Global high-performance proof-of-stake blockchain with erasure coding

As long as professional scammers (Fin and crypto FinTech) believe they can extract more money, Bitcoin will grow. As crypto currency is still an underregulated asset there will always be more ways to extract money in a shady way. Basically fast-forwarding all the reasons for the regulations of conventional assets.

Alts never recovered. Also is Bitcoin really near ATH or did the dollar devalue? Previous ATH was roughly $70k and in that period, Gold doubled. So reaching previous ATH in my math is roughly $140k. That does match, in my experience, the rising real livings costs of food, housing and services.

You make a fine argument, but also crypto is a multi-trillion dollar business at this point, powered by crime or not.

LLMs are all potential right now, but are no way as large and I dare say established as even just Bitcoin. As a fan of Satoshi’s creation, the impact of Bitcoin over society in the long term will be at least as large at the impact of LLMs, whether it’ll still be BTC or some other decentralised trustless digital currency powered by cryptography.

Countries can have FOMO, too

+1 blockchains and cryptocurrencies are super interesting and valuable IMO outside of the present speculative lotteries people are playing.

But I suspect even more interesting things than the current applications will come out of the opening of a bridge between pure computation and the material world over the next decades/centuries/millenia.

Haha, no. Like in sui where the validators halted and froze? Or Solana where dishonest stalkers rigged the delegated staking auction and stole from other stakers?

What you are repeating is the same PoS nonsense. Get out of here. Eth drove off a cliff when it went PoS. It’s going to zero vs Bitcoin, like every other PoS (or alt) coin. It’s all just PoS cartels. Meanwhile, many people have their “edge” BitAxe earning Bitcoin.

nb: PoS can never really be fairly distributed. It’s printed out of nothing to enrich the founders. The billionaires were dumping Sol on retail last cycle. It can never escape this. Eth was “premined”.

It’s more that waste energy allows one way process, which is valuable. Valves. Diodes. One doesn’t complain about waste heat from computation in general, if that computation has value.

And the second part - you won’t understand because you prefer authority to set monetary policy. The history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.

No, you need to buy from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who printed it from nothing.

Meanwhile PoW needs real work. Real resources. Real effort. PoS is a Ponzi

Proof of Work provides scarcity that makes crypto work. Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work.

I think proof of storage or something would be more interesting as a (partial) solution to the crypto folk wasting electricity.

Ideally as proof of RAM though. We don't want them abusing cloud storage plans.

> we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels

Period. Shutting down Bitcoin won't solve global warming, and Bitcoin doesn't require fossil fuels necessarily to run. This is a tired argument that blames the ills of the world on one thing that you don't particularly like or see the benefit of. Bitcoin just likes abundant, cheap energy just like everything else in our modern world.

Technological societies require increasing amounts of energy. The issue is that fossil fuels are easier to generate electricity out of, favoured by governments, lobbies and voters alike, so renewables are more expensive. If your issue is burning large amounts of fossil fuels, you should work on this problem rather than complaining about one user downstream of the problem. It's easy to point the finger because it's easy to calculate how much energy bitcoin uses (transactions per day * energy per transaction), so it's easy to make a one-line viral tweet blaming all the ills of the world on it, while there are much more wasteful businesses whose energy usage is hard to quantify that everyone conveniently ignores.

It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

“I hate TikTok and all those ByteDance Data Centers must be shut down because it’s a waste and I don’t like it”.

> Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute.

Firstly, no one is offering for sale enough compute to attack e.g. Bitcoin.

Secondly, and more importantly, this would be a temporary attack, during which the blockchain in question is rendered unusable. Once an honest majority of hashing power is reestablished, everything is back to normal. But a compromise of a majority stake is a permanent compromise of a chain. No honest actor can conjure up more stake to gain an advantage over the attacker who now sits on a majority.

> Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute.

It’s easier to accumulate a lot of money than to accumulate a lot of hardware and building a nuclear plant to literally outcompete the rest of the world, no? And at that point you are no longer invisible, so the rest of the world could simply decide to ignore your monopolistic contributions to the blockchain altogether and fork.

You don’t really get how mining pools work. It’s not a monolithic thing. well OK MARA is a proprietary pool, but the rest are made up of people contributing hash. If a state actor took over a pool, we could spin up another quick smart. Hash is fluid. Try that with slashing and stake lockups and others nonsense PoS invents to do a worse job.

> [...] than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.

No reason to target many people's private keys. Just find a few insecure exchanges — maybe a single exchange is enough, even — that together hold a majority of stake.