The WTF chill creeping my skin - I get almost anytime thinking about POW. Power ... wasted.

Well BOINC cannot reduce that, it's still electricity transformed into heat, just with some little additional output of scientific knowledge going alongside.
My practice looks like ballancing 2 threads for XMR mining and 1~2 threads into BOINC on a quadcore, plus 1 instance of a GRC wallet syncing somewhere (not needed to run that with redundance). That bottleneck, 4 threads would not produce more hashrate than 2 are capable of.

Inside the BOINC network, all calculations are done several times again, by different people. Just to assure statistical compareability. Checking the outputs, and if they match, the calculation should have been valid. It is that kind of computing work that does not immediately solve into a simply quotation.

On [GRC] they deliberately have choosen POS as a power consumption reduced mechanism for guaranteeing the blockchain security. Former algorithm was scrypt and that reduced the ballance down onto almost 50% electricity still evaporating for blockchain security.

I doubt XMR fits in there nicely. Very different worlds.

Great cloud. Only you can only use it on cold days. 

I follow you. GingerAle did a better job expressing my concerns :


Why do you think "questioning every kind of authority" is short sighted ? The word 'authority' is key here. No man/woman or group should be able to impose something by decree, but this isn't the case anyway with decentralized systems.

i would welcome the social contract in form of a contract/document/post whatever, but its not a must(i feel fine without it) and would be more like a marketing idea, still i like it.
But if there are things that are set in stone(which there are), why not collect and publish them somewhere in concentrated form?

i think right now only the hardcore followers know all the details about this contract. but we are proud of our concensus, so why not make it more visible

As far as wasted energy goes, consider that a crypto-centric money system would have far less overhead than, say a banking system. Paypal, banks, wire transfers, any current payment processing system all have costs to run, inherent to them by the fact that they have to employ people to do jobs like collect your cash, put it in a till, put it in a vault, mess around on the computer, maintain an internal ledger through massive computer systems. Plus, most of them operate only on bank hours, which is generally less than 50% of the day.

That cost can be reduced with blockchains, in the sense that there is much less overhead in employees who have been displaced by an autonomous technology that runs 24 hours a day. I'm not trying to make the point that total displacement of banking, and by extension, all costs in running payment processing will be on compare with keeping the blockchain warm.

More that, the industry stands to see a significant reduction in overhead by incorporating a more agile and fit ledger system that's mostly automated.

Problem is, when errors happen. Like you pay the wrong person or money just disappears. I guess that's a talk for another day, but I see things like correctly executed exchange and price volatility being a major focus for any type of post-crypto banking system, along with lending OFC.

Anyways, point I started out with - by saying that PoW is just a waste of energy, consider trying to convince your bank teller that their job is wasted capital, and get back to me.

LOL,

But just for it to say those beeps, you need engineers to produce the ATM. You need personnel to collect and deposit cash into the system. You need armored trucks to move the money around. And, you need maintenance personnel to keep it in good repair and up to date on technology. You also need power. And local food chains and stores for all of these people. And insurance when they get hurt or die. Just goes on and on.

its worse - its hypocrisy, people waste all kinds of resources on the most stupid things, but securing a decentralized p2p currency is somehow absurd! This is an old line by POSers that simply want to gain more coins doing nothing but sitting on them, POW is fair and with Monero is also more efficient compared with Bitcoin because of the algorithm.

There is a simple solution to this issue. There a common application where electricity is turned into heat and this is not "wasted electricity" namely space heating. This is a situation where POW mining has zero environmental impact. Furthermore because using electricity to produce heat only makes sense when the heat is required on a decentralized and distributed basis it actually increases the strenght of the POW network.

When it is -30 C outside the heat has way more value than the electricity.

Now. It's been working for me. In the future, try http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

this worked out well, good job fluffy. If you call, people come. i think it really helps to have threads inside the monero forum that are on one specific topic only with very low noise inside. please do so again in the future.