What is the problem that #blockchain is trying to solve? 🤔
@dragfyre Something like, "maintain a reliable transaction ledger given only unreliable witnesses to the transactions"
@khird ok, that explains a lot. 🤔 is anyone in the industry trying to come up with a workable solution for the inherent problems of sustainability, in terms of the ballooning demands on computational resources?
@dragfyre Sure, there are alternatives to proof-of-work schemes, most notably proof-of-stake. It's a different take on the same concept - a witness's reliability is linked to some scarce resource, either computing power in the case of proof-of-work, or previously earned currency in the case of proof-of-stake. A malicious witness must accumulate a significant quantity of that resource to make a false update to the ledger, which makes it cost-prohibitive to perform this type of attack. As long as honest witnesses cumulatively control more of the resource, the ledger is reliable.
You can imagine other such proof-of-X schemes where you base it on some other resource that's not environmentally destructive, but the underlying concept applies.
@khird This is interesting, and I wonder whether this doesn't just confirm what I've long suspected about innovation in the IT industry: That many of the problems we're trying to some with material means have important spiritual facets to their solutions. That is, while we could attempt to solve them with a new process or app, a big chunk of the technological dev work could be saved with the application of essentially spiritual solutions.