SENS Research Foundation Raises at Least $20 Million in the First Two Days of the Pulse Chain Airdrop

A warning: we're going to be talking about the strange world of blockchains and cryptocurrency today, about which I am far less informed than is the case for matters relating to aging. Blockchains are a way to solve problems in distributed collaboration, allowing enforcement of transactions and outcomes without the need for a trusted third party. Implementations to date, most notably Bitcoin and Ethereum, have used the cost of large amounts of computation as the barrier that prevents cheating, but that requires a collectively equally large ongoing expenditure on computation on the part of participants in the network. That is an expense that people have been happy to undertake, as the rewards for participating outweigh the costs. Nonetheless, the community is now at the point at which the output of entire power stations goes towards fueling data centers dedicated to blockchains. One of the trends underway in this strange world is an attempt to move away from the use of computational cost as an enforcement mechanism ("proof of work") to something based on provable ownership of tokens ("proof of stake"). This has turned out to be a technically difficult challenge and is an area of active research and development. One of the major blockchains, Ethereum, is on the verge of making that switch, but progress has been slow enough to allow one particular group to forge ahead with a plan to clone the Ethereum network with their own implementation of a proof of stake mechanism, ca...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs