[darawk]

Cryptocurrencies aren't going away. Which means that if your primary motivation to not work on cryptocurrency is that it wastes energy, then there's a whole lot of room for you to be making it better, and that is a stupid motivation. I'm not saying that they are obligated to work on it because it wastes energy. But the comment I was responding to implied that distributed systems engineers didn't want to work on blockchains because they are wasteful - which is clearly illogical. That'd be like Elon Musk not working on electric cars because they're inefficient. Or Solar cells. Etc, etc..

[jethro_tell]

No that's not illogical, Why would I work to bend something like block chain, that was designed to be inefficent, to my will when I can just start from scratch using projects that were designed to be efficient first? That's very logical, the kind of decision that an engineer that's getting paid the make the best distributed system for the least money would make.

[darawk]

It's not designed to be inefficient. It's designed to solve the distributed consensus problem in an adversarial environment. There are other now proposed mechanisms of doing that (e.g. PoS) that are quite efficient. Working on those would be extremely beneficial to the cause of environmental efficiency.

[jethro_tell]

Evironmental efficiently solving a problem I don't have is still inefficient. I still can't think of a mojor user for proof of work in a destributed system. I have trouble thinking of a distributed system that someone would pay for to not be centrally trusted, usually by the benefactor of employment? We always hear what a great solution blockchain is. Even if that's true, I never hear the actual problem it solves. Sure, say distributed ledger, and proof of work but those are solutions of sorts.

Name a problem that would best be solved with blockchain.

[ExactoKnight]

The block chain offers the following unique benefits for asset transfer:

- Assets move directly between entities — transfer and settlement are one-and-the-same — eliminating counterparty risk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_risk#Counterparty_risk)

- Assets move instantly, and settlement time is ~10 minutes (settlement can also be instant if the parties trust the other won’t “double spend”)

- The transfer mechanism is public infrastructure and is always improving — everyone has a shared incentive to make it better, similar to Internet protocols like email and http

- Assets and end-user data are privately controlled, and strong security for assets can be achieved by using multiple signing keys across several parties

- Policy rules about the movement of assets can be enforced programmatically — whether those are “terms and conditions” or regulatory requirements

- Assets are fungible and play nice together — e.g., you can use reward points to buy mobile minutes

- A single transaction can include multiple entities and assets, on both sides of the transaction — e.g., you could execute a merger of two companies in a single transaction, with the inputs to the transaction being all stockholders across all share classes for both companies, and the outputs being all the newco shares going to all the new stockholders (again, no escrow service needed)

- Every transaction is added to an immutable record which, while anonymous, can be used to construct a perfect audit trail of an asset’s movement when combined with the private data held by the entities using the system — this defends against fraud, and also gives issuers transparency into asset movements

- It’s easy to integrate new parties

- Like the Internet itself, it’s a global system

Worth a read: https://blog.chain.com/wall-street-meet-block-chain-b2747909...

[darawk]

> Name a problem that would best be solved with blockchain.

Money. E.g. Bitcoin.

[dogecoinbase]

Bitcoin as money has all the worst properties of both credit cards (traceable, non-anonymous) and cash (irreversible, theft-prone).

[darawk]

It isn't intrinsically theft prone, the UI around using it is just not up to snuff yet. Credit cards, on the other hand, are intrinsically theft prone. They are a pull architecture. Every time you use your credit card, the store takes money from you. This is patently absurd, and the only reasonable definition of 'theft prone'. Bitcoin is a push architecture. You can never take my bitcoin, I can only send you bitcoin. Further, irreversibility is definitely what you want in the underlying protocol. It's fine if people want to implement escrowing and chargebacks via intermediaries on top of Bitcoin, and I would encourage that. But at a fundamental level, a payment system should be irreversible, immutable, uncensorable and push-based. Which is exactly what Bitcoin is.

[KingMob]

Any time you require 1) a distributed database 2) in the face of adversarial participants, which truthfully, is less common than the blockchain obsessives would think.

A centralized organization (.com or .gov) that can achieve consensus amongst participants can do just fine with Postgres and a REST API.

Adversarial participants are common, but typically that's solved with a third-party overseer that administers the system. Finding use cases that demand decentralization are harder.

Bitcoin was created to remove central banks/govts from the money creation process, but in most cases, if you don't trust the central authority, you just don't participate. With cash, you can't easily get around dealing with the govt.

[njarboe]

When cash was gold and/or silver the central authority might do some minting of coin but you did not need to trust them with a ledger or not to print huge amounts of paper currency. Gold and silver were currency for thousands of years. Soon all the people who lived under that system will be dead. It will be interesting what the system of global fiat will bring in the future.

[davidgerard]

> There are other now proposed mechanisms of doing that (e.g. PoS) that are quite efficient.

Well, no they aren't, because they're proposals.

[darawk]

No they're not. They're implemented in many altcoins. And to say that 'proposals' are not efficient because they haven't been implemented is both semantically wrong, and an incredibly stupid point even if it weren't.

[dboreham]

But the entire point is that it wastes energy. That's why it works. It isn't like a car that can be made more efficient and therefore better. The central premise is that we're going to waste energy to do something that can be done in other ways without wasting energy.

[nullstyle]

No, wasting energy is not why blockchain works. proof of work is just one way a blockchain can work. There are alternatives:

https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/scp.html

disclosure: I work at stellar

[darawk]

The entire point is that it wastes something. Not specifically energy. The idea is that there is a sunk, unrecoverable cost associated with mining. That cost may be able to take other forms, though. In the case of proof-of-stake, that cost is the time-value of money.