Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

news.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 839 posts

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#681

Post by hndamien »

ggggtez wrote: post #667
hndamien wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the American military wasteful because it provides too much security? How much should it be reduced to provide sufficient security? This is a legitimate question/ I don't have an opinion either way - but it seems to be a fair corollary.

Unlike bitcoin, every person in the US has an (more or less) equal vote to help decide that. Congress's job is literally to decide whether to spend more money on military, among other things. And also unlike bitcoin, when you pay the salary of 450k+ soldiers, among other jobs and such created, that's likely a lot better for the economy than random people converting electricity into crypto tokens. What does bitcoin pr…

Some would argue that it fixes the economic system so that we won't have booms and busts anymore and can start seeing capitalism in action proper. That seems to be a worthwhile investment, and may even help prevent wars (which are often financed by currency debasement).

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#682

Post by yownie »

plankers wrote: post #543
orthecreedence wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going. That said, I do support som…

I can use bitcoin to buy things on the internet, or send money across borders, or bring money across borders, all without anybody's permission. So it's pretty successful in my book. Oh wait, you're bringing sin into the argument. My bad, I thought we were being rational. And just a side-note, it irks me when people say that bitcoin uses as much energy as the country of Iceland like that's some kind of horror. Iceland…

It also doesn't use as much energy as the country of Iceland (living in Iceland here). You what we use the MOST electricity for here? Aluminum smelting. No one seems to care a lot about that waste, it seems.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#683

Post by root_axis »

sgeisler wrote: post #572
root_axis wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Increasing trust" doesn't add value if the system is already sufficiently trustworthy for the task of processing transactions. Based on that reasoning the cost should ('should' meaning: it is beneficial) increase forever because an infinite amount of energy burned is infinitely trustworthy.

> sufficiently trustworthy Trustworthiness always depends on your use case. If you are transacting small amounts of money (less than is spent on mining a block) then waiting for 3 confirmations is probably sufficient to consider the transaction settled. But what if you send a transaction with a 100 times higher value than goes into mining a block then you will need to wait for over 100 confirmations till you can be s…

The fact that larger transactions require more power to transmit securely only demonstrates my point further.

> Allowing for higher value transactions is good thing imo

PoW systems are the only ones where "higher value transactions" need security proportional to their size.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#684

Post by nonbel »

good-idea wrote: post #242

I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems abov…

>"But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems above). This is something that literally affects every human being ... But we need to talk about the environment."

Great, put it in context then:

A. What is the total energy content of the resources consumed each year?

B. What percent of A is lost to "waste" such as powerplant and grid inefficiencies?

C. What percent of the remaining is spent on crypto?

D. What other things are consuming the same order of magnitude or higher than crypto?

E. Which energy use described in D is easiest to make more efficient without harming the purpose/quality?

Then improve #1 discovered in E until it is below #2, then start work on #2, etc.

I think you will find stuff like getting everyone to use i.reddit.com instead of reddit.com and netflix to stop their annoying auto-playing previews should come before anything to do with crypto.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#685

Post by darkpuma »

eropple wrote: post #676
DINKDINK wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're supposing It's a single example of the value of decentralized property rights. Say I'm an alcohol maker in Sharia-law country, I want to be able to make wine but prevent the state from expropriating my wealth because they ban alcohol. Say I live in a country which mandates that all business ventures with returns less than 2% a year will have their profits stolen (read: inflation) I can use bitcoin to escape t…

I thought "taxes are theft" was bad enough. Is the new galaxy-brain "inflation is theft"?

That's not a new position. "Inflation is a regressive tax" has been around for a while.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#686

Post by scartracs »

naveedi wrote: post #38

Full disclosure: I work on the cryptocurrency in this article, Algorand. There are a lot of questions and speculation here about this paper and Algorand. I would be happy to try an answer them to your satisfaction. Some context may be helpful first, though. This paper is an innovation about one aspect of our technology. Algorand has a very fast consensus mechanism and can add blocks as quickly as the network can deli…

OK I'll bite. Nothing about the article or YT video is innovative, some of it is laughable.

Algorand's consensus per the YT video you linked is step 1. 1 user is randomly chosen to propagate a new block (can user make up a fake block? let's assume not) step 2. 1000 users randomly selected vote on that block and if they agree, it's DONE. (what if 1000 users are in the same country/company, etc. how do you prevent collusion on fake blocks)

This is hilarious. So the only thing you rely on for consensus is 1001 random 'users' input weighted by stake? What happens when your network is bombed with 1000tps and you need to contact 1001 staked users for every block? There are also vulnerabilities such as the recent "fake stake" bug that affect pure POS coins which I won't go into.

Now about the article referencing Vault. I believe NANO came up with this bootstrapping feature:

> Each user account only ever stores the balances of the accounts in its assigned shard

Yes they are replicating NANO's block lattice structure using "shards" with an insecure way of trusting any future chain that includes your old tx's but gives no guarantee on the state of any other account. As I understand it, I can be fed a fake chain while bootstrapping and accept phony funds as long as my balance shows up, right? ...Assuming this feature worked without any security holes, what's to stop other coins from implementing it? You don't need an entire cryptocurrency for it, it's just a feature and if it worked everyone would be using it. The sharding problem has not yet been solved and there are coins like Ethereum that are trying really hard to make it happen.

