Hacker News Reader

Comment by tal8d | Hacker News Reader

> Can you actually point out the misinformation?

Yes. I submit to you this article. Consider the framing of bitcoin's utility and the immovability of the status quo.

> This article is not proposing to 'waste energy' on folding proteins.

No, that accompanies the handwringing about POW - you can substitute an number of other silly suggestions: SETI, fusion reactor modeling, etc.

> This article points out that other systems may also consume a lot of energy, but they give our societies a ton of value in return.

Have you maybe considered the possibility that, I dunno, bitcoin replaces the fiat currency - as intended from the outset of the entire endeavor?

View on HN

BOINC has many projects, several of which are geared towards solving open questions in mathematics

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

Which is the worst thing you could possibly use to secure anything.

Take it up with the creators of Gridcoin

Yeah, that is basically a science themed chucky cheese token - not an independent currency.

Why makes it not an independent currency?

Step one, don't do this:

"BOINC superblocks fetch a participant’s BOINC recent average credit, also called researcher RAC. RAC is based on a participant’s earned BOINC credits. !!!>>>*Credits and RAC are defined by BOINC*<<<!!!"

BOINC's unit of credit, the Cobblestone (named after Jeff Cobb of SETI@home), is 1/200 day of CPU time on a reference computer that does 1,000 MFLOPS based on the Whetstone benchmark

Eventually, credit may reflect network transfer and disk storage as well as computation.

Credit has no monetary or other value; it's just a measure of how much work your computers have done.

Total credit: The total number of Cobblestones performed and granted.

Recent average credit: The average number of Cobblestones per day granted recently. This average decreases by a factor of two every week.

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Computation_credit

Lets just take the shortcut: Who assigns the the proofing unit? The metric doesn't even matter, it is a question of who. Now, who controls that? Once you figure that out you'll realize that you are trusting parties that you either didn't know you were trusting, or you kinda knew but didn't want to think too hard about because nobody really cares about chucky cheese coin. You can't be rewarded for performing useful compute without some degree of implicit trust, which makes you dependent on the other party. You can dress it up with quorum algorithms, etc - but it only further obscures the underlying vulnerability. That is fine for a token system, but not for a cryptocurrency.

Okay, thank you for deigning to explain your objections in detail. That is actually quite helpful, as it has decreased my interest in GRC. I appreciate your time in reading the whitepaper and pointing out the deficiencies in the design.

Full disclosure: I didn't read the entire paper, I just know where the landmines are in these "Better than POW with no downside!1!!" altcoin papers - as they've been around for a long time. After the 5th or 6th time scrutinizing a self-styled bitcoin killer, it gets pretty familiar. But I certainly encourage everyone to read the whitepaper (and genuinely understand) for whatever cryptocurrency they're looking at, and then examine the source. That is the way it was done in the beginning, and those that did were always better off for having done it. Also, final bit of unsolicited advice: if somebody tells you to diversify your crypto portfolio, they're either dumb or they think you are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com