So, there's two requirements for Bitcoin 2.0, or the replacement for Bitcoin 1.0
1. Eliminate wasteful mining driven by computing capacity.
2. Decentralize the currency exchange function.
#1 is easy, #2 not so...
Oh, RLY? #1 is not easy. There must be proof of work to ensure the validity of blockchain.
Good thinking inside the Bitcoin Box there. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like cryptography.
Why not a capacity-based mining metric as used in the distributed project software BOINC? "Earnings" are based on your percentage of commitment of a benchmarked resource as well as total capacity contributed. If capacity is really not needed in the aggregate, you could level the playing field between the cell phone processor used at 99% and the energy-wasting dedicated red hot pig breath generator running at 99% or for that matter dial in any skewing of reward you might want to achieve.
The whole weird hack of the difficulty level makes it clear whats really going on. Set it to minimum and rework the mining block creation rate meter, which could be amenable to something as simple as a consensus-based peer to peer counter.
Right now the mining hack is a lovely illustration of the fallacy of composition. The more it's done the less is the return to each participant for their investment. At the other end, where everyone recognizes pointlessly compute-intensive mining just costs everyone more individually so that no one should do it, bitcoins aren't created. It's a truly ludicrous situation.
LOLNO
a BOINC-like system would require a central authority to verify the work, defeating the whole point of decentralization.
Why is that? Please elaborate. Peers benchmarking each other could do the verification. Once again, you are only telling us how Bitcoin works, it seems you are having trouble thinking outside that tiny little Bitcoin Box. ROTFLMFAO, what's the weather like in 2008?
I am having trouble figuring out how such a system would work successfully. It seems like you are describing Bitcoin when you say "'Earnings' are based on your percentage of commitment of a benchmarked resource as well as total capacity contributed". And then you say that you will even the playing field between a cell phone and a power generator. How, exactly, would that be achieved? Give the technical details! Most "evening the playing field" ideas are shot down pretty quickly by people who figure out how to circumvent such measures. The best you could do is to limit the computations to something that only CPU's can calculate, not GPUs, but that's not going to save much power.
And what about security? If it only takes a few cell phones to do the calculations, what would stop someone with malicious intentions from calculating and broadcasting their own blockchain? By default, the Bitcoin client accepts whichever chain is the longest as the "correct" blockchain. If you used a similar scheme, but limited the processing power behind the protection of said blockchain, it wouldn't be long before you'd start seeing 51% double-spend attacks on it.
No shit? To borrow a phrase from the mayor of Chicago, that's fucking retarded. Are you suggesting that this preposterous business of spinning wheels at ever increasing rates is necessary to maintain the security of the blockchain? If so, failure is inevitable. So many flaws, thanks for pointing this one out.
Give the technical details. The means of benchmarking GPUs, FPGAs, or whatever are too obvious to waste space on, in fact the more heterogeneous the platforms, the better for having them cross-check each other. Besides, existence proofs are always compelling, witness the BOINC project does this for CPUs and GPUs as well and it is not centralized other than as a matter of recordkeeping convenience. Of course, the BOINC project generates work of tangible value, whereas bitcoin asks for unbounded resources just to barely keep itself going, so there's a shared interest in central recording in BOINC.
It's been said before, but Nakamoto was very prudent not to burn his real identity on a 1.0 prototype. He's obviously much more clever than the folks who have internalized his work as gospel, a silly thing to do with a wholly synthetic mathematical game.