| > Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell. Proof of Stake as a theory and concept is probably almost 10 years old at this point. And as an actual real-money-in-production blockchain Proof of Stake will actually be 10 years old in the next couple of years or so. I wish I could confidently remember specific names and dates here, but on bitcointalk I remember SunnyKing coding and launching a real in production a PoS coin almost 10 years ago now...I want to say it was something like "NuCoin" but I could be off on the name there. I do speicifically remember he made Primecoin which was an alternative PoW function based on discovering the world's highest prime numbers(kind of cool, which is why I remember it I guess) after he was done with his initial PoS coin. He(SunnyKing) was also endlessly trolled and mocked due to the theoretical threat PoS posed to those invested in Bitcoin and other PoW coins like Litecoin at the time. There was also a larger PoS coin called NXT from that era(again, almost 10 years ago, 2013 maybe?) that I suppose never really caught on, perhaps it was technically flawed? There were lots of legitimate criticisms of PoS regarding whether or not it was a truly viable decentralized consensus mechanism. And I don't claim to after the answer to whether or not it is, or was sufficiently viable. But historically there was also lots of trolling and suppression from people trying to protect their investments. It apparently may be finally getting its time, given PoS as a technology seems to have only recently become a mainstream topic of interest, despite how old the tech and theories themselves are. Perhaps that's just because the problems were only recently solved? But regardless, I find it funny how much play PoS gets these days now that mainstream media is reporting on how PoW mining as a whole is using more power than many nation states, as if there was any other path for PoW to scale given its fundamental design. |