Quote from: wiebemarten on November 14, 2017, 05:02:40 AM

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Quote from: aleksej996 on November 13, 2017, 10:47:43 PM

I am curious, do these ledgers have all the balances of every address on them? Or just the new transactions?
It seems to me like it would have the same security if the ledgers just stored balances instead of transactions which isn't the case for PoW chains.
There would be no need for the old ledgers then. You can just have the most recent one. And poof goes the blockchain.
It is just a SWIFT system now where anyone can be a bank, right?

The security between these two is not the same because when you do not store the transactions that caused a change, you lose the ability to audit what happened.

Ripple stores both the transactions as well as the effects the transactions had on the global state of the network. (See Ripple Tech Talk: Understanding Consensus (Mar 2015) for an in-depth description, this is covered at 22:34).

~Wiebe-Marten

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Sure it is very different if you actually care for some reason what happened and not just what the current state is. But when it comes to currencies, most people don't care ,and really there is no reason why they should, about who owned how much money in the past. Sure maybe some historians do, but for the purpose of currency, it is useless. In PoW that is necessary, but in PoS it isn't so it shouldn't be there. It is just a cost for the nodes to keep a history.

The history doesn't matter in PoS. It doesn't matter in PoW either, it is just that you can't show the current state in PoW without showing the past.

And that is my point. There is no reason for a blockchain in a PoS currency. It is just a cost. It is a scam to make it sound like it has anything to do with Bitcoin, but it doesn't. The technology used for PoS was used for decades before Bitcoin existed, it is nothing new, just a marketing trick of the banks where they use a new trend to sell their old services in a new package.

You don't have to be running a node from the beginning to know that the blockchain that you are following is the same one as it always was in Bitcoin. In PoS that is not the case. In PoS there are people who can give to chains that are both equally valid and that the nodes can't decide whether they received the coins or not, even tho they see both chains. In PoW that isn't the case.

The point is that PoS coins are just P2P technology. Not that different then using torrents for ledgers. PoW is something new, a different technology, that binds digital to physical in an impressive way.

Quote from: Euro1000 on November 19, 2017, 05:30:30 PM

Sometimes I have discussions with people thinking that BTC is a waste of energy and we should stick to FIAT instead.
Even if the computation of hashes is useful it is also bad for the ecology.
I think it would be interesting know which of these two systems is wasting more energy - FIAT or BTC?

Probably I (or we) would have (another) argument against FIAT.

Bircoin can run on green energy, like the rest of the digital technology. It can be run from solar panels in the dessert where nothing grows.
Cash needs trees to be cut for paper or for plastic to be used that is polluting the world. Either way, the reason that Bitcoin was created for wasn't to be more ecofriendly then fiat, it was to be more decentralized and secure.