A naive take on blockchain mining
At the cost of sounding outright foolish, with all due respect to the people doing amazing work in taking blockchains as a technology forward, i write here some mundane observations — driven purely out of intuition and no research what so ever.
Every blockchain has one (usually) fundamental usecase. Mining rewards are distributed to nodes that keep the system running. Inherently, i feel, the mining should happen in a way that exploits the fact that the node performing the mining is successful only if it is contributing its resources on the network which bolsters the fundamental usecase. A successful mining means that the transactions have been verified by a node that is heavily invested in the network and hence its fundamental usecase.
By the same definition, capitalist countries are run by capitalists. States united by religion are lead by a religious leader.
There are a very few blockchains that i have stumbled upon that seem to fit this mental model of mine.
Bitcoin miners are miners who expend maximum compute power. Adding compute power doesn’t directly add value to transactions clearing. I assume Bitcoin’s fundamental usecase to be that of currency.
Ethereum’s vision of proof-of-stake proof-of-work hybrid seems to fit the model, because Ethereum is a Turing Complete machine and adding computation justifies the fact that more computation power that exists more complex smart contracts will be cleared; proof of stake continues to make sense because ETH also aspires to replace fiat currencies, and the nodes which are willing to stake a high number of coins deserved their say in dealing with money matters.
The only two other projects i have come across that also (probably coincidentally) fit this paradigm are Orchid and Filecoin. Orchid uses proof-of-bandwidth to provide a Tor like service over the blockchain. Filecoin uses proof-of-storage to provide a decentralized storage solution.
I know the devil is in the details. I would like to know if there is something fundamental that i have missed.