It's really sad to see this low-quality content come out of MIT. This looks like someone trying desperately to get a piece of the Crypto pie using MIT's reputation as a get rich quick scheme. Just for kicks I looked through reddit/r/cc and found only 5 dead posts mentioning Algorand with no comments on any of them. Their website makes all these claims about "pioneering a sortition algorithm" that looks "totally legit" if you ask me.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#687

Post by bb88 »

ecwilson wrote: post #514
orthecreedence wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going. That said, I do support som…

> You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million in my brain, and full confidence that that money is mine . That's pretty damn cool. > I do support some form of decentralized currency. Not because people are ever going to be smart enough to be their own bank or because I think some currenc…

> I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million in my brain, and full confidence that that money is mine. That's pretty damn cool.

Technically the brain is just another layer of encryption to the data. And that level of encryption can often be solved by the purchase of a $5 wrench.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#688

Post by scartracs »

DenisM wrote: post #87

This gets asked often, but in case something changed recently - what are the use cases of cryptocurrencies that are not: - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserver or VISA) - Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players I am not looking for answers of the form "well whenever you want to avoid a t…

1 - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) -> Most are attempting to side-step credit card service fees while remaining open to transact across the world in real-time. Most popular CC's fail at the real-time part and cause unnecessary resource usage, but hopefully that will change. Actually, most CC's fail at trying to side-step the law given all transactions and account balances are public for most coins. You could say tax-avoiders prefer money they can hide through sketchy banks or cash rather than CC.

2 - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserve or VISA) -> Bitcoin, Ethereum and others can do Smart Contracts which means delayed sending, multi-sender transactions that serve as escrow and in the case of Ethereum programmable using it's own language to do any number of actions/apps. The important feature is that this is handled by the network using your own transaction, you don't have to set up the escrow through a company like VISA, Paypal, etc.

3- Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players -> This is true of all CC because it's an open, yet small market. The earlier you get in, the better your outcome. However, it's not like CC's NEED to explode in price to be useful, competitive or solve a real-world problem. Getting rich is a secondary effect of having a functional CC reach adoption. Look at MemeCoins like Doge and Banano to see adoption is easier when everyone abandons the idea of getting rich off a coin.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#689

Post by sgeisler »

sgeisler wrote: post #572
root_axis wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Increasing trust" doesn't add value if the system is already sufficiently trustworthy for the task of processing transactions. Based on that reasoning the cost should ('should' meaning: it is beneficial) increase forever because an infinite amount of energy burned is infinitely trustworthy.

> sufficiently trustworthy Trustworthiness always depends on your use case. If you are transacting small amounts of money (less than is spent on mining a block) then waiting for 3 confirmations is probably sufficient to consider the transaction settled. But what if you send a transaction with a 100 times higher value than goes into mining a block then you will need to wait for over 100 confirmations till you can be s…

@root_axis (since I can't reply directly):

> PoW systems are the only ones where "higher value transactions" need security proportional to their size.

Every other currency is either backed by men with guns and transactions are reversible (fiat) or you have to spend a roughly proportional amount of resources securing it (e.g. gold). I didn't look at the data, but judging by US military spending I'd guess that the strongest economies also have to spend the most to keep their system safe.

You can still argue that the assumption of pseudonymous actors in bitcoin makes the proportion factor larger (=system less efficient) than for systems that can use identities and attribution and I'd agree with that. But that's only because it can operate with less assumptions (no identities), which I see as a feature.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#690

Post by baddox »

b1daly wrote: post #679
baddox wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone disagrees that reducing the energy requirements of cryptocurrency without any capability loss would be great. The trouble is when people who don’t like cryptocurrency for other reasons, or just don’t care about it, focus specifically on complaining about its energy usage. Say you don’t care much about professional sports. Of course you would think that any innovation that reduces the energy requi…

Damn bro, you are missing the point. As has been described, pure market mechanisms do not and cannot price externalities correctly. That’s why we have environmental regulation, as imperfect as it is. This implicitly means a society does make choices about how energy is used. Therefore, a discussion about societal priorities amongst individuals is essential. Likewise with regulation related to finance and money. Energ…

Perhaps you’re misunderstanding my point. I’m not against environmental regulations and I don’t expect market mechanisms to eliminate externalities. On the contrary, I want environmental regulations that reduce (ideally eliminate) externalities in the cost of energy. This should, almost by definition, be the goal of environmental regulations. Cap and trade on energy producers, for instance, can and probably does do this.

As for the stuff about cryptocurrencies being associated with scams and wealth inequality, to me that’s entirely independent of environmental impact and should be dealt with (and probably can be dealt with using existing laws) regardless of the environmental impact.

Post reply on HN