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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

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Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#101

Post by jjeaff »

littlestymaar wrote: post #91
goodroot wrote: post #50

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

Praising solar and being concerned about accumulating wastes in the same sentence is pretty ironic imo.

Get your startup plan in order. In 20 years you can become the "Uber" of solar panel disposal. Because you can't even throw away a fluorescent bulb with most garbage collection services. Imagine the amount of toxic chemicals we will need to get rid of when these solar panels start to wear out en masse.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#102

Post by oh_sigh »

kanzure wrote: post #12
gzou wrote: post #3

What are "proof of space"/"proof of work" ? How do they compare to proof of work/proof of stake ?

"Beyond Hellman's time-memory tradeoffs with applications to proofs of space" https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf

Any ideas about the proof of time which Bram references?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#103

Post by asciimo »

durkie wrote: post #45

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ( https://electrek.co/2017…

The energy consumption of the incumbent financial infrastructure is extremely difficult to measure, and so it has never been seriously considered a "problem." There hasn't been an alternative. What does it cost to put a roll of quarters into the hand of a laundromat customer in Faibanks? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#104

Post by jwilliams »

tpallarino wrote: post #81
freeloop3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin adjusts difficulty based on how many people mine it. So cheap power doesn't reduce the cost, since it will just mean even more mining.

Exactly, the amount of money spent on energy to mine is equal to the amount of mining revenue. Energy consumption is more closely related to price.

Nod - I'm coming to the conclusion that the effective store of value is the mining infrastructure. Even if it's not that explicit, they move in lock-step.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#105

Post by nas »

paulgb wrote: post #51
durkie wrote: post #45

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ( https://electrek.co/2017…

The problem is that with a competitive mining market, Bitcoin energy use will rise until the cost of mining a block is equal to the reward for that block (i.e. market equilibrium). So if the cost of energy goes down but the price of Bitcoin stays constant, the amount of energy expenditure will be (approximately) equal. Likewise, if the price of Bitcoin goes up, the amount of energy used will go up accordingly. The re…

This is a key observation. Now apply it to the "eco-friendly" and PoS schemes. The same economics apply. For Bram's coin and PoS systems, the costs spent will rise to equal the block reward. So, you are basically doing something more complicated to end up with the same amount of economic waste. In the proof of space version, maybe you will be building millions of hard drives, running them to failure and then throwing them away.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#106

Post by wmf »

eof wrote: post #97
nickik wrote: post #94

There already is delegated prove of stake algorithms that solves the power consumption problem.

I have never understood what stops POS algorithms from being havens for opportunistic cheating. There is no punishment for spending energy on attacking the network unsuccessfully because you are still also playing good with the majority. In POW schemes you can only use your mining power on a single chain; in POS it seems like you can "stake" every competing chain simultaneously.

you can "stake" every competing chain simultaneously

This is called the "nothing at stake" problem and people have been proposing solutions for a few years but so far none of the solutions have stuck.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#107

Post by fe2ijwe99 »

jwilliams wrote: post #104
tpallarino wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the amount of money spent on energy to mine is equal to the amount of mining revenue. Energy consumption is more closely related to price.

Nod - I'm coming to the conclusion that the effective store of value is the mining infrastructure. Even if it's not that explicit, they move in lock-step.

Isn't that true of basically any computing task?

Can't generate AI, websites, etc with the computing infrastructure.

No software patents if no computers to create software.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#108

Post by Domenic_S »

pdog wrote: post #29
sschueller wrote: post #5

Sounds like IPFS. Why do we need an ICO. Can't we just do it like bitcoin and download a client to start 'mining'?

Why would they do all that work for free?

Why wouldn't they just pre-mine a bunch of coins and reap benefits that way?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#109

Post by kurthr »

jjeaff wrote: post #101
littlestymaar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Praising solar and being concerned about accumulating wastes in the same sentence is pretty ironic imo.

Get your startup plan in order. In 20 years you can become the "Uber" of solar panel disposal. Because you can't even throw away a fluorescent bulb with most garbage collection services. Imagine the amount of toxic chemicals we will need to get rid of when these solar panels start to wear out en masse.

Why would you throw out a paid for PV system? It's a sunk cost unless you're running out of roof space and need more power. The efficiency only drops some 20% over 20 years.

Also, they can be reasonably recycled... http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2016/06/solar-p...

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#110

Post by mrb »

«A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week»

This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use.

For example the transaction rate could double tomorrow, without increasing energy consumption.

[¹] Also, this metric is derived from Digiconomist, which is flawed as it overestimate consumption by a factor of 2: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/

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