Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but…
Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?
I feel like it is, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM “prompts?” Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.
Have you heard of hashcash, it’s POW precursor to bitcoin. It stops spam, was originally developed for email but could be incorporated into Lemmy eventually on sign up. Principal is similar to what you suggest.
@Senseibu @FaceDeer POW was one of the biggest issues with crypto in general. Let’s not kill a tree everytime someone wants to sign up
@shipp Ethereum switched to Proof-of-Stake consensus nine months ago, it no longer burns a significant amount of energy to operate. I’m primarily interested in Ethereum because it’s got smart contracts, allowing a huge variety of applications that older, simpler cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can’t handle.
It’s a small foot print for a real user and expensive for bots who are generating enmasse. It worked on Windows 98 PCs so isn’t really an issue like you describe.
PoW is indeed an interesting solution to protect against DDoS in some situation, like how Tor Onion Services does it.
Not all applications of PoW are bad.