Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space • Hacker News Board

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#161

Post by inter_netuser » Mon, May 03, 2021, 12:43 AM UTC

woah wrote: post #154

inter_netuser wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because PoW miners have very little authority tied to their computing resources. Users have prevailed in Bitcoin forkwars over miners and many large exchanges and businesses. Miners are really more similar to employees of the network, that order transaction in exchange for fees. They are not masters of the protocol, and cannot dictate its rules. Proof of Work has a nuclear option (change of hashing algo) that would b…

This is nonsensical. PoS users can change any parameters of the chain just as easily as PoW users can change the hashing algorithm. If all the PoS users switch to a version of the full node and or light client software that has the biggest holder’s balance reduced to zero, there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. It is the exact same thing as if PoW users switch to a full node software with a different hashing al…

I think the most fundamental difference that "balanced reduced to zero, is not even up for discussion in Bitcoin.

Some Orwellian newspeak right there. "Reduced to zero". Just call it what it is: blacklists.

Blacklists = permissioned access.

Behave or we blacklist your coins. Welcome to Fiat 2.0

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#162

Post by inter_netuser » Mon, May 03, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

ddrdrck_ wrote: post #155

inter_netuser wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because PoW miners have very little authority tied to their computing resources. Users have prevailed in Bitcoin forkwars over miners and many large exchanges and businesses. Miners are really more similar to employees of the network, that order transaction in exchange for fees. They are not masters of the protocol, and cannot dictate its rules. Proof of Work has a nuclear option (change of hashing algo) that would b…

This is not true. Cosmos network (PoS network based on Tendermint consensus) is running successfully since 2019 for example.

Never said they cannot operate.

It'll be just wildly more political than PoW chains where you can verify the heaviest chain objectively.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#163

Post by tempestn » Mon, May 03, 2021, 8:08 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #9

chia claims that its proof of work alternative is "eco-friendly"[1]. This is also reflected in their advertising material, eg. instead of having a whitepaper they have a "greenpaper", and rather than mining they have "farming. While it's true that proof space is less energy intensive to "farm", wouldn't economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of work's resource consumption? All you're doing…

To me, this is why Proof of Stake is the only long-term sensible decentralized cryptocurrency system. ISTM PoW and PoST ultimately equate to the same thing, for the reason you've suggested. If it's profitable to invest more in mining, people will invest more in mining; it doesn't matter whether that investment takes the form of ASICs, GPUs, HDDs, or simply the opportunity cost of holding the currency itself. The only difference is, that last one doesn't burn a bunch of real world resources in the process.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#164

Post by tempestn » Mon, May 03, 2021, 8:18 AM UTC

freddiecoleman wrote: post #58

pjc50 wrote: post #56

So .. is this like FileCoin, where people provide storage services and are rewarded, or is it a proof-of-waste scheme?

Filecoin has 4.6 EiB of space, of which only 11 PiB is actually used for file storage. It also has insane hardware and staking requirements. We are talking about $10k of hardware (including CPU and RAM) and staking $20k of the coin just to get started. With Chia anybody can get started with their spare hardware. Right now, it is a gold rush and this is leading to shortage of supply especially in China. This is a shor…

I agree with your critique of FileCoin, but re Chia, I think it's the exact opposite of this:

> This is a short term phenomenon as there eventually comes a point where you cannot compete against people who just have spare hardware and therefore $0 upfront investment.

Very quickly people with just a regular amount of spare storage won't have any incentive to bother, compared to those with racks of PiB of drives and dedicated plotting hardware streaming to it. It's already at the point where 1TB of plots would take a year or so to win a reward, and the difficulty is increasing exponentially, so it would actually be far longer.

Perhaps farming pools will eventually make it feasible to make something with spare space, but likely not enough for it to be worth most people's time.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#165

Post by selfhoster11 » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:38 AM UTC

christiansakai wrote: post #146

selfhoster11 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's becoming more and more popular for hobbyists to have at least double-digits of TB of storage sitting around for various purposes. I'd gladly make some profit out of the part of my array that's not filled up yet.

Curious, what purposes here? What kind of hobbyst we are talking about?

The usual "Linux ISOs" storage, self-hosted cloud services, data hoarding of all kinds (https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/), probably original content creation for those who don't want to pay for/use cloud storage (photo/video/audio editing and creation). I'm sure that there must be more, but this is just the ones I know off the top of my head.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#166

Post by mac01021 » Mon, May 03, 2021, 12:09 PM UTC

meowface wrote: post #144

stirfish wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is any more plutocratic. It's about the same.

