
imo, bitcoin is an outdated cryptocurrency using archaic technology in quite literally every respect. there are far smarter, more modern, greater utility tokens, not to mention environmentally friendly solutions already available today. people just don't care as much because it's not all over social media. reality is, bitcoin is just the most popular, because it was the first cryptocurrency on the market. no other reason to it. it's really, quite useless, for anything except make money for its owners sitting on piles of it like it's gold.
but i have hope that, the more there are people who acquire awareness of the alternative cryptotechnologies, their functions and solutions, the sooner it could one day outpace bitcoin and similar useless tokens which holds its sole value from the proof-of-work concept. and hopefully shift the public consensus towards the future.
I'm pretty sure, Bitcoin will sooner or later be replaced by a more modern technology/project, pretty much because of the Energy usage (and growing concern around it), the inability to scale and the stubborn devs around it (just look at this issue and the actions of the core dev: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/21217).
I'm not even sure if this technology will be Blockchain, as (one) Blockchain just can't scale on a global scale.
Maybe it won't need any consensus algorithm, and be less datacentric, such as proposed in Holochain.
Yeah. Bitcoin was great as a proof-of-concept that decentralized currencies can exist, but it's not good for anything.
Its price is instable, privacy-wise it's worse that traditional bank transfers, and also slow.
If we could make special hardware (some kind that can be made with relative ease by anyone who has enough knowledge), we could base it on sensors that bind it to natural events somehow. Like, events that don't repeat too often.
I'm not sure how feasible this idea is.
I believe you should be measuring some global events so that results can be independently verified across the globe. Maybe measurement of some cosmic radiation? That would then be proof of time. If there is some radiation source that is periodic and globally observable it could work?
The thing about proof-of-work is that, while performing the work, you have to know about which block you're creating. You aren't doing generic work. You're doing work that's specific to the block data. If you wanted to double spend, you would have to re-do the work, because the work you did is only applicable to the exact block you mined.
And therein lies the problem with using a globally observable event like you've described: It is not tied to any particular block. I can use the radiation data from the fifth of March to mine a block, then use the same data to mine a conflicting block. "Nothing at stake" problem is related.
That's what I meant.
Although, cosmic radiation is problematic, because:
But in general good idea
i think for verification each full node should be taking measurements as well. But would this approach even allow for consensus? All the miners would observe the same event at the roughly same time so how would you even reach consensus for who gets the reward? Maybe this wouldn't work after all :(