We should probably generalize cryptocurrency mechanisms to “proof of waste”. Fundamentally, the concept of a blockchain is that real-world resources are used for artifically-complex calculations just to show that one doesn’t need those resources for something else.
Interesting! What cryptocurrencies or blockchains are there which are based on something other than proof of {some resource use}?
There are certainly non-crypt-based currencies and centralized data authorities that simply use fiat and access bottlenecks. I’ve only come across distributed authority mechanisms based on usage of some expensive and limited resource.
Cardano and Polkadot both use proof of stake. They are more like proof of resource ownership instead of proof of resource use. Resource is however a bit misleading here given that there are no resources in the classical sense needed to create the coins that are used for the staking in the first place. The coins are created out of nothing. Saying that minting coins out of nothing is creating resources is like saying that the FED printing money creates more resources for the economy.
Besides reducing electricity consumption that has additional advantages such as increase the amount of transactions that can be processed by two orders of magnitude (and additional orders of magnitude if you count side-chains). It also makes the process of validating blocks faster.
Filecoin is also noteworthy in that it uses proof-of-spacetime where miners do valuable work of storing data instead of wasteful work.
I was aware of the proof of spacetime as an alternative to the normal proof-of-computation chains. Unused (for other purposes) disk space definitely falls into the category of “resource”, as much as unused (for other purposes) compute capacity.
A quick glance at polkadot and cardano didn’t jump out as to what limits their tokens and what a “stake” actually is. Thanks for pointing them out, though—I have more to learn :)
In the case of Filecoin it’s not space that’s unused for other purposes. It’s space that’s used to store files that users (that are verified clients) of filecoin want to store.
The basic idea of proof-of-stake is that when it comes to validating a new block, one of the users that stake coins gets randomly chosen weighted by the amount of staked coins. That user is then responsible for validating the next block in a way that’s similar to a miner in Bitcoin being responsible for validating the new block when the miner succeeds in solving the computational problem. If a user validates a block that’s invalid they will lose part of the coins that they staked which incentives them to only validate valid blocks.
We should probably generalize cryptocurrency mechanisms to “proof of waste”. Fundamentally, the concept of a blockchain is that real-world resources are used for artifically-complex calculations just to show that one doesn’t need those resources for something else.
This is only true for “proof of work” currencies and thus does not generalize to crypto currency that’s more efficient.
Interesting! What cryptocurrencies or blockchains are there which are based on something other than proof of {some resource use}?
There are certainly non-crypt-based currencies and centralized data authorities that simply use fiat and access bottlenecks. I’ve only come across distributed authority mechanisms based on usage of some expensive and limited resource.
Cardano and Polkadot both use proof of stake. They are more like proof of resource ownership instead of proof of resource use. Resource is however a bit misleading here given that there are no resources in the classical sense needed to create the coins that are used for the staking in the first place. The coins are created out of nothing. Saying that minting coins out of nothing is creating resources is like saying that the FED printing money creates more resources for the economy.
Besides reducing electricity consumption that has additional advantages such as increase the amount of transactions that can be processed by two orders of magnitude (and additional orders of magnitude if you count side-chains). It also makes the process of validating blocks faster.
Filecoin is also noteworthy in that it uses proof-of-spacetime where miners do valuable work of storing data instead of wasteful work.
I was aware of the proof of spacetime as an alternative to the normal proof-of-computation chains. Unused (for other purposes) disk space definitely falls into the category of “resource”, as much as unused (for other purposes) compute capacity.
A quick glance at polkadot and cardano didn’t jump out as to what limits their tokens and what a “stake” actually is. Thanks for pointing them out, though—I have more to learn :)
In the case of Filecoin it’s not space that’s unused for other purposes. It’s space that’s used to store files that users (that are verified clients) of filecoin want to store.
The basic idea of proof-of-stake is that when it comes to validating a new block, one of the users that stake coins gets randomly chosen weighted by the amount of staked coins. That user is then responsible for validating the next block in a way that’s similar to a miner in Bitcoin being responsible for validating the new block when the miner succeeds in solving the computational problem. If a user validates a block that’s invalid they will lose part of the coins that they staked which incentives them to only validate valid blocks.
In practice it’s a bit more complicated then that and for Polkadot explained at https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-staking