[Cryptography] Proof of Work is the worst way to do a BlockChain

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 06/02/2018 23:49, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> But no, the BitCoiners insist. We must obsess about this one particular 
> threat to the exclusion of all else because gubermints and the bankers 
> are evul and untrustworthy 

Actually governments and bankers are evil and untrustworthy, and the 
burdens of using trust mediated by bankers and governments to do 
business are rapidly becoming intolerable.  Accounting and HR have 
become vast and onerous bureaucracies, burdensome tentacles of the state 
in every business, making businesses larger than a family and smaller 
than giant multinational corporation with a skyscraper full of Harvard 
lawyers each drawing $300 per hour, increasingly impractical


> and we should instead trust the security of a 
> scheme with a hole big enough to swallow it whole.

Yes, proof of work is a terrible idea.

But we need to replace it with something better than bankers and government.


I have been working on it, but the result always implies pre-mining, 
that existing owners of currency are like shareholders in an existing 
business, which is politically unpopular right now, though I may well go 
right ahead with it anyway.