timorl @timorl@qoto.org

@velartrill One more nitpick that is a common confusion -- bitcoin is not quite anonymous, in fact there are very few anonymous cryptos. People use it for black market stuff only because the tracking around it is not as developed as within banks and it's impossible to undo transactions (so sellers like it). In principle bitcoin transactions could be tracked by governments almost as well as banking ones, and probably easier than cash payments.

@velartrill Making it backed by governments or corporations kind of defeats most of the purpose. I haven't really seen propositions for decentralized backing of cryptocurrencies, but maybe this could be possible?

@velartrill Massively, it's mostly network-bound, and even there it's latency not throughput, so not really a resource you can exhaust too easily.

The main disadvantage is that the current designs are less decentralized, as participating in a network requires an initial stake.

Also, full disclosure, I worked on implementing one of these, so I might be biased (but also knowledgable, tradeoffs...).

@velartrill Yup, the main contender afaik is proof of stake, which tries to base this on market incentives. You "bet" you won't cheat, and as long as a portion (usually 2/3, because math) of the people participating are honest everything works (and cheaters are punished). A big part of the idea is that you would have to amass an enormous portion of the total worth of the currency to disrupt it, and as soon as you did all that would be worthless almost immediately.

@velartrill A currency is only worth as much as the goods you can exchange it for -- if too few people use it, it might be worthless.

@velartrill That's not what proof of work is for, the creation of tokens is completely separate from confirming transactions, which is the purpose of PoW. In particular there are already PoW cryptocurrencies with a fixed amount of tokens.

@velartrill
Well wishes and good luck!