[kouteiheika]

> Handshake uses proof-of-work mining

Uh, no thanks. If you insist on using a blockchain at least don't make it proof-of-work. It's 2022, and there are plenty of production-ready non-PoW chains out there already. Please stop killing the planet.

[josu]

PoW makes sense from a first principles approach [1]. I don't see Handshake growing into a trillion dollar network, so the security budget won't be that big, therefore I don't think it will be very energy intensive. Furthermore, if you calculate the economic impact of DNS hacks, the net impact of a decentralised PoW DNS implementation could even be positive.

Wrt to non-PoW system, so far governance for those chains looks closer to a federation (where a few agents control the majority of the network) than to a really decentralised network. In that sense, a proof-of-stake DNS network wouldn't be that different from the current implementation. If such network ever takes off, I wouldn't be surprised if major ISPs, Cloudfare, Google, and a few other players end up owning the majority of the tokens.

[1] Adam Back's 1997 Hashcash, designed to fight email spam and DDOS attacks was based on PoW.

[kenniskrag]

small PoW networks are prone to takeovers. E.g. one actor decidea to use his asics to take over the network for a few blocks.

[josu]

This is a solved issue with Merge mining. Here a primer: https://blog.bitmex.com/the-growth-of-bitcoin-merge-mining/

[kenniskrag]

then someone has to mine two blocks?

How are they linked together. E.g. I haven't much luck to mine a bitcoin block and will others put data inside the bitcoin blockchain for me? If it is the other way around there should be some kind of auth?

[rvz]

> It's 2022, and there are plenty of production-ready non-PoW chains out there already.

Yeah. Like Solana, Polygon, Helium, Celo, etc? Which they went down. Why would something that operates like a CA, DNS or TLDs be suitable on those 'production-ready' chains? PoW makes sense for this use case.

> Please stop killing the planet.

I agree. I'd rather have something useful burning the planet and is an improvement than something that is burning the planet for the benefit of more surveillance, censorship and spyware (Deep Learning, Machine Learning systems on user data) or something that is not useful at all to the current system. (Bitcoin)

So perhaps we also should look at stopping running broken machine learning / deep learning models continuously on many data centers for 10+ years which that is also incinerating the planet.

[ceejayoz]

> I'd rather have something useful burning the planet...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

[rvz]

Except that the examples I listed after more than 10 years of operation, especially the use of Deep Learning and training on tons of new data, have NO efficient alternatives, and still require tons of data centers to the point where some of them literally caught fire and their use is worse for society. Unless you want more surveillance, spyware, etc who would be happy with that?

The end result to all that wasteful training is that it doesn't work or it gets tricked or confused by junk input. Proving to be a waste of energy, time, money and the re-training, fine-tuning process has to be done repeatedly if there is an error, or everyday on new data.

Either way, it is pointless to outline a comment as 'This is a false dilemma' without countering my claims as I have both recognised the wastefulness of decentralized blockchains like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Doge, that are much worse for their intended purpose (payments) etc and using tons of data centers for Deep Learning / Machine Learning training, re-training, fine-tuning, etc everyday on user data which benefits surveillance capitalism, spyware uses etc which that is also worse for everyone.

[ceejayoz]

> Either way, it is pointless to outline a comment as 'This is a false dilemma' without countering my claims...

It's pointless to counter a fallacy.

Trying to pretend machine learning and Bitcoin are of equal uselessness is dishonest.

[rvz]

> Trying to pretend machine learning and Bitcoin are of equal uselessness is dishonest.

As soon as that deep learning or machine learning model gets confused or attacked with erroneous / junk input, garbage noise or performs badly on new data, that model is useless. What do you do next? More training, re-training, fine tuning? That problem is unavoidable and evergreen.

The end result is the same and either way, that is used for surveillance, spyware on user data which not only that is a waste of energy, CO2 and time, that is worse for both for society and the planet and the methods to improve these models have been known to be inefficient and have not changed for 10+ years and always require tons of data centers. On that, Bitcoin is the same with mining. There is no benefit or useful improvement for it in the current system for payments (it's original intended purpose) and it also burns up the planet with PoW.

No idea why you had to deliberately ignore deep learning as that is also part of the planet incinerating problem.

[ddrdrck_]

> Yeah. Like Solana, Polygon, Helium, Celo, etc? Which they went down

Funny how you forgot to mention Cosmos [0] which is one of the most prominent PoS blockchain, in production since march 2019, and never went down ...

[0] https://cosmos.network/

[capableweb]

> Yeah. Like Solana, Polygon, Helium, Celo, etc? Which they went down

I do know Solana has had downtime and Celo not even being a cryptocurrency but something centralized, but when did Polygon have any downtime? I have some automation happening over the Polygon network and never encountered any downtime, when did this happen?

[rvz]

> but when did Polygon have any downtime?

It happened recently this year. [0]

[0] https://cryptoslate.com/polygon-matic-suffers-network-outage...

[xvilka]

Cardano/Ada never went down as well.

[chriswarbo]

> So perhaps we also should look at stopping running broken machine learning / deep learning models continuously on many data centers for 10+ years which that is also incinerating the planet.

That's Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

[jedimind]

That's a Nonargument https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nonargument .

Giving examples of technologies that can also be considered "a waste of energy" is a valid argument. Why is using energy playing graphics intensive games with high-end graphics cards not considered a "waste of energy"? It's a value judgment that lacks perspective. Dismissing some technology for its energy usage without providing a better alternative with similar or better properties is nescient.

Some people at least try to provide "alternatives", but they don't have better properties or completely ignore what the technology was even trying to accomplish.

[mavhc]

Just tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, then you can do whatever you want without a problem

[verdverm]

How do you calculate that price? How would you enforce it globally?

[rvz]

No it isn't. I already agreed that PoW is burning up the planet especially with the uselessness of blockchains like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Dogecoin, that don't improve on the current system when used and thus have no use case. So that isn't 'whataboutism'.

Nice try though.

[pjc50]

Indeed. Proof-of-work is the "what if we put some CFCs in our leaded petrol" level of technological disaster generation.

[lfkdev]

No, PoW is still the most secure out there. This is an important topic and theres nothing wrong with using energy for this.

[intothemild]

I can't agree with this more.

[capableweb]

If I remember correctly, Handshake came into life somewhere around 2016, and was forked from Bitcoin, hence the reliance on PoW. Seems unlikely to change at this point.

If you'd rather want to use something with PoS, then Ethereum Name Service (https://ens.domains/) is probably your best bet as Ethereum is moving to PoS shortly and is a widely used chain.