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Exactly. This is also why I think the trend to be "ASIC-resistant" is misguided and should be considered harmful.

All GPU-mined coins (except the hashrate-dominant one: Ethereum) are massively vulnerable to majority attacks because of the huge pre-existing installed based of GPU miners.

As I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173774 the only solid defense is for each coin to implement an ASIC-friendly algorithm that is unique to this coin, so there is no risk of 51% attacks from a pre-existing installed based of miners.




Or use something other than proof-of-work.


I've yet to see anything other than PoW that's got all four;

* genuine decentralization

* reliably generates a concensus with global supermajority, little or no forking (objective chain selection)

* fault tolerant network, minimal fragility / auto recovering, can't be permanently crashed / hijacked

* requires no human intervention

Everything I've seen so far in terms of PoS violates at least one of the above.

Hashgraph doesn't deal with concensus (it offload that to other layers), Ripple doesn't really deal with decentralization, Algorand is fragile, most PoS require human intervention besides often having several other faults.

Also there's probably more criteria like these that matter.


So?

"Genuine decentralization" / and "consensus" are not necessary to make a useful currency.

There's also massive cost and risk with the currencies that do implement those criteria.

We should all be open to different alternatives that WORK, and not reject them out of hand just because they're not implemented in such a way that they have attributes we LIKE.


Dropping global concensus means you're back to small regional currencies. With centralization you get things like Ripple. Both problematic / unstable in the long term.




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