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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

#132

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…

I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various nuclear fuel cycles.

AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio. For certain, salt reactors need a lot more research, but so do many of these other "green" energies. Are we even clear on the full environmental impact of the various "green" energies when factoring in secondary and tertiary costs?

I feel like China probably has the right idea of dumping a bunch of R&D into LFTR and whatnot instead of riding the Eco Friendly TM train.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At a really abstract level, yes. However, many computing tasks generate results that can be used near-infinitely. For example, that supercomputer that generates the weather can distribute the results to every person in the region.

Whereas in cryptocurrency, that's split. The miners provide security and integrity for the chain. They also take their own very specific fee.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#134
post #105
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This answer written by the Ethereum team addresses why cost spent won't necessarily rise to equal block reward in their PoS formulation. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doe...

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#135
post #47
post #2

One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either... Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again. It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in sp…

I don't think that approach avoids the core problem; it just shoves it onto a different resource; the same fraction of general economic output is still incentivized to convert from "satisfying human needs" to "mining". It will just manifest in difference ways.

Remember, the whole point of proof of work is to make it too expensive for "bad guys" to amass enough work to force their skewed version of the ledger[1].

As long as you have the constant rate of coin production, and difficulty adjustments to ensure it, you have the exact same arms race. Miners might not use more energy[2], but they'll still take away workers, land, metal, etc. from the real economy.

[1] They can't forge transactions, but they can publish empty blocks, effectively shutting it down.

[2] Although even that's doubtful: when you throw money at a problem, you generally end up throwing a proportional amount of energy at it too.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#136

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.

This is the exact same conclusion Marx came to about labor.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#137
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. This point keeps getting brought up and is patently ridiculous. It is computing something - a hash that is not easily reproducible that prevents attackers from modifying the ledger. And there is no other known way to do this, including proof of stake. I think people who say this are just naysayers that are implying that crypto currencies have no use o…

And that hard to reproduce hash represents computational trust, which is a new type of resource that just happens to be very expensive in energy cost using our current technology.

It would be expensive by design no matter what the technology.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#138
post #67

There are already blockchains that do not require proof of work (Lisk, Nav, Dash, NEO, etc) and already storage based blockchains (Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc). It is unclear to me what Chia brings to the table that is really new.

Beyond the tech, it brings a somewhat famous person, which is not to be underestimated. Hype is important, it makes this coin pop out a little bit more than some of the others competing for the same mind share.

[deleted]

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, the legal system is gonna surprise anyone who thinks they are operating outside of it. And not in a good way.

Look up pinkapp. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=the_stc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389364 https://medium.com/@PinkApp/pink-app-trading-latency-for-ano...

Your argument that bitcoin is worth wasting a large fraction of the worlds energy is that it lets you get a hooker easier?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#140
post #9

I don't see how this is better. It sounds like we have to waste power running hard drives now. Isn't Ethereum's Proof of Stake better?

The idea is that there are already a bunch of hard drives being wasted.

If we could use all that extra space that nobody is using, we get it for "free".

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