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by thisisit 2956 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.