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Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

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Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#361

Post by VectorLock »

wyager wrote: post #317
VectorLock wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats why the only cryptocurrency that really appeals to me now is Chia with its Proof of Space. Not zero power usage, but better, and I like the design goals and its approach.

Chia’s consensus mechanism, while probably the cleverest of non-PoW mechanisms (their white paper explains why most Proof-of-Whatever mechanisms besides proof-of-work are broken), is pretty sketchy. Their reliance on “time lords” seems to be pushing a lot of the consensus mechanism towards hyper-centralization. It’s complicated enough that I can’t spot exactly what the weak point is, but that in itself is pretty conc…

I don't think there are any rewards for running Time Lords or any vulnerabilities inherent in them. Chia relies on VDFs and I think its just "altruistic" to run a Time Lord. I think Chia Inc. does and will continue to run most of them.

Chia is pretty complicated but I'm not sure its much more complicated than other cryptocurrencies. The complexity seems pretty inherent in them.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#364

Post by openfuture »

jude- wrote: post #358
openfuture wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that necessary? Edit: To be a bit less standoffish and make my position clear. You only need to form a consensus with the part of the network you are aware of. Datalisp leans into the properties of propagator networks (fully CP systems) to avoid needing to synchronize everyone eagerly.

Try googling "Byzantine Fault Tolerance" and read the original papers by Leslie Lamport. 2/3 is required to ensure liveness.

Yeah, so if you look at some commentary around that paper there is a variant of the problem with "approximate agreement" that can solve for example the 3 person variant. This fits with the theory (really just a hypothesis at this point but actively worked on) that I have w.r.t. datalisp.

Edit: see for example slide 30 of this slideshow: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15712/lectures/15-bft.pdf

I'm not (yet) very good at probability theory so it's a bit slow going filling in the model I have in mind (that is; deciding the message format) but propnets are the correct framework to fit it into.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#365

Post by mratsim »

openfuture wrote: post #354
mratsim wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think you've studied how the attack would work. It's my day job to implement proof-of-stake https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/pull/865

How is that pull request relevant to our chat here? By the way I don't think it's a good argument to say that your job depends on proof of stake being secure and therefore it must be secure (or "therefore you would know if it wasn't"). The coordinated bribery attack can be done by having people stake on a different chain until a majority is reached and then softfork and slash the minority. If you don't believe the at…

It's a relevant answer to your personal attack "I don't think you've studied how the attack would work."

My job is literally implementing proof-of-stake securely. Also when I work and implement an algorithm, I provide references and sources, which my PR is.

> The coordinated bribery attack can be done by having people stake on a different chain until a majority is reached and then softfork and slash the minority.

Changing the vote is a slashable offense in the Gasper paper (cited in my PR). https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 A change of vote will be ignored and the validator will be deemed malicious and ejected.

p17 section 4.7 Slashing conditions with proofs.

Furthermore, this has been formally verified https://runtimeverification.com/blog/formally-verifying-fina...

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#366

Post by hudon »

jude- wrote: post #336
oefrha wrote: post #72

A good reminder that Bitcoin runs on cheap renewables is BS. See also miners buying gas power plants in New York.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479

A friendly reminder that PoW runs just fine on 100% renewables. It's the job of regulators to make sure all PoW runs this way. Just like it's the job of regulators to mandate renewable energy for literally all other industries.

“Runs fine” doesn’t mean it’s energy efficient. If we can get whatever value out of a payment system with 1 wind turbine instead of 10,000, the former is obviously a better choice. And right now it’s not obvious that PoW provides anything that other technologies can’t. Bitcoin itself has shown that when PoW doesn’t produce the results people want, developers can just release code that makes users ignore the most work chain... so the system ends up just as political as any other money system, and PoW is just a clever trick to fool investors into thinking there’s some magic “decentralization” going on.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#367

Post by lifeisstillgood »

DaftDank wrote: post #267
nootropicat wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But it’s important to point out that proof-of-work (PoW) is more decentralized than e.g. proof-of-stake (PoS). The opposite is true in multiple aspects. PoW has infinite economies of scale which inevitably leads to total centralization as all miners but the most efficient one have to shutdown. PoS can stay decentralized forever because new stakers arriving aren't going to make existing staking unprofitable, forcing…

