Presumably hughes is just making a knee-jerk comment about how 99% of PoW systems are doing useless work. Personally I am very skeptical of any system that tries to do proof of useful work like transcoding; it seems vulnerable to cheating.
Hi wmf - I work on Livepeer, happy to clarify on some of the skepticism here.
Livepeer uses cryptographic signatures to prove authenticity of the video transcoding results, and that signature can be used as proof to punish cheaters (if you signed the result, you are responsible for the correctness - and since it's easy to validate whether the transcoding is done correctly, anyone can use that signature to punish you by taking away your stake). If no one cheats, no one gets punished. Since the cheater doesn't know how many people are monitoring the results, their best strategy is to be honest.
Hey ericxtang. I've met your boy Phillip a few times (that's how I found out about LivePeer) - solid guy. Very good ambassador for your project and all that it can mean for the world.
