dust @sifr@anticapitalist.party

We're in the final countdown - in six hours, I'll be presenting a casual talk about what #theTubes are and how it could be useful in various scenarios as part of hacker.town's Virtual Hackerspace meeting

Saturday, April 3rd, 2021 at 6 PM EDT / 10 PM UTC. https://meet.jit.si/vhs

Meeting will be livestreamed on https://video.hackers.town and https://stream.aardwolf.social.

#hackerWeekend #vhs #hackersTown

“Doors are opened to some of us on condition we show we are willing to shut the door on others. If you police the border, you get in. And then, the shut door is treated as a melancholic object, not in the world but in the minds of those who don’t get in... So, racism appears only by being located in the minds of those who are haunted by history”
- Sarah Ahmed

https://feministkilljoys.com/2021/04/01/melancholic-migrants/

@bob Also Nano uses proof-of-work, but differently from Bitcoin, as an anti-spam mechanism.

"continuous advances in GPU make the Proof of Work resolution faster and faster for these new graphics cards. In order to prevent the network from becoming vulnerable, the difficulty of proof of work must always increase and that is precisely what we are seeing."

O RLY?

So it's still on the proof-of-work escalator.

"What has been done so far in the main Nano wallets is a process of delegating proof of work to purchased / rented worker-servers (which is usually very expensive and does not use 100% of resources) or services such as DPoW (Distributed PoW), which offer an API for developers to obtain quick transactions, using the processing of such a service instead of computational of user."

This is the same game that I saw in the early days of Bitcoin. You encounter some problem, and so you pretend that you don't have the problem and hand it to someone else, like a hot potato. But then as surely as night follows day, or gravity causes apples to fall to the ground, that someone else *always* turns out to be a crook who is stealing your cryptocurrency or engaging in further laundering scams. This stuff is so easy to predict.

"That’s why I created P2PoW. With P2PoW it is possible to delegate proof of work directly to 'worker peers', who currently work as miners"

Up the workers!

And thus Bitcoin is reinvented, but with some delegated chicanery around doing the proof of work. You can obfuscate the audit trail of wasted energy, but you're still wasting the energy.

I rest my case, milud.

https://anarkrypto.medium.com/nano-p2pow-d9c839a7ec49

Reading about Nano on Wikipedia and chuckling.

"On 9 February 2018, the Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail announced its shutdown after being hacked"

Well, of course!

"In January 2019, the Court of Florence found Firano liable for the losses after discovering that the exchange had failed to implement any meaningful safeguards to ensure the safety of their customers' funds"

Uh.

And exactly how viable is your "currency" if you need exchanges to do anything?

But then we get to the substance...

"Consensus is reached through an algorithm similar to proof of stake named Open Representative Voting (ORV). In this system, the voting weight is distributed to accounts based on the amount of NANO they hold"

Rich people get more votes. Because they're rich. Who could have predicted this!

But wait, there's more.

"In the event that two contradictory transactions are broadcast to the network (as in a double spend attempt), nodes vote for one of them and broadcast their vote to the other nodes. The first transaction to reach 51% of the total voting weight..."

So there's a problem right there, in that there is an incentive for the richest people to engage in double spending and then "vote" in support of their double spend. The vote is stacked in their favor.