Comment by paoliniluis
15 hours ago
It's 2026 and there's still people that believe that proof-of-work makes sense as a consensus mechanism
15 hours ago
It's 2026 and there's still people that believe that proof-of-work makes sense as a consensus mechanism
Sure, why should my opinion have changed?
There is a breakthrough on a more productive Po(useful)W: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47430951
Isn't the whole point of PoW that the work done is otherwise useless? I mean: you invest money (in form of your hardware/electricity bill) to mine a block, and that ensures that whoever would like to fork the chain has to spend at least as much money to do it. If PoW can earn you extra money outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem (by making the work "useful") it lowers the cost of the 51% attack, potentially making it profitable.
I understand that there was a problem finding a useful PoW from the computer science perspective, and that paper is showing a solution.
Now, it doesn't necessarily lower the cost of an attack because you can adjust the required output to a cost that is suitable.
Hopefully between this and looming cryptographically relevant quantum computing, this whole house of cards will come crumbling down. And those who invested vast capital to burn carbon in order to evade finance regulations will lose everything. Probably not. But it’s a nice dream.