PoW is necessary to financially disincentivize attacks on the network.
Programmable money can achieve everything a bank does and more. Imagine automations that have their own wallets and can pay people (or other bots) to do things.
Attacking a PoW system costs more than a bad actor would receive in reward for attacking the system.
There’s good book I can recommend that you might enjoy as a programmer if you want to learn more about this: Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopolis. He is a Greek CS nerd who got into it during the Greek financial crisis and explains this all very well.
It’s strange to me to be a professional programmer and have no interest in highly secure programmable money and distributed systems for consensus, but you do you. I am not here to change your mind.
Yes, we obviously have different definition of security, as you imagine at being ‘outside the traditional banks’, not ‘guaranteed to be at your disposal and accepted by the rest of the world’.
Bitcoin is just one crypto, which is still being developed, and if you think CrowdStrike is an argument against thousands of banks versus one git repo, I have a bridge to sell to you.
It gets really exhausting talking to people with minimum technical knowledge at best about this stuff. 51% attacks have been done in the past, acting like it’s not possible is just plain stupid.
PoW is a huge energy black hole with nothing to show for it.
Bitcoin by itself has done very little for the general public, its biggest achievement was spawning other coins, which was the idea from the start. BTC should have died a decade ago.
Crypto is and should remain a niche past time for some techical folk, once big money goes in, it will kill the retail (non-business) users. Big players will make (or already made) PoW and PoS irrelevant for basic users. At least stop them from killing the planet.
Minimum technical knowledge indeed. Just not in the direction you are saying.
Bitcoin is not a repo. It’s a protocol, like TCP / UDP. You are probably thinking of the Bitcoin core client. It can be written in Node or Python if you want.
I’ve read the whitepaper, all the source code for Core, and built lightning mainnet applications.
Re: 51% attacks, yes they have happened, but as I noted above, the expense of running them is more than the gains. Because of PoW.
Re: real-world applications: Africa and other unbanked areas use BTC regularly. Citizens of countries with high inflation too.
Re: destroying the planet: many of the successful Bitcoin miners run on excess energy that would otherwise be wasted. Nuclear / hydro plants have excess energy as they generally online large portions at a time, more than is needed for a specific time. You can think of Bitcoin mining as bringing forward the ROI on a new power plant before it reaches capacity.
Protocols are maintained by someone, too. How many nodes use that core implementation?
And if you are aware of development, you then know CVEs right? So you must understand while not having global economy rely on a singular protocol with majority nodes using a core implementation is not a good idea? And don’t you dare compare it to TCP again, or I will not take you seriously any longer.
51% - just use the cloud computing for a little while, it’s not as expensive as buying an entire country worth of ASICs, that you have no use for afterwards.
Back to big players - imagine if Google decided to go all in on crypto? Wonder what would have happened.
People use it - sure, people use all kinds of shit, might as well use any other currency, what makes bitcoin special there?
Planet - just no. It’s inefficient, and provides very little advantage over existing solutions, with huge drawbacks. We should use the hardware and resources on power storage, not made up markets. Folding@home would make 10000x more sense than this bullshit.
So fuck off with this apologistic bullcrap. There are better solutions for every issue at hand, where bitcoin poses no advantage, and alternatives provide some value to this world. Bitcoin robs us of huge amounts of power all over the world, and that stupid fad has been replaced by even worse energy sinkhole - AI - that other techbros will defend with similar arguments, while the results never meet the expectations. “But just one more planet, bro, and we will change the world, bro.” Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Also, fucking relational databases do way more than blockchain ever will. And distributed ledgers even less so.
Bitcoin has done jack shit.
Move bitcoin from proof-of-work, then start building an argument.
Banks do a hell lot more than just basic transactions.
PoW is necessary to financially disincentivize attacks on the network.
Programmable money can achieve everything a bank does and more. Imagine automations that have their own wallets and can pay people (or other bots) to do things.
What are you talking about?
How in the hell does PoW better disincentivize attacks than PoS?
And programmable anything is a big mistake. As a software developer, I want LESS programmable things, specially in life-threatening scenarios.
