How many ex-CTOs of square have to die for it to be obvious that having thousands of junkies slowly decaying on the street in an orgy of madness and drugs might be a bad idea?
Not that this should matter, nobody deserves to be stabbed… but I knew Bob personally btw and he was a great guy.
I knew crazybob too. Met him his 20s at Google. Haven't chatted with him in years but the Bob I knew would have have your intro to be offensive and in poor taste.
I don't know. Saying someone was kind vs spouting hate rhetoric seems less bad to me. But this is subjective, obviously. I take your point but I disagree with your scoring.
Photonic chips for analog matrix processing are already being commercialized.
The underlying platform, CMOS Silicon Photonics is commercial already (in every data center) and produced in high volume.
Heavyhash can be constructed such that the Keccak hashes comprise a minimal amount of the work.
Quoting from the BIP:
"Below is a conceptual representation of a 3D-packaged oPoW mining chip. Note that the majority of the real estate and cost comes from the photonic die and the laser, with only a small digital SHA3 die needed (as opposed to a conventional miner of the same cost, which would have many copies of this die running in parallel)."
Firstly I'm not convinced that the photonic version would be more efficient than the all-electric version. The conversion is very expensive. Secondly, they don't need to be on the same chip. The Sha3 chip would be very dense, and the multiplex in time and frequency into the photonic circuit, which would have much larger features, probably printed on silica.
Chia is great (and the one real alternative to oPoW for low energy consumption that I am aware of), however the security assumptions are very different from PoW (it uses VDFs etc).
Bitcoin is conservative by nature, so the likelihood of adoption for a PoW with the same fundamental game theory and security assumptions is much higher.
Regarding targeting commodity hardware:
This has a good ring to it but introduces some 51% attack vectors. A lot of the security in BTC comes from the fact that miners will make their hardware worthless if they collude to double spend in a 51% attack. That's not true if the hardware is a real commodity and has resale/reuse value outside the system. Probably there will be specialized hw for Chia though as people often point out.
I don't think that specialized hardware is a security feature of Bitcoin, and definitely not one that was addressed or foreseen in the Bitcoin whitepaper (one IP one vote or one CPU one vote).
In fact, it's quite easy to argue the opposite, that commodity hardware makes the decentralization/security of the network higher because anyone with extra space can farm. This is true today since Chia already has more full nodes than Bitcoin — you can run a full node off a Raspberry Pi :)
