An old observation of mine has been that the more powerful and plentiful our devices get, the longer they spend idle. I call it the Tragedy of the No-Op.
(A No-Op or NOP is a machine language instruction that tells the processor to do nothing, an empty cycle).
The processor on a Nokia ‘dumbphone’ spent a greater percentage of its lifetime cycles working for its owner than today’s iPhone. Or iPads, Macs, Echos, routers, smart home switches, TVs, or connected cars.
We own more computers today than ever. And each of those gets more powerful each year – and they stay idle more and more. An Echo mostly just stands there checking “did someone say Alexa?” over and over for well over 99% of its life.
I’m pro-abundance – to coin a term – so I’, reluctant to call this idle computing power a waste. But I do wonder if we can put all this silicon to better use.
For example: Bitcoin mining is now increasingly concentrated among a small set of mining pools because bitcoin now requires miners to run specialised hardware, ASICs, to be competitive earning mining rewards. Ethereum also requires high end graphics-processing-units or GPUs. The demand for GPUs got to the point where in May last year Nvidia designed a graphics card that would cripple its own performance if it detected its use for crypto mining.
It’s the same for storage: most of us have inexpensive hard drives and pen derives, and hundreds of GBs of free space on our laptops and iPads and phones, and yet decentralised storage projects require massive amounts of high-end solid state drives connected to powerful computers to be viable.
So here we all are, with more combined computing resources than ever across all our devices but today’s proof of work/space blockchains are such that they require even *more* hardware, affordable by a very few – far from their ideal of decentralising trust and opportunity and value creation.
What will new blockchains that can run on billions of devices look like? What new use cases will they make possible? What effect will they have on wealth creation? What incentives will they create for low-cost devices and even cheaper, ubiquitous connectivity?
Like with every seemingly intractable problem, this is a massive opportunity. I wonder what tomorrow’s solutions to these will look like.
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