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Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

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Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#61

Post by taywrobel »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #59
spir wrote: post #54

Mining revenue is the network cost of running the Bitcoin network. What if you ran a business that spends billions per year on network cost, then somebody told you they could reduce it by 98% and make it a flat cost, forever. That's proof of stake. Ethereum launches the first phase of proof of stake this year. When Ethereum v1.5 launches in ~18 to 24 months, Ethereum's network cost will undergo such a transformation.…

Proof of stake is as equally expensive as proof of work. The trick is that both of based on burning money, proof of work burns by using CPU cycles while proof of stake burns through lost interest. http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ gives a nice discussion of how this works.

The problem is that the claim that nothing is as cheap as proof of work as made in that article is only applicable if you think cryptocurrencies have value in a way that is comparable to tangible goods in reality, like the electricity they burn to have proof of work.

I don’t. Your “lost interest“ on a currency that has nothing beyond speculative value is literally worthless to me. The increased energy production and subsequent pollution that proof of work costs, however, has a real value and does real damage to the environment.

Proof of work currencies need to be shut down, for environmental impact reasons if nothing else. You keep playing with your speculative assets all you want. I don’t subscribe to the idea but it doesn’t bother me, until you start damaging the real world with it. Then I have to insist you stop.

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#62

Post by trixie_ »

tdhttt wrote: post #37
trixie_ wrote: post #4

'Bitcoin is the product of hashpower. The industry wouldn’t exist without incentivizing miners to continuously invest in hardware and burning electricity to augment Bitcoin network’s settlement assurance' I think this is a common misconception. People don't need to continually invest in mining hardware to keep it going. The entire Bitcoin network could technically be run off a single Rasberry Pi. The network hash rat…

> The network hash rate is only so high because the ROI is there, but without it, people would still be mining. Can you expand on that? What would be the incentive for the miners then? What happens when all blocks are mined?

You never mine all the blocks, and regardless of the reward there is always a transaction fee which incentives mining.

Regardless though my point about space heaters was that 'being warm' is enough incentive for some people to mine crypto.

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#63

Post by a1369209993 »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #55
contravariant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, efficient is hardly the right phrase. When it comes to heating using electricity then 100% efficiency is on the low side. A heat pump could be many times more efficient.

I just also want to add that gas heating is also effectively >100% efficient relative to electricity because there are no losses incurred on the power generation side.

That depends on how you're making that gas. IIRC algae (the primary ingredient in most fossile fuels) are less than 10% efficient at converting sunlight into chemical energy after metabolic expenditures. (There's also the part where the sun is <<0.00001% efficent at turning fusion energy into sunlight-that-hits-earth, but that problem isn't specific to gas heating.)

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#64

Post by a1369209993 »

trixie_ wrote: post #26
hn_acc_2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.crypto51.app/coins/BTC.html You could pay $384k to hire miners to 51% attack BTC right now (that is, if NiceHash had the capacity). If you cut the hash rate that much the cost would be only $400 or so. Does it sound like a secure trustless currency if anyone can pay $400 to gain 51% majority? EDIT: 51% attack != rewrite blockchain

There's a big difference between rewriting all history and rewriting a portion of it during an attack which costs 400k per hour. Also people may misinterpret 'rewriting history' as the ability to to change coins sent from A -> B to A -> C. Which it is not. Not saying an attack still isn't bad, but let's be clear what the extent of the damage could and could not be.

1: It's actually, under your proposal, "rewriting a portion of [history] during an attack which costs 400 [not 400 thousand] [dollars] per hour".

2: If you are A (and regardless of whether you're also C) and you sent money to B during the 400$/hr (less than a high-profile lawyer, and probably faster to boot) attack, then yes, changing coins sent from A -> B to A -> C is exactly what you can do.

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#65

Post by trixie_ »

spir wrote: post #54

Mining revenue is the network cost of running the Bitcoin network. What if you ran a business that spends billions per year on network cost, then somebody told you they could reduce it by 98% and make it a flat cost, forever. That's proof of stake. Ethereum launches the first phase of proof of stake this year. When Ethereum v1.5 launches in ~18 to 24 months, Ethereum's network cost will undergo such a transformation.…

The consensus part of 'Proof of Stake' systems is crazy complicated, and there really has been no simple way of doing it determined yet. It's still very much an experiment.

