[Nursie]

Really?

You really think that having only 30% of output go into actual, productive endeavour would be a good thing?

It just screams of a completely broken system to me, and inefficiency.

I could understand if your attitude was that, well, it seems it had to be this way, it's the best we can do. But to actually celebrate a ~2:1 ratio of fund-shuffling busywork over production seems crazy.

Don't get me wrong, I work in the sector right now, I'm happy to get paid for it, and I can see a use for what I'm doing (exposing data for use in new services) but really not so much when it comes to using distributed supercomputers and thousands of coders to try to predict tiny market movements. And really not "burning energy as fast as possible to (adversarially) compute transactions on a shared ledger".

[jackstraw14]

Just what exactly is your definition of an "actual, productive endeavour"?

Is it really that ridiculous that we dedicate a lot of resources to keeping track of who owns what? We're a mostly capitalist society, right? In a system where private ownership reigns supreme, you absolutely need to keep track of who owns what or we'd have even greater wealth inequality than we have now. Personally, I'd like to see some kind of anarcho-syndicalist structure but let's be honest our greatx10 grandchildren will probably still be capitalists.

This article is a little over-the-top in some spots, but the main point is correct. Cryptocurrency is an innovation in accounting: https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...

Cryptocurrencies are trying to make trustless transactions a reality so we don't need a human workforce to keep it all mostly accurate. Don't get too disappointed yet, this stuff is just getting started.

[Nursie]

A "lot" of resources would be 1% IMHO.

If society is burning up not just a lot, but a majority of its effort in servicing its model (resource tracking), it seems to me something has gone very very wrong.

You need to keep track of who owns what. You don't need to make that such a complicated thing that it takes vast portions of available human effort to track, and sucks in vast portions of the fruits of said effort.

You don't have to be an anarchist to think that that's ridiculous.

We can do that with trust and the vast majority of people don't care.

[jackstraw14]

I don't disagree that it's a depressing waste of existence to spend one's life keeping track of stuff. Especially if it's not even your stuff. But we've only had the computing power to take a load off us humans for a decade or two. And plus everyone needs a job (pointless or not) or the unemployment statistics start to freak people out. It's sort of the hand we've been dealt, the whole "let's work hard now for a better future we'll never see" thing.

I think the situation will improve dramatically when some of these crypto projects begin to mature. From what I can tell, blockchains are the opposite of lightweight, and personally I'm not holding my breath for one to become useful for anything besides profit anytime soon. I think something like IOTA is a better candidate to be useful (a fee-less directed acyclic graph, not a blockchain). It's more like a new communications protocol that will allow machines to conduct their own transactions with each other. The team's goal is to make it useful first, and if it's profitable too well that's great. Maybe I'm just not that creative anymore, but I can't see a production-quality future for blockchains, and would agree that giant PNW datacenters doing nothing but proof-of-work is a massive waste of resources.

That said, these are mostly just research projects hoping they have one of the big ideas that will win.