Well on point, PoW dint work on Bitcoin as well. The only reason it dint become a problem was that Bitcoin wasn't famous at that time. From Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper:
Laszlo’s CPU had been winning, at most, one block of 50 Bitcoins each day, of the approximately 140 blocks that were released daily. Once Laszlo got his GPU card hooked in he began winning one or two blocks an hour, and occasionally more. On May 17 he won twenty-eight blocks; these wins gave him fourteen hundred new coins that day.
Satoshi knew someone would eventually spot this opportunity as Bitcoin became more successful and was not surprised when Laszlo e-mailed him about his project. But in responding to Laszlo, Satoshi was clearly torn. If one person was taking all the coins, there would be less of an incentive for new people to join in.
“I don’t mean to sound like a socialist,” Satoshi wrote back. “I don’t care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%.”
As a result, Satoshi asked Laszlo to go easy with the “high powered hashing,” the term coined to refer to the process of plugging an input into a hash function and seeing what it spit out.
But Satoshi also recognized that having more computing power on the network made the network stronger as long as the people with the power, like Laszlo, wanted to see Bitcoin succeed.”
One can imagine the outrage it will cause if it happened today.
These kinds of shenanigans have been happening a lot on a small PoW chain called Amoveo. It’s been interesting to follow it since the founder is very honest and forthcoming about its difficulties, in contrast to most other blockchains.
PoW is leader based consensus. It’s slow and can’t handle millions of simultaneous payments. Why do new distributed ledger technologies still prefer to use it, when there are other, far faster consensus algorithms out there?
> More seriously, if the name of the game is efficiency then a distributed ledger isn't the answer.
And if you're only looking for immutability, then time-stamping is already good enough (and available since the late 90s or so). I suppose you can use a Merkle tree and then proceed to put "Blockchain" in your marketing materials without technically lying.
BCH at 32 MB blocks can handle 108 Tx/s. It would only need to grow to 6 GB blocks to handle the 20k Tx/s that VISA claims they can handle. It would only need to grow to 600 MB blocks to handle the 2k Tx/s that VISA handles on average.
600MB every 10 minutes is no sweat for even modest internet connections nowadays.
With technology like weak blocks and the lighting network and other side-chains the network can handle it no problem.
This is pretty offtopic, but the amount of time it takes to download the block isn't the only factor, amount of time to process & verify the block is pretty important as well as the storage costs etc.
That's all pretty moot at the moment as BCH is averaging ~50kb blocks.
This statement is against the spirit of HN. Although I agree that none of other pow coins currently have as robust code, but making an absolute statement like that is not rational.
You are saying every merge in the core code protocol is trusted by you even if that code has not even been written yet.
Laszlo’s CPU had been winning, at most, one block of 50 Bitcoins each day, of the approximately 140 blocks that were released daily. Once Laszlo got his GPU card hooked in he began winning one or two blocks an hour, and occasionally more. On May 17 he won twenty-eight blocks; these wins gave him fourteen hundred new coins that day.
Satoshi knew someone would eventually spot this opportunity as Bitcoin became more successful and was not surprised when Laszlo e-mailed him about his project. But in responding to Laszlo, Satoshi was clearly torn. If one person was taking all the coins, there would be less of an incentive for new people to join in.
“I don’t mean to sound like a socialist,” Satoshi wrote back. “I don’t care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%.”
As a result, Satoshi asked Laszlo to go easy with the “high powered hashing,” the term coined to refer to the process of plugging an input into a hash function and seeing what it spit out.
But Satoshi also recognized that having more computing power on the network made the network stronger as long as the people with the power, like Laszlo, wanted to see Bitcoin succeed.”
One can imagine the outrage it will cause if it happened today.