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apxhard's avatar

I didn't start off as a maximalist. I was interested in ethereum, thought iota sounded pretty cool, maybe ripple would go somewhere, etc. I still remember the exact moment I became a bitcoin maximalist; i was sitting on the toilet thinking about the precise mechanism bitcoin's proof of work algorithm uses, and realized that even slight changes break it.

During the 2017 ICO boom i thought about making my own coin. "Proof of work is wasteful", i mimicked other people saying. It sounded right. Bunch of coal being burned to generate random numbers? Isn't there something useful we can do instead? I thought i knew just what would work.

I was long obsessed with the P vs NP problem (I have a tattoo, even) and thought that it might be doable for a blockchain to generate solutions to NP complete problems as proof of work. Storing the solutions to the problems on chain would then lead to an ever-growing database of solutions to NP complete problems. Wouldn't that be amazing? Any time someone needs a solution to one of these problems, they could first look up on the chain and see if a solution already exists.

But i wanted to make sure i wasn't selling people on something i couldn't deliver. So I wanted to make sure this thing could actually work. I remember the precise moment i figured out it couldn't, i was sitting on the toilet thinking about _why_ bitcoin is setup the way it is, and what kinds of strategies bad actor could pull off under my imagined coin, that bitcoin's design presents. And that's when I became a maximalist.

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Bureaugewas's avatar

I have also experimented a lot with alternative usecases for decentralized blockchains. I’ve tried to build a chain for selling products (e.g. second hand). The idea was not even to add a coin to it, but just a way to interface with product offerings.

I realized at some point that it made no sense to have all offerings permanently on a blockchain, or anything other than money for that matter.

I’m still fascinated by the idea of doing opensource decentralized platforms (e.g. for sales), but I’m now focussing on leveraging Bitcoin nodes for running such decentralized applications and using the Lightning as the underlying monetary network.

I’m also writing an article on this and I have a project up on GitHub: GitHub.com/bureaugewas/Ddist

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