Koinos And Other Experimentations

Today is the day Koinos is released.

For those who are unaware, this is a new blockchain that was designed by the developers from Steemit Inc after they parted ways with the company following Justin Sun's acquisition.

This is a PoW blockchain that is touting a new mode of mining that allows for CPUs to be involved. This is a change from what we presently see where high end cards are required to mine the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is why mining pools run into the millions of dollars to compete with each other. A lot of high-end processing is required to amass those tokens.

It was not always that way. In the early days, Satoshi set up the system to mine on simple computers. These were the first block producers. Now, Koinos seeks to mirror that by "turning back the clock".

The obvious goal is to enable average people to be a part of the network, looking to decentralize it through computer processing power. If people are doing it on their laptops and PCs, the number of participants can increase. That is the theory anyway.

For those interested in the project, here are a couple of articles that explain it in greater detail.

https://peakd.com/hive-103021/@andrarchy/announcing-koinos-whitepaper-and-koin-mining

https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@ervin-lemark/koinos-platform-announcement-and-koin-miner-setup-mining-start-on-october-13th-2020

https://cointelegraph.com/news/former-steem-devs-believe-cpu-mining-is-the-key-to-a-fair-launch-for-their-blockchain-3-0

This is obviously a big difference from the DPoS that the team was accustomed to working on at Steemit Inc. We all know there is still a great debate between PoS and PoW. Advocates on both sides are resolve in their views about which system is better.

In the end, we are still in the stage of grand experimentation. PoW does offer security that, thus far, is not able to be penetrated. The biggest challenge with this system is a 51% attack, something that a few chains experienced. It is possible that Bitcoin is clear of this hassle since the processing power is such that it would be too expensive to launch that type of attack.

Of course, the biggest challenge to PoW is in scaling. Ethereum is working on converting to PoS due to the scaling issues it has. The recent success of DeFi has caused network traffic on that chain to back up while the cost of transactions exploded.

Hence we find ourselves back in the same old quandary with this debate.

Source

Nevertheless, experimentation is needed and, to be quite frank, different systems are of benefit. In the end, we need all the power we can muster. Just consider how much computation power is required to run a network like Visa. At the same time, consider how much storage an Amazon Web Services employs.

In the move towards decentralized data, we need a lot of processing and storage capability added to these networks. The decentralized blockchain world is rather small at the moment. In fact, compared to the existing system, is a tiny.

Down the road, employing most of these systems will take place. The world simply needs different options. There are going to be many applications that do not require the top end security features such as gaming. For their purposes, basic security is sufficient. However, gaming does require the ability to scale, as well as a host of other industries. We saw how important this is in the world of finance.

We have a tendency to look at things as this wins, that loses. Our inclination, which comes from operating in a scarcity world, leads us to believe that things are black and white in this regard. The actually reality of this situation is we need all these different chains to have a degree of success.

The present system has 30 years to build it networking power. Over those years, a great deal more was added, resulting in extremely powerful systems. The world of blockchain is just getting started with what it is constructing.

As the fold@home project showed, decentralized computation can result is significant power. Earlier in the year, there was more computational power being utilized to search for answers to COVID-19 than exists on the largest super computer.

Determining what works best is really an exercise in what works best in a given situation depending upon the needs of that particular project. There is not going to be a single answer that works in every situation. Blockchains like Ethereum and EOS, which are general in nature, could find developers migrating to other chains as they offer better focused solutions for the needs of those people.

Over time, with experimentation and feedback, we find we are progressing. Koinos is just another level of testing that we are doing.

We will see how this project goes.

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