[metastart]

Solana with its proof of history and performance sounds extremely cool. The performance relative to network size also looks really good. The general idea strikes me as a great insight, though I have just an intuitive grasp of the idea (I haven't looked into the white paper). Proof of history seems to be based around proof of time -- a fundamental problem in physics (inspired Einstein) is defining time and that usually is via synchrony. It seems here that's defined by assigning a function which takes a certain amount of time and something that can't be pre-computed. I'm not sure how the parameters to compute are determined every second or fraction of a second -- but it sounds like a modified proof of work where the computing and energy burn may not scale as the value or size of the network does (unlike bitcoin to date). Building a network fundamentally around timestamps also makes sense for a ledger. The price of Solana and every other cryptocurrency has gone wayyyyy up this year...no comment about any of that except that for almost all crypto (maybe excepting Bitcoin), it is driven by speculation with limited usage in legal markets and dominant usage in illegal markets. If crypto disappeared from the world today, the only thing that would change is cybercrime would reduce by at least half...maybe more hehe. That doesn't detract, though, from what look like quite innovative technical achievements by Solana!

[hanniabu]

> for almost all crypto (maybe excepting Bitcoin), it is driven by speculation with limited usage in legal markets and dominant usage in illegal markets

Uhhhh, what? The coin that isn't used for anything besides speculation is the one you think isn't? How are you going to say that Ethereum, which beats bitcoin in most metrics and has tons of uses and potential is more speculative?

[metastart]

Ethereum has a value equal to roughly GM, Ford and Toyota combined. Probably as much as AWS despite the fact that no large company I know of runs their company on Ethereum. The largest things on Ethereum are things like Uniswap which facilities speculation on Ethereum...hehe. What happens to the world if Ethereum disappears? I don't think it misses much of a beat. Ethereum does have "tons of uses and potential"...but it's still just that, and it could be displaced.

[mech422]

>>If crypto disappeared from the world today, the only thing that would change is cybercrime would reduce by at least half...maybe more hehe

Yeah - cuz no one hacked banks, cut fraudulent POs, or any of the other scams before crypto. It used to be said banks wouldn't report or prosecute hacks for fear losing public trust, so how common it was is speculation.

That was a cheap shot for an otherwise interesting post :-P

P.S. My favorite 'bank hack' was the coder that changed a banks interest calculations to deposit all the factions of pennies of calculated interest to accounts he controlled. Because it was less then a penny, the bank couldn't account for it and he had something like $4 million before he was caught. After that, we had to start using accumulator buckets for calcing the interest..

edit: s/would/wouldn't/

[neRok]

> Yeah - cuz no one hacked banks, cut fraudulent POs, or any of the other scams before crypto.

OP was probably referring to attacks such as ransomware, because if you don't have an anonymous way to receive payment, then there is less incentive to do the crime in the first place.