You basically described PoW (proof-of-work) mining, which was (imho) the actual innovation with Bitcoin. The current idea though is to build a byzantine fault tolerant system that doesn't require massive amounts of "wasted" power. I put wasted in quotes because it is actually doing something, it is just the output isn't useful for much more than validating the transactions.

Interestingly, Maker is currently built on top of (Ethereum) PoW. Some day, ETH2, which is PoS (proof-of-stake), will solve all the same issues you're talking about. Or at least that is the dream. We will then have a pretty amazing digital rube goldberg machine where we can sit back and watch the gears turn.

PoS will not solve anything. PoS is just obfuscated proof of work. The same amount of "resources" will be wasted in a PoS system, its just going to be a different type of resource.

Required reading

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

HN Discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451187

Also newer article http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pos-still-pointless/

That's not even close to being correct, and blogs from maximalists are never a good source of correct information.

Happy to walk you through what PoS looks like in 2020, but you can look up the information yourself too.

Tell me, what does PoS look like in 2020, apart from delayed?

ps. Using the word "maximalist" immediately shrinks your audience to other die-hard crypto fans.

I'm not in it for the audience.. in any case, maximalism is mostly a self-assigned title and the author of that blog describes himself as such

edit: how can something that is being discovered be late? The work on PoS is almost completely greenfield and far from trivial. Many people made many far too optimistic comments about how long it would take to get it right but no one can say it's late...

Right, so when you say you'll tell us the state of PoS in 2020, the answer is "currently unsolved".

There are testnest live for some time now but there is still plenty to do before anyone should trust their funds into the staking contracts.

edit: I mean, several dPoS networks went live without spending enough time considering the game theory attacks, but now we've seen them used on EOS and more recently on Steem so thats why I (personally) believe a real PoS is still a few months away at best.

Last I checked, "real" PoS was at least a year away, and receding fast. The current testnets are so lacking in functionality I'm not sure they can be called PoS.

ETH2 will deployed in phases. It will take many years before ETH1 PoW is turned off, if ever.

Unfortunately, many people don't understand the actual dynamics of all of this and they equate ETH2 phase 0, which is supposed to see the light of day this year (I'm personally doubtful of even that), with the 'end' of PoW. Nobody in their right mind would trust many billions of value to some brand new unproven consensus model.

That said, if they think they can make it work, I'm all for letting them try.

I would say they can be called PoS because that's the nature of the consensus algorithm used... but it's not in a "go live" production stage atm.

Given the unwillingness to back up your argument, would you instead simply show one pure Proof of Stake system that is used today?

If you can define "pure" in terms of how it relates to energy consumption, I can try.

The one PoS system I'm (edit: deeply) familiar with is Ethereum 2.0's, I wrote about it a couple of years back: https://medium.com/@jpa_of_snc/consensus-casper-and-cryptoec...

There are testnets using this already: https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/ethereum-2-0-phase-0-testn...

Why does MC=MR imply TC=TR?

I was looking at Etherium recently, and thought HBM on the new Xilinx Alveo would be perfect to attack the problem.

I wish I had an Alveo board. Sheesh, now would be the time. You could fit the whole DAG into HBM.

Take a look at the light eval method [1].

Even with HBM on the card... while it will hash fast, you're still going through the memory controller. What you need to do is skip that. Get rid of the memory hardness entirely. Generate the DAG on demand.

[1] https://github.com/ethereum-cat-herders/progpow-audit/blob/m...

That's cryptoeconomics in a nutshell, mechanism design and decentralised governance.

I curate a popular resource on this here: https://github.com/jpantunes/awesome-cryptoeconomics