It reminds of the article that was posted yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21315942) that said the biggest disruptors are the technologies that start out looking like toys. An HN commentor mentioned (which I now can't find) that what differentiates actual toys from big technologies that start out looking like toys is the fact that the fad never passes despite looking like a toy. Crypto has seemed like a toy with no practical applications since it's inception but for some reason it's still around. I wonder if that points to eventual significant growth for the field.
If someone can figure out how to do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute, they would have a real winner on their hands. Of course, execution is also a key factor in success. There are lots of good ideas that were had by multiple people, but only one successfully executed.
It’s called Proof of Stake (as opposed to Proof of Work) and there are multiple implementations working already and Ethereum will migrate to PoS next year.
PoS is conceptually more complicated (block producing is assigned to nodes with staked currency and there are multiple validation techniques) but requires very little CPU power.
> If someone can figure out how to do crypto without burning through thousands of CPU-hours of compute...
I will freely admit that I'm only passingly familiar with many of the concepts of cryptocurrency, but - isn't that precisely the point? If coins are easy to mine, then they're valueless. I must be missing something...
