Really showing their teeth! I like it 
There is very usable blockchain based consensus engine : Tendermint
It supports light client and very scalable.
Yeah or public land registries or things like that could probably be a nice use for a open and duplicated public ledger
This is great. It’s a compelling and clickable title for things like twitter too.
+1
SAFE Network, removing the handcuffs and unchaining the crypto experience.
Not even sure it’s great for this use case either @whiteoutmashups. In the UK house and land deeds contain (amongst other things) ordinance survey maps showing land/property boundaries and such data would be prohibitively expensive to put on a blockchain. One recent analysis suggested it would cost over $2million to store 1 gigabyte of data on the Ethereum blockchain.
Good article, more public understanding of what blockchains are and aren’t suitable for is sorely needed.
I don’t consider Proof of Work a waste of energy though, it fulfills an important function. The highly competitive nature of PoW mining also ensures that that energy usually comes from locations where there’s a surplus or where the heat has to be produced anyway. Energy itself isn’t scarce really (for our current level of civilization at least), it’s just very hard for us humans to transport and store efficiently, but miners move to the right locations to avoid those problems. As far as I know the energy usage by miners hardly affects the regular consumer market, and compared to the legacy banking system it’s probably more energy efficient?
Serious question @Seneca, if that’s the case why are transaction fees so high (say $10)? I’ve assumed this was a reflection of the increased cost of mining, which whether due to energy use or other mining costs, or even due to demand pricing, is an inefficiency in my terms. I haven’t researched this, so interested if you can shed light!
Another problem I have with bitcoin is that it is not technically decentralized as most perceive. It is actually distributed computing nodes, with centralization ledger. All transactions are recorded, and stored in pleb computers, so the centralization power does not have to worry about losing their database. Plus, miners are centralized already. The only thing the government has to do is pass a law to regulate miners. Poof, now we got a controlled system. This is a regulator’s wet dream. All bitcoin has unique adresses. Have ID attached to those address, and just follow the money trail. A perfect NSA designed system. Oh wait, bitcoin is written by NSA!
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm
To the point about immutable datachain… That is false. Under regulator’s control, they can reverse the transactions given any time. Look at Ethereum and DAO conflict… If they can do it, then it is no longer decentralized… Another evidence that it is a “distributed computing nodes” rather than “decentralized.”
Nope. Has nothing to do with the cost of mining.
Bblockstreamcore made it harder for anybody to make transactions. You can’t put 25 people in 20 seat bus. The memory pool back logs went over 30k transactions. So if you’re in memory pool, the chances are you’re gonna have to wait for few days. If you want to get on the bus, then you must pay high fee to make it priority first. It’s artificial system by blockstreamcore. Thus, there was a split last month.
Now the fee is a lot lower in bitcoin classic than blockstreamcore. Now you can put 40 people in 40 seat bus… The memory pool is cleared every block.
The Bitcoin block chain is constrained in the amount of data that can be put in a block, which was 1 MB max until a short while ago. Since August with segwit type transactions it’s possible to store the signature data outside the legacy block, so the theoretical limit is about 4 MB now (though more like 2 MB in practice) depending on what type of transactions are used by the user network.
This is what the “civil war” in Bitcoin is about, the question of keeping the current capacity restriction, increasing it or even removing it.
Opponents of a blocksize increase argue that it harms decentralisation because running a full node (one that downloads and validates the entire blockchain) becomes more expensive and the additional network latency of bigger blocks encourages geographical mining centralisation. In addition, a further blocksize increase requires a hard fork, which means that unless practically everyone upgrades to the new software version, the network and ledger is likely to split and two distinct coins would emerge (like Bitcoin Cash).
Proponents of a blocksize increase argue that the blocksize limit was never intended to stay and that Bitcoin will be fine if regular people can’t afford to run a full node. From that perspective the blocksize limit is holding Bitcoin adoption back and causes an undesirably expensive fee market. Proponents also sometimes argue that a hardfork is the preferred method of upgrading Bitcoin software because when two coins emerge market forces will determine a winner.
That’s a very short summary that’s hopefully objective (apologies if not). I’m not really interested in discussing it more deeply here because it’s a hotly debated issue that has caused a lot of bad blood, and this community has people in both camps. It’d be a shame if that division would also negatively affect this community.
Edit:
The core of the issue is of course that a block chain has the maximum level of data redundancy, so there is a fundamental trade-off to be made. David Irvine mentions this in the article in the OP. Because the data redundancy in SAFE is fixed at a far lower level, SAFE should be able to do things that a block chain can’t.
From a more economic and less technical perspective…
It only costs little over $1k a coin to mine bitcoin at the moment, so the miners are doing fine.
Arrr yes, it depends on how you define it.
As an Engineer I consider a waste of energy when the desired result can be achieved using a process that uses significantly less energy. Obvious the processes have to be suitable and not some unethical method.
So for PoW the energy required to produce a set result/function (security/transactions) is many many times higher than other methods that are becoming available. For example SAFE.
So yes in terms of comparing different processes to achieve the same result then PoW is extremely inefficient and a waste of energy. When it was invented the only other method that produced a inadequate result was the current banking system. Obviously the banking system was not acceptable and the blockchain solved a lot of issues and was the only way to achieve the desired result back when it was invented.
But in the near future, PoW is not the only way and compared with the alternatives it is very much a waste of energy.
Wondering what’s the cost to farm a Safecoin in the future. If it’s very low, it might disrupt the disruptor (btc). After much research I find that the cost to mine crypto is not exactly cheap for the average Joe.
Costs are
- bandwidth
- storage
- computer
- electricity
Now SAFE vaults is targeted at home user who is going to use their spare resources.
Thus actual costs is
- bandwidth if you don’t have enough quota in your plan. SAFE is targeted at those who have very high or unlimited so for most vaults at home this will be zero cost. Those who don’t have enough quota will likely find the cost too high
- Disk - no cost since the vault is on their existing disk in the computer
- computer - no cost
- electricity - extremely small extra for extra disk activity and only significant if they leave the computer on longer than they usually do.
Now if you use a RPi or CHIP or other SBC then initial cost of SBC (<$100) and USB drive (stick or HD). Electricity should be <10 watts, then bandwidth
Mind if I pm you my postal adress so you send me 2 or 3 ones ? 
Just tickling , we get that you talk of additional cost over existing
Currently to mine 1 Btc it costs 0.25btc. If the profit ratio for Safecoin is higher then we will see a huge shift from Btc to Safecoin farming. Best is farming is invisible to the government.
Unless you’re a student, or similar, where there is 0 cost per kilowatthour. In that case, they’re better off ASIC mining than SAFE farming, on an earnings per hour basis, all other things being equal.
That’s a bit of a WAG, since we don’t know what the earnings opps will be like on SAFE.
Assuming (bad start already eh) that the earnings are similar to storj, it wouldn’t take much to figure out which way the earnings scale tips.
There is no mining cost. The transactions are handled by two sections/groups by consensus without any mining.
The cost for most home people to do farming (run node/vault) is the extra electricity to leave the computer on for longer. There is no high usage of electricity, its just your computer running as normal sending or receiving packets.