[zwegner]

I tend to shudder when people talk about bitcoin being "cheap". There's a massive amount of energy wasted to maintain the public ledger. It became much more clear to me how this impacts the cost of transacting bitcoins after reading this article: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/how-many-bitcoins-does-...

...and particularly after seeing this graph: https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

I'm more excited about proof-of-stake, as there isn't this arms race to throw more and more computing power to generate bitcoins. I'm not sure why it hasn't seen more adoption, but I will admit that I don't pay a lot of attention to the cryptocurrency space...

[jamoes]

Proof-of-stake isn't being adopted because it simply doesn't solve the Byzayntine General's problem [1].

[1] http://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

[zwegner]

Interesting, thanks. I see the problem, but this paper takes as a given that individuals can introduce transactions that tilt the system in their favor. I can't immediately see a solution to this, but I don't think it's necessarily impossible.

An additional problem I just thought of, however, is that there will be some number of stakeholders that leave the network, lose their keys, etc., and there is a chance that they are the only ones chosen to sign a given history extension. So there has to be some way to recover from this, while still being resistant to denial-of-service attacks.