Why I’m a Proof-of-Work Minimalist
YES, (for those familiar) I’m playing with the term “Bitcoin Maximalist” (and in a future post I’ll share my reasoning as to why I’m staunchly not a Bitcoin Maximalist).
It is not my intention to provide proof (pun intended) of anything here — just want to bear witness to some obvious facts and hopefully coin a new term (“Proof-of-Work Minimalist”) to express my doubt in the longevity of PoW — the original consensus algorithm.
Proof-of-work was a necessary introductory approach to confirm transactions and produce new blocks to the chain — but as blockchain technology progresses, newer more efficient approaches exist that will render it obsolete.
Many of my hard core crypto colleagues will cringe with disagreement and for such a new industry with so many stakeholders heavily invested in this approach — I’m sure that disappointment (or even anger) would be the natural reaction.
In a recent Laura Shin podcast Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of HyperLedger made a bold prediction — “I’m highly confident that most of the crypto communities will move away from Proof of Work and those who don’t, will.” *
There are many factors that lead me to agree with Brian Behlendorf — and determining the perfect consensus algorithm is not a battle that can be won purely on the basis of technical or algorithmic prowess.
The focus — on the highly technical algorithmic brilliance is what gives many confidence in its superiority but it is actually the source of its greatest weakness in terms of long term scalability and actually delivering on the promise of decentralization.
Whether it’s GPU vs ASICS or hardware vendors vs software developers this escalating war of technical prowess reminds me (perhaps because I was a teenager in the 80’s) of the futileness of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War.
This is an absolute waste of compute power and energy — particularly when their are viable alternatives.
The supposition of the PoW approach is that nodes must prove their worthiness in order to perform block production of valid transactions. Instead of focusing on making that so challenging so as to prevent the injection of false or bad data from a single source — why not focus some of that compute power on empowering (truly) decentralized nodes to query each other’s status to continuously seek blockchain convergence (to borrow a routing network infrastructure concept).
Convergence is the state of a set of routers that have the same topological information about the internetwork in which they operate. For a set of routers to have converged, they must have collected all available topology information from each other via the implemented routing protocol, the information they gathered must not contradict any other router’s topology information in the set, and it must reflect the real state of the network. In other words: In a converged network all routers “agree” on what the network topology looks like.
OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) uses LSA (Link State Advertisements) and this could be a perfect model for blockchain Nodes to query each other and determine the validity of a potential block producers data injection (in relations to all other existing transactions in the chain). There are lots of details that would need to be developed here but this avoids the nuclear arms race approach to validation/consensus.
Proof of work is not sustainable and does not support the future promise of decentralization. It ultimately gives advantages to chip manufacturers, state players (who control the local energy costs) or crafty nuclear engineers who siphon off power (from the nuclear plant of their employer) in order to support their undercover mining operations.
There is most certainly room for multiple consensus algorithms. One size does not need to fit all.
So tell me — are you a Proof-of-work minimalist? Either way — please drop me a line — I would like to hear why!!!
*Earlier in the conversation Brian Behlendorf described PoW as “scientifically and algorithmically fascinating” and then called it a “temporary blip” and compared it to Mercury mining of gold (https://www.miningfacts.org/environment/does-mining-use-mercury/).
