I know quite a lot about PoW’s, and I have co-designed an ASIC miner, and my view is that ASIC resistance is not really possible. Maybe ProgPoW has the best chance.
Zooko also believes ASIC’s are inevitable, but still the Zcash foundation has actually given a grant to the ProgPoW team to develop an Equihash flavor. Not sure why that’s necessary… just use original ProgPoW. Anyway, it looks like they will bow to popular pressure and try to be ASIC resistant.
Also in Monero, fluffy knows ASIC’s are inevitable and there’s already talk about going ASIC-friendly with Keccak. Of course they need to try RandomX first, but I have reviewed it in technical depth (at their request) and I’m pretty sure it will fail to stop ASIC miners from significantly outperforming.
In Grin, we’ve already seen the story play out. Start with trying to be ASIC resistant by using a lot of memory bandwidth, but in the end just embrace ASIC’s.
Why not proof of stake then? And don’t drag out that old saw about pos not being proven secure. It has been proven mathemtaically secure in a peer-reviewed published paper by cryptography professors and phds. Bitcoin or pow has never even attempted any sort of mathematical proof of security - just ‘it’s worked so far!’ People can poke holes in the pos paper, by fixating on how private keys are handled, but that wouldn’t do anything to make pow look more secure.
In other words, I love mining and mining equipment too, but isn’t what you said an argument possibly for pos?
Then I have nothing to say I guess? I’ll say it anyway:
Byzantine Consensus relies on “votes” being difficult or at least non-trivial to obtain. That is true whether it’s PoW or PoS or Po-anythingelse. The big difference for me is that a vote in PoW proves you spent energy, a fundamental concept of Physics, whereas PoS relies on “ownership,” a concept fabricated by people with no physical basis. PoS is inherently a rich-get-richer scheme, and the owners are required to do almost nothing except… continue owning things. PoW means that miners have to burn energy to keep their position of power, and there’s no way to make energy magically appear. Basically I trust physics more than people.
But maybe it will work. I’m open to the possibility that a PoS scheme can work. But as for “proofs”, it is all a matter of convincing experts rather than strict math. I mean, we can’t even mathematically prove the existence of one-way functions (hashes) in the first place. Such a proof would imply P!=NP! So anyway I prefer to view Byzantine Consensus as a “scheme” rather than pure math. Once you’re on board with that, it’s “energy” vs “ownership,” which do you trust as the foundation?
I enjoy your spirited response! But rich guys owning things will concentrate coins anyway. You know as well as I do mining equipment isn’t exactly cheap. The inevitabilities of asics, as you point out, with an economy of scale at play, means that all pow coins end up being owned by the same people whether they’re pow, pos or giant conch shells. Currency is just a token of some sort representing human energy and production power, therefore, the dominant point sources of energy and production, the dominant, acquire most of the money in any market. Fortunately, there appear to be enough greedy rich guys to fight with each other to make it not centralized in one individual at least. Ultimately the average joe ends up trusting some wallet app on his iphone that’s a complete mystery anyway made be unknown parties if this cryptocurrency thing is going to get anywhere. But I do appreciate and agree with your rapturous ode to physics and hardware!
Most people in society, by the time cryptocurrency is truly mainstream, will have about as much power or autonomy as they do now - which is none. And cryptography is really computer security, not really special to cryptocurrency. What’s really being built here is the computer age of FinTech. So why is this good or noble? Banking actually is good. Banking improves a society’s efficiency and grows its wealth. When silicon valley types hawk their crypto project talking about Africa, it’s because banking would revolutionalize the daily lives of many people in Africa.
All crypto projects really aim at handling a traditional financial service in a new way, leveraging modern computer technology to ideally make these services uber-efficient. Ethereum can do contrracts more efficiently than now. Bitcoin - interbank and wire transfers. My fave of the moment, cosmos, aims to be the programming language or network standard of some future cryptocurrency economy. So when you buy the tokens, it’s almost like someone was offering you the opportunity to invest in C or the Internet Protocol on inception. Grin can take the place of cash - which is currently handled in an expensive and inefficient way.
The way I see it, the consensus mechanism is almost irrelevant. What matters is what the coin as fintech aims to do for the economy. Consensus mechanisms can be changed arbitrarily, like with ethereum.
You’re right, a technology is mostly defined by how people use it, and to that extent, the underlying tech doesn’t matter. Until it does!
House-building “technology” is not about foundation excavation or frame construction. It’s about a home with people eating and laughing and sleeping. Until there’s a tornado then it’s really REALLY about frame construction…
@GORE1988 We’ve been making these designs on the in-browser custom shoe design on various popular shoe brand websites (vans, nike). You can submit any design and they’ll make a pair for you. For the Vans I made all I needed to do was upload the grin logo. The rest of the design is just choose-point-click.
So to make a long story short, you’ll have to go throw them together on the vans website if you want to buy them.