Remove humans from equation, wonder later why there’s nobody do blame for the catastrophy.
And fuck every system that enables such state.
Attacking a PoW system costs more than a bad actor would receive in reward for attacking the system.
There’s good book I can recommend that you might enjoy as a programmer if you want to learn more about this: Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopolis. He is a Greek CS nerd who got into it during the Greek financial crisis and explains this all very well.
It’s strange to me to be a professional programmer and have no interest in highly secure programmable money and distributed systems for consensus, but you do you. I am not here to change your mind.
Because if you know one thing about software as a developer, it’s that it’s never secure, not even now.
I have no desire to automate everything and let bad actor disrupt the global system of anything.
Remember crowdstrike?
Also, PoWs have been split in the past thanks to cloud, what are you talking about.
Never secure? Maybe you and I have a different definition of secure. Billions are currently secured in BTC, and have been for years.
Crowdstrike is an argument against your point - single point of failure and too much power in one actor.
Please send me the example you mentioned about Bitcoin’s PoW being “split by cloud” - not sure what that means.
Yes, we obviously have different definition of security, as you imagine at being ‘outside the traditional banks’, not ‘guaranteed to be at your disposal and accepted by the rest of the world’.
Bitcoin is just one crypto, which is still being developed, and if you think CrowdStrike is an argument against thousands of banks versus one git repo, I have a bridge to sell to you.
It gets really exhausting talking to people with minimum technical knowledge at best about this stuff. 51% attacks have been done in the past, acting like it’s not possible is just plain stupid.
PoW is a huge energy black hole with nothing to show for it.
Bitcoin by itself has done very little for the general public, its biggest achievement was spawning other coins, which was the idea from the start. BTC should have died a decade ago.
Crypto is and should remain a niche past time for some techical folk, once big money goes in, it will kill the retail (non-business) users. Big players will make (or already made) PoW and PoS irrelevant for basic users. At least stop them from killing the planet.
Minimum technical knowledge indeed. Just not in the direction you are saying.
Bitcoin is not a repo. It’s a protocol, like TCP / UDP. You are probably thinking of the Bitcoin core client. It can be written in Node or Python if you want.
I’ve read the whitepaper, all the source code for Core, and built lightning mainnet applications.
Re: 51% attacks, yes they have happened, but as I noted above, the expense of running them is more than the gains. Because of PoW.
Re: real-world applications: Africa and other unbanked areas use BTC regularly. Citizens of countries with high inflation too.
Re: destroying the planet: many of the successful Bitcoin miners run on excess energy that would otherwise be wasted. Nuclear / hydro plants have excess energy as they generally online large portions at a time, more than is needed for a specific time. You can think of Bitcoin mining as bringing forward the ROI on a new power plant before it reaches capacity.
Protocols are maintained by someone, too. How many nodes use that core implementation?
And if you are aware of development, you then know CVEs right? So you must understand while not having global economy rely on a singular protocol with majority nodes using a core implementation is not a good idea? And don’t you dare compare it to TCP again, or I will not take you seriously any longer.
51% - just use the cloud computing for a little while, it’s not as expensive as buying an entire country worth of ASICs, that you have no use for afterwards. Back to big players - imagine if Google decided to go all in on crypto? Wonder what would have happened.
People use it - sure, people use all kinds of shit, might as well use any other currency, what makes bitcoin special there?
Planet - just no. It’s inefficient, and provides very little advantage over existing solutions, with huge drawbacks. We should use the hardware and resources on power storage, not made up markets. Folding@home would make 10000x more sense than this bullshit.
So fuck off with this apologistic bullcrap. There are better solutions for every issue at hand, where bitcoin poses no advantage, and alternatives provide some value to this world. Bitcoin robs us of huge amounts of power all over the world, and that stupid fad has been replaced by even worse energy sinkhole - AI - that other techbros will defend with similar arguments, while the results never meet the expectations. “But just one more planet, bro, and we will change the world, bro.” Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Also, fucking relational databases do way more than blockchain ever will. And distributed ledgers even less so.