The reason is because the only point of proof of work _is_ to keep latency high. You don't actually need it for anything else. The entire point of PoW is just to have there be a single value you can check before validating a transaction block. It's DDoS protection.
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Replying to @cmuratori
Latency should factor out of the equation, right? I see that Proof of Work makes certain kinds of Denial of Service attacks expensive. But is the dimensionless constant 10 minutes (BTC update rate) divided by 0.3s (global worst case ping time) = 6000 significant?
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Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic @cmuratori
Clearly as that number approaches 1, the region of the world that produces the most transactions gains an advantage in building the longest chain soonest.
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Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic
I'm not sure I understand the question, but, the idea was that anybody could run a bitcoin node. In order to run the node, they need enough computing resources to validate all block candidates being broadcast. Validating a block is potentially very expensive...
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Replying to @cmuratori @TimSweeneyEpic
So what PoW does is that it means that blocks cannot be spammed very quickly, because rather than validating blocks, nodes just look at the ~80-byte header and see if the PoW hash checks out. If it doesn't, they discard the block.
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Replying to @cmuratori @TimSweeneyEpic
AFAICT - and I may be missing something - it really doesn't do anything else. That's the entirety of what the PoW part does (I mean, with respect to transactions - there's the minting money part, which is separate).
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Replying to @cmuratori @TimSweeneyEpic
So PoW is just a rate limiter. It caps BitCoin at, you know, 7 transactions a second or whatever. And that's on purpose, to prevent both DDoS, and to prevent the storage from overwhelming the non-industrial nodes on the network. For example:pic.twitter.com/CsHKV2r0ZP
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Replying to @cmuratori @TimSweeneyEpic
PoW is not the transaction rate limiter. The transaction rate limiter is the block size cap. It's not to prevent DoS either. The important function of PoW is establishing a canonical ordering of transactions in a way that everyone can agree on, without requiring trust.
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Replying to @modeless @TimSweeneyEpic
No, it does not. Longest-chain-wins is the thing that establishes the block order. PoW doesn't, and in fact, in practice already does not - the BitCoin chain already does occasionally get forks of this nature.
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The size of the block does not limit transaction rate. That's like saying the size of UDP packets limits your bandwidth. The chunk size would not matter if you didn't have PoW, you'd just send as many blocks as you want, as fast as you wanted. PoW is the rate limiter, period.
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(and more precisely, "the block order" is the wrong phrase to use. Block order is always rigorous because the previous block hash is always included in the next block. It's block _primacy_ that is arbitrated by longest-chain-wins.)
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