Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shepardrtc 2953 days ago
> PoW systems have a clean distribution mechanism based on external resource consumption.

Unless the creators are the only ones mining for a time.

2 comments

Even without that it's still not fair because of ASICs not being widely available to consumers. It's not as fair as simply selling tokens/coins which grows linearly with how much money you have, which is what you'd be spending on electricity and hardware anyway, you're just taking the shortcut of not using them and is one of the more popular arguments for PoS.
True, this has been one of the consistent criticisms of Bitcoin - Satoshi solo mined coins and therefore distribution wasn't fair.

OTOH, consider the alternative. Satoshi gave himself all the money in the system, then divvied it up among his friends.

However, given the availability of multiple multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency economies, another option might be possible. Airdrop to the current holders of some other cryptocurrency. Or maybe a basket of cryptocurrencies. Key owners could then claim their money on the newly-created network. This idea really started to take off in 2018 with Bitcoin hard forks.

The problem is that the network creator will face intense pressure to withhold just a little currency to fund a war chest. Yielding to that pressure creates the very political problems I alluded to earlier (e.g., Ethereum).