"the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase."
https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets...
By making an economic exchange computationally expensive, we may have invented another way to make economic activity ecologically expensive.
1) ASICs. In the early days of Bitcoin, one of the biggest concerns was: "Now that computational power is worth real money, aren't malicious hackers going to become rich and powerful by harnessing botnets? And more normal people's computers will join botnets as hackers are directly incentivized, by bitcoin mining, to exploit users more often."
With the rise of the Bitcoin-specific ASIC, that suddenly became a total non-issue. It's completely worthless for a normal desktop PC to mine for bitcoins now: their total computational power, as measured in SHA256 hashes per second, is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the high-end ASICs that are mining today.
Problem solved.
Though governments will try to get involved, and no one can definitively predict the winner in advance -- I believe it's most likely that private industry, incentivized by Bitcoin's mining rewards, will create the most advanced specialized chips for Bitcoin. They're already pushing much lower nanometer processes than general purpose CPUs!
2) Energy expense of current monetary system. People, computers, ATMs, POS's, paper, time expenditure, inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or eliminated by Bitcoin.
3) Future technology. Before cars were invented, one of the biggest concerns was: "How are we going to get rid of the horse manure that's piling up in the world's densest cities?"
Infrared radiation isn't the only way to release heat to space. And even if it were, no one could say that it's not possible for humans+technology to amplify/improve this process.
Population rates in developed countries are plummeting. And just in time too. If only we could make the developing countries do the same thing -- but instead of condoms, careers and consumerism, they have poverty and religion which prohibits condoms.
We should be figuring out ways to handle economic problems such as those Ukraine and Japan will face: an aging, graying population for a few decades followed by less people and more robots doing work. We tax the robots and distribute Basic Income to everybody. Instead, we are worried about sustaining an exponentially growing economy, and how will the kids pay for the parents. On a global scale this is the most dangerous thing on the planet! Pollution and heat!
It's quite possible at some point that one of those will supersede Bitcoin, and/or Bitcoin will alter to proof of stake (perhaps when nearly all coins are mined).
Yes.
Ripple servers only need the current state of the ledger (as opposed to requiring the entire history of transactions, as Bitcoin does). This eliminates the problem of needing to download GBs of history to run a server. You can optionally download the full ledger history if you want access to the data, but it is not required for your server to participate in transaction processing. It's a much lighter weight design in general.
This is a major problem though.
The Blockchain is literally almost exactly like P2P File sharing except the file can be updated across nodes in an extremely limited context.
At a high level, BitTorrent's DHT uses some notion of consensus to communicate between peers about who is on the network and where they and their files are. There is never system-wide coherence of the DHT, but the algorithm (Kademlia) doesn't require anything like that. BitCoin's notion of consensus requires that coherence in all but the last ~10 minutes worth of the blockchain.
Zooming out even farther, BitCoin requires the entire network for anything to happen at all. BitTorrent leverages the entire network to speed up interactions between two individual nodes.
If you're still not convinced, consider what happens if 40% of the network is cut off from the rest for a large period of time. After the extended network partition ends, and the two big swarms rejoin, what do users find is different?
P2P requires seeds and peers. The structure of the Bitcoin network means that as long as there are miners, any information stored on the blockchain will continue to exist. This, in my opinion, makes it much more similar to the idea of a "cloud" than either bittorrent, or a corporate-controlled data server that hosts your information.
Comparing it to a "traditional DHT" is like kind of like comparing SQL and NoSQL. This is a good start on why that doesn't work: http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/
All you need is a network of computers that agree to run timestamp services, and then sign any info with enough timestamps from enough computers. That will give an uppsr bound on the time something was signed. The lower bound is trivial to provide by the transaction originator - simply sign something using enough timestamp services values as a salt.
A timestamp service simply outputs a random number for each previous minute and is available to sign things using the next number.
In order to defeat this scheme, an attacker needs to execute a Sybil attack against all the timestamp servers. The only time you really NEED to make something really expensive is to be let in as a timestamp server. This can be done on a reputation system, essentially proof of stake for new miners only. But not for each transaction!
