[bogomipz]

>" we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms."

Can you elaborate on what the shortcomings of the current consensus algorithms are?

[nosuchthing]

Immense waste, and lack of egalitarianism.

Proof-of-Work consensus algorithms (so far) work by wasting more and more energy.

  Max efficiency peaks in the network with a very basic CPU 
  PoW algorithm merely sets a lottery number granting write access for a single computer
  Every additional increase in processing power reduces efficiency by increasing the size of the number to be guessed 

All PoW does is increase the capital cost for any user who joins after x-amount of time has passed.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I like that analogy: “setting a lottery number” - that feels more accurate than the typical way the lay media explains mining, usually a variation of “solving lots of puzzles”.

“Puzzle” implies some cognition is required to come to a solution - not that effort is being wasted by brute-forcing something.

[bogomipz]

Thanks for elaborating, these are interesting points and observations.

I am curious are there any proposals floating about for achieving greater efficiency or more egalitarianism?

It seems like a great area of research.

Might you or someone else have any resources you could share if this is an active area of research? Cheers.

[nosuchthing]

It's a problem in the realm of distributed computing.

PoW attempts to create a mechanism to verify accuracy of transactions in the database among a group of users who would want to cheat, suppress, or manipulate the records.

So PoW uses the lottery to create a competition among all users for high computational power (capital sacrifice), but unfortunately the computational "work" is nothing more than a random number generator.

Ideally, the computational work used in PoW would not be worthless random numbers but could instead be computations that provide value to scientific research. Distributing computing projects like Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), Folding@Home, and Seti@Home, are all very similar distributed computing projects that predate Bitcoin.

The main problem is PoW for transactional verification needs to be a problem that's hard to known in advance, yet very easy to verify once known, and there must be a consistency to the solving of transactions. This can be done with a centralized validator, but presumably the ideal solution would need to be distributed/decentralized as was the point of Satoshi's p2p cash system.

The problem is it's very hard to have consistency of successful problems solved when you have complex useful computational problems being solved, whereas PoW simply asks "guess a number, now guess a higher number if the network hashrate is faster".

If anyone solved a method to process useful valuable computational work, instead of random numbers, and applied it algorithmically into a PoW transactional protocol - this would be a holy grail solution as it wouldn't be considered a race to the bottom of inefficient computational waste.

Golem seems to be attempting a distributed computational work for digital tokens model, but I have doubts their design will be genuine, effective, or sustainable.

See also: https://medium.com/@hallam/proof-of-work-is-the-worst-way-to...

[bogomipz]

Thanks for the comprehensive response. It does seem like there should be a way to accomplish something more meaningful for society as part of PoW. That link was an interesting read, I was unfamiliar with "Notary digest chains." I have now some new reading. Cheers.

[VMG]

It's only wasted if there was a cheaper alternative. There isn't.

[trixie_]

If all the power eventually comes from renewables. Is it still wasteful?