Comment by tliltocatl
1 day ago
Yes, but no. The Rube Goldberg of PoW isn't just for show, it's a protection from Sybil attack (not that it makes the economics of it any less of a disaster).
1 day ago
Yes, but no. The Rube Goldberg of PoW isn't just for show, it's a protection from Sybil attack (not that it makes the economics of it any less of a disaster).
You cherry picked one thing from the list, and even there made a mistake.
In Bitcoin PoW used as a method for leader election of the node composing the list of validated transactions on the ledger (aka block), or even an empty list of transactions (aka Nakamoto-style Consensus).
But without all the Rube Goldbergian nonsense it’s simply an illegal/unlicensed lottery where the participants pay with electricity for the right to earn records on the longest chain (aka UTXO with mining block rewards).
> You cherry picked one thing from the list, and even there made a mistake.
Not quite. Nakamoto consensus is PoW + LCR, and the PoW part is for Sybil resistance, and the LCR part is for consensus.
he wrote
> The Rube Goldberg of PoW isn't just for show, it's a protection from Sybil attack
he cherry picked PoW
no, Nakamoto-style consensus is not the same thing as PoW, or even PoW+LCR, not even the same thing as Bitcoin consensus.
Nakamoto-style consensus simply means that we're doing a leader election, and the leader does the transaction validation (aka mining a block in Bitcoin-speak).
The novelty of Nakamoto-style consensus is how we're doing this leader election, i.e. using PoW, PoW+LCR, PoS, PoET, PoA, Proof-of-X, etc.