The value of a single bitcoin has recently plummeted from an all-time high of €53,981, to around €30,000, in wake of the news that Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla has stopped accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for vehicles.
The reason behind Musk’s move is not motivated by lack of faith in the idea of cryptocurrencies: on the contrary, it is motivated by the faith in future generations of cryptocurrencies, namely, those which are not as harmful to the environment. The main issue with Bitcoin is that it relies on something called proof of work. The idea is that, in order to make it difficult for a malicious party to make fraudulent transactions, adding transactions to the blockchain requires computers to solve complicated cryptographic mathematical problems. These take up a lot of computational power to solve, and this is on purpose: so that if one person wants to make a fake transaction, it is essentially impossible to do so, because of all the necessary computing power.
The downside to this is that simply maintaining the cryptocurrency uses up a large amount of energy, comparable to that of an entire country. Other newer cryptocurrencies use alternative strategies to ensure that fraudulent transactions cannot occur, one such strategy which has gained popularity is known as proof of stake. The idea is essentially this: rather than proving you are making a valid contribution to the blockchain by solving a complicated mathematical problem, you instead fork out a large amount of the currency temporarily (known as the stake), and then you get it back once others in the ecosystem have found that there is nothing fishy about your transaction. This way, it is not worth attempting to add a fraudulent transaction to the blockchain, because if you do, you will lose all the money you staked!
Ethereum, the second most popular cryptocurrency (currently), uses proof of work to verify transactions, but is in the process of shifting to proof of stake; many other major coins are also doing this. This way, we can retain all the advantages that come with cryptocurrencies, without wasting energy and consequently harming the environment.
Luke Collins holds an MSc in mathematics from the University of Warwick, and a BSc (Hons) in mathematics and computer science from the University of Malta. Currently, he is a developer in the cryptosphere, working with Simply VC, a company which support various proof of stake projects.
Did you know?
• Meerkats are the most murderous animals on earth.
• In 1972, Don Woods and James M. Lyon created a programming language called The Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym, or INTERCAL for short.
• Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks. Elephants with a rare ‘tuskless’ genetic trait had a better chance of surviving Mozambique’s long civil war, financed in part by poached ivory.
• According to the Guinness Book of World Records the world’s most difficult tongue twister is in the Xhosa language of South Africa: ‘Iqaqa laziqikaqika kwazw kwaqhawaka uqhoqhoqha’ which means ‘The skunk rolled down and ruptured its larynx’ (the last word contains three clicks).
• Captive penguins only lay eggs if they are happy.
For more trivia see: www.um.edu.mt/think
Sound bites
• A new study by earth scientists from Yale and the College of the Atlantic has turned up a massive die-off of sharks roughly 19 million years ago. It came at a period in history when there were more than 10 times more sharks patrolling the world’s oceans than there are today. For now, researchers don’t know the cause of the shark die-off.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210603171119.htm
• Waking up just one hour earlier could reduce a person’s risk of major depression by 23 per cent, suggests a sweeping new genetic study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry on May 26. The study of 840,000 people, by researchers at University of Colorado Boulder and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, represents some of the strongest evidence yet that chronotype – a person’s propensity to sleep at a certain time – influences depression risk. It is also among the first studies to quantify just how much, or little, change is required to influence mental health.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210528114107.htm
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