Proof of work on the other hand is an order or magnitude simpler, and has worked for the past 10 years and is pretty battle hardened at this point with everyone trying to attack it. I don't know how well the 'consensus nodes' would fair under the same pressure.

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#66

Post by Dylan16807 »

a1369209993 wrote: post #64
trixie_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between rewriting all history and rewriting a portion of it during an attack which costs 400k per hour. Also people may misinterpret 'rewriting history' as the ability to to change coins sent from A -> B to A -> C. Which it is not. Not saying an attack still isn't bad, but let's be clear what the extent of the damage could and could not be.

1: It's actually, under your proposal, "rewriting a portion of [history] during an attack which costs 400 [ not 400 thousand] [dollars] per hour". 2: If you are A (and regardless of whether you're also C) and you sent money to B during the 400$/hr (less than a high-profile lawyer, and probably faster to boot) attack, then yes, changing coins sent from A -> B to A -> C is exactly what you can do.

Though that's also assuming people don't do anything about the blatant attack.

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#67

Post by a1369209993 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #66
a1369209993 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1: It's actually, under your proposal, "rewriting a portion of [history] during an attack which costs 400 [ not 400 thousand] [dollars] per hour". 2: If you are A (and regardless of whether you're also C) and you sent money to B during the 400$/hr (less than a high-profile lawyer, and probably faster to boot) attack, then yes, changing coins sent from A -> B to A -> C is exactly what you can do.

Though that's also assuming people don't do anything about the blatant attack.

True, but if such a attack only costs 400$/hr there's going to quite a lot of them to do things about.

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#68

Post by perl4ever »

trixie_ wrote: post #4

'Bitcoin is the product of hashpower. The industry wouldn’t exist without incentivizing miners to continuously invest in hardware and burning electricity to augment Bitcoin network’s settlement assurance' I think this is a common misconception. People don't need to continually invest in mining hardware to keep it going. The entire Bitcoin network could technically be run off a single Rasberry Pi. The network hash rat…

It's been a long, long time since your computer drew the same power independent of processing load.

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#69

Post by perl4ever »

thebean11 wrote: post #34
Klinky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An idle computer clocks down and sips power. Going full bore mining coins results in significant power usage increases. We're talking 10 watts vs 100s of watts.

Right but if your goal is to heat your apartment (and your alternative heat source is also electric) running the computer is a pretty efficient heat source.

What people say is that all electric heat is equally efficient in the sense that all the delivered watts ultimately become heat, but at least in the general area where I live, electric heat of any kind is not efficient in the sense that it is significantly more expensive than burning fuel (natural gas, oil, etc.) at home.

Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem

#70

Post by perl4ever »

uryga wrote: post #52
mindcandy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the numbers is to prove that you heated space. Seriously. It proves that you burned value that you know you are not getting back if you are caught falsifying records for the system. And, everyone knows its extremely hard to not get caught if you try. Therefore you can be trusted to sign records for the system because you are risk:reward tremendously more financially motivated to be a good actor than a ba…

i understand the idea of proof-of-work. but idk, when i think about all that electricity and computing power wasted on guessing arbitrary numbers... just doesn't feel right kind of reminds me of how FAANG job interviews require memorizing not-very-useful algo stuff to weed out people who "aren't motivated enough" to study that stuff for the interview¹... "proof-of-motivation" if you will. it serves a purpose, but req…

"Pointless" only matters if it is "a lot" and "a lot" is relative. It seems like it has not been possible to resolve the question of whether the effort is necessary. If you suggest that existing monetary systems have orders of magnitude lower overhead, particularly fiat money, then people will argue that all sorts of costs are hidden. But I don't believe it makes up the difference, and I attribute peoples' willingness to believe it to the assumption/belief that anything that virally spreads cannot be drastically worse (in some dimension).
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