I've been mining for about 4 years now (1btc/month and 35-40eth/month since March 2017), and this is the first time I've heard someone trying to say PoS would lead to MORE decentralization. To be fair, I don't regularly converse online with other miners. I mean, I see what your arguments are here, but I'm just not sure I agree. Usually the only people trying to promote PoS are the ones who are financially well-off en…

Where do I get a copy of your autobiography? :-)

can you indicate how many machines you have running to get 1btc/month (plus does that actually mean 1 correct "mine" every 25 months?)

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#368

Post by danans »

jcranmer wrote: post #351
danans wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The loan shark driving to bust someone's kneecaps for not paying back loans on time would still be doing exactly the same thing. Tangential thought... I might be mistaken, but how can one even collect on defaulted debt denominated in BTC? I thought that the BTC owner still has to transfer BTC themselves, since only they would know the private keys. Wouldn't the collector literally have to physically threaten the in…

> Wouldn't the collector literally have to physically threaten the individual to transfer the BTC back, since it's not like they can get a court to order the bank to do it. What makes you think the court can't order the bank to do it? The court can order you to give some assets up, and if you refuse, they can order your employer to deposit wages directly into creditor's accounts, or the creditor can seize other asset…

> What makes you think the court can't order the bank to do it?

The bank doesn't have the private keys for the wallet

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#369

Post by nyolfen »

danShumway wrote: post #345
nyolfen wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. sorry, is that just because you say so? the success of bitcoin is the only thing i need to point to contra every point you make. if it's so bad, why does it work? maybe that won't always be the case, but so far the market has deemed it suffic…

> if it's so bad, why does it work? As a currency? It doesn't. Do people actually think that Bitcoin is succeeding as a currency right now? If you want to talk about the market deeming something sufficient, the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency. As a speculative investment? Because of what I said in my last paragraph. > chaumian coinjoin I've seen multip…

> I don't understand why a community would go down that route when solutions like zero-knowledge proofs already exist and have a better track record

you don't understand why a community at a nash equilibrium wouldn't jump at the opportunity to break consensus? bitcoin is favorable because it is relatively speaking the minimum viable collection of traits needed to function as a cryptocurrency, reduced complexity leaves less attack surface. if zk proofs become obviously necessary or superior to cj because of coin blacklisting, people will switch to zcash or whatever else uses it, but in a world where regulators or businesses block cj'd coins, i don't know why you think zk coins would be any better off. in any case these alternatives still exist and people use them, so why does it even matter? if you're right, everyone will see and you will probably be rich.

> the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency.

man in 1910: the market has universally declared horses superior to automobiles

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#370

Post by jude- »

hudon wrote: post #366
jude- wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friendly reminder that PoW runs just fine on 100% renewables. It's the job of regulators to make sure all PoW runs this way. Just like it's the job of regulators to mandate renewable energy for literally all other industries.

“Runs fine” doesn’t mean it’s energy efficient. If we can get whatever value out of a payment system with 1 wind turbine instead of 10,000, the former is obviously a better choice. And right now it’s not obvious that PoW provides anything that other technologies can’t. Bitcoin itself has shown that when PoW doesn’t produce the results people want, developers can just release code that makes users ignore the most work…

If all it's using is surplus green energy (something regulators can enforce), then efficiency isn't a concern. That energy was wasted either way.

Re: PoW, the thing it does provide that no other tech can't is Sybil-resistant open-membership replicated state machines. Anyone can join in deciding state transitions because the barrier to entry (access to mining tech and electricity) is decoupled from the system's operation -- there are no protocol-defined gate keepers. Sybil-resistance comes from the fact that votes on the next epoch of state transitions comes from an irreversible expenditure on the voter's part (i.e. you can't vote for 2 conflicting blocks in PoW without having 2x the mining power). Making the system process state transitions at a fixed pace under these two constraints is the scientific breakthrough that PoW contributes.

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