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by nosuchthing 2562 days ago

  "The decentralized design that Bitcoin uses needs people to do lots of processing work"
You should try reading Satoshi's white paper which explains what that processing work is. (hint: there's not really any processing outside of generating a bunch of random worthless nonces in the hope that one nonce will be accepted as a winning lottery number)

The Proof of Work "algorithm" is completely unnecessary for processing transactions, and it's actually quite simple. To the point, PoW simply asks for a random number for the purpose of creating a lottery. If you want Bitcoins, you need to waste more real world energy and capital on hardware to print more lottery tickets (nonces).

The Bitcoin network and all the transactions on the network could easily be run on cheap hardware, a raspberry pi even. The PoW filter is a psychological tool for "governance" (write access) to the database, granted now exclusively to wealthy capital holders. Effectively granting the Bitcoin / PoW network to the wealthiest speculators who can devote resources to be sacrificed in return for digital lottery printers, which in turn give a chance to generate numbers in the cryptocoin database.

Curious why someone would design a currency system in objection to the financial plutocracy, when the design inevitably restricts control of the entire network only to existing capital?

It's no mistake Satoshi owns at least 1,148,800 BTC.

1 comments

>The Proof of Work "algorithm" is completely unnecessary for processing transactions

The Distributed Systems community awaits your proposal for a solution to Byzantine Fault Tolerance in open, decentralized, adversarial networks. Why would you withhold an alternative solution to PoW?

>The PoW filter is a psychological tool for "governance" (write access) to the database, granted now exclusively to wealthy capital holders.

No amount of PoW allows a block producer to write data to a node that a node operator hasn't consented to accept by their choice of consensus rules. Your argument is "capital holders" can force consumers to purchase whatever they produce. Consumers induce producers. Producers cannot induce consumers. Producers can /speculate/ that latent consumption may exist but without purchasing consumers, production will eventually end.

>why someone would design a currency system in objection to banks, that inevitably restricts control of the entire network only to existing capital?

Money warehouses and credit creators (banks) are not capital. Capital is the product of work / R&D / creation.