The world doesn't "need" 19,000 cryptocurrencies. So wby do they exist? Simply because it is easy and profitable to create one. It is literally free money.
As long as crypto-suckers exist, there will be people looking to service their "needs".
> Simply because it is easy and profitable to create one.
It is indeed. It's also possible to make it not easy (built it from scratch [1]) while implementing novel crypto (such as [2]) and in such a way that the creators have no way to profit from it (with pure linear emission that emits the vast majority of supply in later decades).
Useful PoW is unlikely to be successful. You need a puzzle that’s difficult to compute AND very easy to verify the result. It also needs to be robust to many different attack vectors.
Back in the ol'piracy days the "proof of work" were in the form of your download/upload ratios, so essentially your storage and the volume of data your shared with others.
So I don't think the PoW needs to be some CPU intensive task, it can be something of very low effort and value. But the problem becomes that yield must also be of low value -> and this should be ok!
Except people seem to prefer the perception of high-risk/high-reward over some that's slow but builds up over time.
So it's not about PoW, but instead people are looking for gambling opportunities.
BT upload counts were a client side value, they were trivial to fake and the tracker would trust the client. PoW cannot rely on client side trust, it must be universally verifiable.
We have a few ways to do this, partial hash collisions, finding large primes, finding prime constellations, calculating cuckoo cycles…
The primes seem to be valuable, alas nobody cared about primecoin or riecoin.
because boinc is useless or what? it allocates coins based on having done a distributed aciebtific computation? there’s no big consensus-securing PoW, where is the energy waste?
I think cryptos niche is small to medium size trading networks that could be mostly services, digital items.
Since they don't scale well and transaction fees are small on smallish networks it seems like a good environment for niche types of marketplaces.
if networks can figure out how to minimize the scammy features. kind of hard to grow big and push your weight around like most network players if it's hard to scale.
I don't think web3 is the answer it's too centralized at the interface.
Most of them are not currencies. They are securities , shares in innovative projects. The number could be the same as the number of digital startups and there are many more than 19k worldwide.
Careful. If you frame them as "securities/shares", they may be subject to a whole host of legal requirements which makes fraud much harder to perpetrate. And we wouldn't want that now would we?
I have no vested interest. If they are securities they should be regulated. All I am saying is that the article makes a parralel saying "there are only 180 currencies worldwide" while most tokens represent ownership of some game or defi or service.
I had to do a bit more wordsmithing than usual to get it to fit within the HN title limits.
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