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A comment on Bitcoin study: Period of exclusivity encourages early adopters. Parent comment

Re:Bitcoin study: Period of exclusivity encourages early ado... by julian_1 on Thursday July 13, 2017 @10:06PM (#14766878)
> ... wealth out of thin air by doing useless computations at the cost of enormous electricity.

This is not a new observation or a universal property of crypto projects. Alternatives to POW, are an active subject of research, and are very important to several active crypto projects. You don't even have to look too far down the market-cap listings to find them.

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Re:Bitcoin study: Period of exclusivity encourages early ado... by bumblebeard on Thursday July 13, 2017 @10:15PM (#14766925)
What are some of them? I'm not too up on the latest research in this area so it would be interesting to know how you can do a cryptocurrency that doesn't depend on proof-of-work calculations.
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Re:Bitcoin study: Period of exclusivity encourages early ado... by joshschreuder on Thursday July 13, 2017 @10:31PM (#14766989)
Proof of stake. ETH has an ongoing project called Casper to switch to PoS.

PoS has many of its own problems, but I think it is undeniably better from a waste point of view.

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Re:Bitcoin study: Period of exclusivity encourages early ado... by Frogolocalypse on Friday July 14, 2017 @03:00AM (#14768078)
The issue with PoS is that it introduces trust into the element. There doesn't seem to be a way (yet?) where you can introduce PoS without lowering the security of new adopters.
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Re:Bitcoin study: Period of exclusivity encourages early ado... by whiskers08xmt on Friday July 14, 2017 @03:40AM (#14768210)
How does PoS introduce trust into the system?
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Re:Bitcoin study: Period of exclusivity encourages early ado... by Frogolocalypse on Friday July 14, 2017 @05:28AM (#14768606)
PoS works on the premise that rewards will be given to holders. Unlike PoW, PoS has a single incentive structure where the management of the networks is aligned with the holders of the tokens. If you are not a large holder, the existing holders can re-write the rules to their advantage. You have to trust that large holders won't do this, even though the incentives align with that outcome.
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