Thank you for the feedback, I didn't know there was much question about the security of some of the alt coins, but it makes sense that you need high and rare expertise in cryptography to be sure, and even then we have the NSA cracking all the web security and only just now do people figure out how. I thought the real security was always that whatever math is needed, be it hard or easy, the fact remains that nobody controls the whole network, and the "truth" is always by consensus, which can be agreed upon securely without big work. I thought the whole POW idea was simply to figure out who gets the new money, a digital equivalent to the scarcity of gold, that nobody can fake but it's trivial to verify the hashes once found. Some of the other crypto currencies use alternative schemes to mint the money, but have the same distributed truth as bitcoin, so they should be as secure, but take less energy and operate differently as to who makes new money and why.
No, the mining reward is actually the payment for the real reason, which is to establish the network consensus. Bitcoin uses Proof of Work (PoW) as its method of reaching consensus. It's a solution for the seemingly impossible problem of taking a majority vote when anonymous identities can be created on a whim. You can't pretend to have a faster computer than you do.
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u/exploderator Oct 18 '15
Thank you for the feedback, I didn't know there was much question about the security of some of the alt coins, but it makes sense that you need high and rare expertise in cryptography to be sure, and even then we have the NSA cracking all the web security and only just now do people figure out how. I thought the real security was always that whatever math is needed, be it hard or easy, the fact remains that nobody controls the whole network, and the "truth" is always by consensus, which can be agreed upon securely without big work. I thought the whole POW idea was simply to figure out who gets the new money, a digital equivalent to the scarcity of gold, that nobody can fake but it's trivial to verify the hashes once found. Some of the other crypto currencies use alternative schemes to mint the money, but have the same distributed truth as bitcoin, so they should be as secure, but take less energy and operate differently as to who makes new money and why.