Tl;dr: This report updates on what FACT0RN Blockchain, a Coinbase Crypto Community Fund grant recipient, has been working on to replace PoW hashing by work that is of interest to the private sector as well as to the academic community. Code for the FACT0RN Blockchain, which launched April 20, 2022, can be found here and the whitepaper can be found here.
By Escanor Liones (Github)
Proof-of-work (PoW) is the original scheme to secure blockchain technology introduced in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto through the Bitcoin whitepaper. An analysis done in late 2021 by the New York Times on the electricity usage of the Bitcoin network indicated that the lowest electricity consumption estimate was on par with the total electricity consumption of Washington State for a year — and more than 7 times as much as Google’s global operations.
Just this month, Forbes reported on a bill that is in the works in New York State, as well as leaked European Union Documents, that signal to ‘A De Facto Ban` on proof-of-work mining in general, for Bitcoin and otherwise. It is worth noting that by and large PoW blockchains are based on some form of hashing — a mathematical function that is easy to compute forward and hard to reverse given an output.
There is a blockchain that uses finding prime constellations as its proof of work, and yet another searches for chains of prime numbers known as Cuningham Chains as its PoW. Vitalik Buterin published an article on July 7, 2013 on Bitcoin Magazine about the latter titled “Primecoin: The Cryptocurrency Whose Mining is Actually Useful” where he observed that “One of the disadvantages of Bitcoin that its proponents often gloss over is the fact that its mining algorithm has little real-world value. ”
The author of the PrimeCoin whitepaper in 2013 stated: “I would expect proof-of-work in cryptocurrency to gradually transition toward energy-multiuse, that is, providing both security and scientific computing values.” I would extend this to…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Coinbase Blog – Medium…
