I’ve been dabbling in the crypto world for about a year now and tonight I finally met people in the real world who are also into crypto. I also made my first Bitcoin joke.
The event was Andreas Antonopoulos speaking in Melbourne.
Arriving at the venue there was a crowd of people all standing out front waiting to get in. It was a big crowd of people milling about with no discernible line. So I turned to the guy next to me and said, “Looks like they’ve got scaling issues.” He looked at me blankly like he knew I’d made a joke but he didn’t know how to react.
After a small wait and being given some free beer, the room settled to listen to Andreas speak. He was a really good speaker, super clear, passionate and he’d obviously done this a lot. But there was nothing really new for me in terms of info, as it was more geared towards people getting into Bitcoin for the first time. So at the end they opened it up for questions and I shot my hand up.
“Proof of Work is a very robust consensus system, but it uses a lot of energy and has had difficulty scaling. Have you looked at other consensus systems such as DPOS and what are your thoughts on them? And is there a point where we don’t need more security in a consensus system?”
He answered that he has looked at other consensus models and started talking about how Ethereum was about to try Casper which is a Proof of Stake consensus. He said they're interesting but we don't know how effective they will be until they scale. The only real test of a how a system scales is when it actually does. He went on to say he thinks the world will need at least one consensus system based on thermodynamics and that that will be Bitcoin, perhaps as the settlement layer for other consensus systems.
So I guess he avoided saying anything about DPOS. And I am unsure why he thought one consensus system had to be based on thermodynamics.
As an interesting adjunct when I went home I listened to this old interview from 2014 of Dan Larimer being interviewed on Let’s Talk Bitcoin with Andreas.
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-129-dogeparty-and-delegated-proof-of-stake
They kind of go head to head there for a few minutes.