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A comment on One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month. Parent comment

Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by trhway on Monday January 22, 2018 @06:41PM (#16209275)
>And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work.

No. PoW is just an old name from the 199x spam fighting. The point here is planet-scale consensus, not "proof of work". One way to achieve distributed consensus in untrusted non-static environment is to randomly choose master for a given block. Imagine that everybody just throws a dice, and whoever gets 6 becomes that master. How we make sure that there is only one master for a given block, and that when you say 6 you really got 6 as i have no way of checking whether you even threw the dice at all? Satoshi's great insight was in building such a verifiable and statistically [for several minutes] single-master dice by using the good old hash based PoW.

Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale...

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by zeroxfe on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:04PM (#16209462)
> Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale...

A handful of the top cryptos are using some variant of proof-of-stake (like dPoS, dBFT, etc.), all of which are energy efficient. Ethereum is currently experimenting with PoS in Casper.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by ActsJuvenile on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:29PM (#16209660)
Ah PoS, the "Rich get richer" algorithm.

Ethereum's PoS implementation requires lock up of balances in stake accounts, so it removes any incentive to do transactions.

I believe that ETH PoS will calcify the economic strata, kill all transaction volume, and have the opposite of network effect.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by trhway on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:19PM (#16209569)
PoS basically increases energy efficiency by decreasing the degree of randomness and skewing the dice in favor of stakeholders to the degree depending on their stakes (at the limit you'd have just one entity verifying all the transactions, a very energy efficient situation we have today with fiat). In general PoS looks like a reasonable trade-off, and we're to see whether it gets accepted.
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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by rpearl on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:11PM (#16209512)
a cheaper way to achieve this is to have a centralized currency and mature financial infrastructure.
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