do not imagine that a currency market is any way to equitably distribute finite goods. it is not a solution to web of trust problems. it’s a speculator’s game. how long are you willing to ride the bubble?

a highly consistent distributed ledger, divorced from all this proof-of-work stuff would have tremendous value
to communities trying to operate local voucher and coupon programs. the use cases abound for this but somehow we’re stuck reproducing currency markets for rich nerds.

@garbados you need the proof-of-work to prevent someone from forging bitcoins. Otherwise you could just say you mined a buttcoin and nobody would be able to say otherwise.

But yes, blockchains(and more generally merkle trees) shouldn't be currencies, or more accurately commodities(since they're currently way too unstable to be currencies). They should be used for reliable distributed event/resource tracking, of which currency is a small and relatively shitty subset.

@popefucker proof-of-work doesn’t scale: it becomes costly and inefficient, unsuitable for communal use. i look forward to seeing how proof-of-stake and proof-of-cooperation work out, or models that use gossip protocols instead of blockchains to improve availability and efficiency. projects like the stellar consensus protocol make trust an opt-in act, rather than assuming like cryptocurrencies that math can preclude bad faith.