Can GOV provide same level of proof of work as bitcoin?
“For a block to be valid it must hash to a value less than the current target; this means that each block indicates that work has been done generating it. Each block contains the hash of the preceding block, thus each block has a chain of blocks that together contain a large amount of work. Changing a block (which can only be done by making a new block containing the same predecessor) requires regenerating all successors and redoing the work they contain. This protects the block chain from tampering”
Proof of work has been adopted for verifying bitcoin transaction since the first block had been generated in 2009. The mechanism continually been discussed widely since the tide of bitcoin has swept financial technology (FinTech) land scape in these few years. It profoundly produced irrefutable process which consumes significant energy that modern governments and financial institutions had ever foreseen.
The value of producing block chain isn’t purely related to transaction verification such as preventing double spending, it also involves the traceable and irrefutable record of ownership transferring process that may disrupt modern value transferring system.
However, the phenomena rises us few questions:
Would any institutions/governments provided trust (notary/endorsement) could compete with the trust which bitcoin has produced through its proof of work system since 2009?
If the proof of work currently bitcoin’s blocks rely on reflects the fact that our trust among individuals would require such work to further validate it, then how come our centralized trust/credit evaluator can provide same level of quality and effectiveness on assessing or authorizing credits to clients or any individuals?
“The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power”
The incremental impact the block chain introduced by bitcoin has been made is not merely a new and workable methodology that significantly reduces the reliance on a centralized institution to prevent double spending issues, but also the potentials to allow our growing computational powers in the 21th century against on the weakness of our believes in each other, that is, all the promising value transfer among individual would no longer rely on a third party, but with SHA 256 or any of its serial encrypted algorithm that provides tremendous barriers which mostly no individuals or computing power can overwhelm it (redo the work).
Eventually, we have to find an objective and effective methodology to assess the correctness of value transferring between each party. Such credit transferring relates to the fundamental fact that we can barely trust any single centralized institution to give us an answer. Currency such as dollar offered by government is the way we are transferring credit and value now, however, if we examine how expensive we produce each dollar and see how much work we have done through the decentralized system that bitcoin relies on, then we may see a much clearer path to our future.
In the future, we may either reinvent current proof of work system to customize it into our current government system, or we choose another way to transfer values with each other. Oops, maybe it’s a little bit naive.
Apparently, government has no awareness to provide same level of proof of work as bitcoin since we in democracy society already vote for it. Proof of work in modern democracy society has been conducted by a primtive way, so-called vote, which is ironically assumed to be a procedure that represents a certain level of consensus among folks. Thus, such a question should be modified into the doubt of central bank, which is actually not elected and operated oblige to the will of us, and we unfortunately are living under it’s monetary policy every single day.
