Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The "innovation" in the original blockchain is that it is computationally expensive on purpose, to create "economic value". There is no computer science innovation there. Computer scientists didn't come up with the idea because it made no sense.

And it all went downhill from there.



No, the goal wasn't to create economic value. The goal was to make it prohibitively expensive to recreate the chain and thus fool someone else. Satoshi did not say that the purpose of PoW was to "create economic value".


And a digital signature couldn't be used because?


A digital signature alone cannot prevent double spending


No, going back in the list of transactions can.


[flagged]


Proof of work blockchain is nothing technically complicated. Nobody was doing it before because it makes no sense technically. The only reason it is used is because it adds economic value. Anyone using it for other purposes could use something else but wants VC money.


Okay then tell me how you can make a distributed ledger with global consensus without a consensus mechanism like PoW or PoS even with “no economic value”


Consensus doesn't need to involve doing hashes… there's a million distributed algorithms to do this stuff.

it's well researched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault


But those other solutions aren't just "using signatures".

Again, _please point out how you can have a distributed ledger with global consensus with only signatures and no other technology_


not only is this provably wrong, but the entire point is also negated through the merge which this post is about.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: