| | DECEMBER 20198CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONA lot has been written about Casper, the upcoming Proof of Stake consensus mechanism for Ethereum. And like in the famous cartoons and movies it's really a "GHOST" because it is derived from the "Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree" protocol. Casper has been announced as early as August 2015 - only about a month or so after the Ethereum main network went life - and design work on it started even earlier (in September 2014). So what is it about?After Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta established the idea of a blockchain in 1991 - and published a weekly hash of their blockchain for verification purposes in the New York Times starting in 1995 - the so far biggest and most widespread application of blockchain is Bitcoin. Bitcoin, as well as many other blockchains - also Ethereum - currently use a mechanism called "Proof of Work" (PoW) to decide about which block (with which content) should become the next block of the respective chain.The idea was to create security and prevent tampering by distributing the consensus finding in a way where everybody could join and would be rewarded for their participation - some sort of democratization of the blockchain. In the beginning this "mining" - new coins are "created" in the process and put into circulation - really worked for everyone, but due to the - automatically - adapting complexity of the computational "riddles" to be solved (because so many people took part) - the constant "armament" lead to a situation where only miners with highly specialized mining equipment in areas where electric power is cheap have a chance of making profit anymore.Apart from the negative effect of more centralized mining the real problem created by this is the huge power consumption for PoW at scale. The estimated By Alexander(Sascha) Majarek, Director Infrastructure Management & Service Delivery, TUI Group (LSE: TUI)WHERE'S CASPER, THE FRIENDLY GHOST?Alexander(Sascha) Majarek
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