Crypto’s biggest achievement is being the financial equivalent of the gulf war oil fires. Just massive pollution. Think of all the good things that computing could be used for… we used to have all kinds of interesting collaboration projects. Instead we are setting those CPU cycles on fire for short term profit.
Imagine if all that processing power was used for Folding@Home.
The problem is that cryptocurrencies do not inherently need tons of processing power to operate. You could theoretically run the entire Bitcoin network on a Raspberry Pi. But the PoW algorithm was designed to always produce a block every 10 minutes, no matter how much hashing power was dedicated to the network. Everyone wanted a piece of the block reward pie, so the arms race was created.
Proof-of-stake algorithms would eliminate this problem entirely, but PoS is a shitty "rich get richer" method. Granted, with how expensive mining power is, even PoW results in the rich getting richer, but at least it doesn't result in the wasting of gigawatts of electricity.
> Everyone wanted a piece of the block reward pie, so the arms race was created.
And that's intentional – getting people pursue the goal for their own egoistic reasons, because that's bound to succeed. As a result, they all increase the security and stability of the network whether they want it or not, the only way to not do this is to not participate. If the network were running on a single Raspberry, someone bringing two Raspberries could effectively outcompete the other person on block rewards.
I'm not sure how this can be avoided without fundamental changes in society with regards to competition and adversity.
Read Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin was meant to decentralize trust and to eradicate fraud through transparent decentralized database called Blockchain. It is certainly more impactful than hobby search engines taking in consideration Bitcoin was also hobby project but really revolutionary one.
Go search what Larry Page said 20 years ago: If innovation is commercially successful it can have more widespread impact.
So your response to the author saying "I'm trying to be commercially successful, but it's really hard for these reasons" is "You should try being commercially successful"?
I respect his effort but the project is 20 years old and yet not commercially successful? There must be a reason behind it. The project is not good enough. Like I said only innovation can displace Google. Innovation is not something new and different innovation is something better.
