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rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 day agoAlternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B’s to buy some A’s and you pay with them.
But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.
I think that’s why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.
With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There’s no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin “123456” depends only on operations with coins from “123*” subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don’t need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can’t have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.
And I don’t know if it’s possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don’t know how one can do this.
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
There is already a PoW crypto that is actually private called Monero. It uses ring signatures to sign transactions and rotating public keys to keep public keys private. It also happens to be relatively stable since it’s basically the only crypto that people use as a currency (generally to buy illegal contraband online).
Since it’s PoW, though, it still consumes buckets. Something I thought looked cool was Chia coin, which somehow uses hard drive space as a consensus algorithm which saves a ton of electricity, but I haven’t read the whitepaper on that, so I don’t fully understand it.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago…
They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward…
They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.
Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.
They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.
Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system… but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for…
Well, then basically no one does that.
Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.
Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.
And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.
Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.
Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading… people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.