What other options are possible for blockchain networks? All I've seen so far are plutocracy (PoW/PoS blockchains) and oligarchy (centralized blockchains).

I don't have a great grasp yet of how PoS and other non-PoW consensus protocols work.

But if I ever grok the building blocks fully enough, I'd like to see if I can devise a system based on "proof of receipt" in which the act of receiving X coins grants you the ability to "settle" a set of blocks totaling a*X worth of transactions (for some constant a).

Like in other blockchains, the node selected to settle a block of transactions gets to keep some or all of the transaction fees for that block. But instead of continually getting selected by virtue of continuing to hold a large amount of coin, you could only continue to be selected by continuing to receive coin (presumably in return for goods and services).

The transaction fees and the constant $a$ would have to bee chosen such that you couldn't turn a profit by sending lots of money to yourself. But I think that would allow for a fair system with a good incentive structure.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#167

Post by meowface » Mon, May 03, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

mac01021 wrote: post #166

meowface wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other options are possible for blockchain networks? All I've seen so far are plutocracy (PoW/PoS blockchains) and oligarchy (centralized blockchains).

I don't have a great grasp yet of how PoS and other non-PoW consensus protocols work. But if I ever grok the building blocks fully enough, I'd like to see if I can devise a system based on "proof of receipt" in which the act of receiving X coins grants you the ability to "settle" a set of blocks totaling a*X worth of transactions (for some constant a). Like in other blockchains, the node selected to settle a block of…

>The transaction fees and the constant $a$ would have to bee chosen such that you couldn't turn a profit by sending lots of money to yourself. But I think that would allow for a fair system with a good incentive structure.

What if the goal isn't to profit from block rewards but to attack the network, though? What if you pass stuff around over and over between tons of addresses you own? (Any person can create an unlimited number of addresses, pretty much instantly.)

Even if by the end the total transaction fees result in a heavy loss being incurred, the attacker would only do it if they think they can gain more from the network attack than they'd lose in fees.

I think a secure blockchain system can never make any kind of assumption that 1 address = 1 person/entity or 1 transaction >= 2 people/entities. I think depending on addresses or transactions in any way is probably a non-starter.

One of the key anti-Sybil features of Proof of Work, Proof of Space, and Proof of Stake is that it solely relies on a single scarce, unfakeable, totally fungible resource. The network cares about only one fungible variable: the total amount of computational power, or hard drive space, or funds in the network. That way, it makes no difference if the attacker has 1 address or 1 million addresses.

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#168

Post by rkalla » Tue, May 04, 2021, 12:31 AM UTC

meibo wrote: post #59

pjc50 wrote: post #56

So .. is this like FileCoin, where people provide storage services and are rewarded, or is it a proof-of-waste scheme?

It's pure waste. You fill your disks with random data in a very computationally heavy process, and then wait for your "number" to be called on the network, for which you get a reward(which admittedly can be/should be done on a thin client like a raspberry pi, as their docs recommend). The more storage you invest, the more numbers you have, it's analogous to bingo in a way.

This is so succinctly put - I love it!

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#169

Post by mac01021 » Tue, May 04, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

meowface wrote: post #167

mac01021 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a great grasp yet of how PoS and other non-PoW consensus protocols work. But if I ever grok the building blocks fully enough, I'd like to see if I can devise a system based on "proof of receipt" in which the act of receiving X coins grants you the ability to "settle" a set of blocks totaling a*X worth of transactions (for some constant a). Like in other blockchains, the node selected to settle a block of…

>The transaction fees and the constant $a$ would have to bee chosen such that you couldn't turn a profit by sending lots of money to yourself. But I think that would allow for a fair system with a good incentive structure. What if the goal isn't to profit from block rewards but to attack the network, though? What if you pass stuff around over and over between tons of addresses you own? (Any person can create an unlim…

This is a very helpful comment, thank you!

I agree that any blockchain has to be resistant to Sybil attacks. And that may be an insurmountable obstacle for my idea but, so far, I haven't let that stop me from thinking about it.

There do seem to be some properties of PoW/PoS related to the level of iniquity in control of the blockchain and to their incentive structures, and I think it is worth casting a wide net in search of something better (even if it may not exist).

Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space

#170

Post by meowface » Tue, May 04, 2021, 8:49 PM UTC

mac01021 wrote: post #169

meowface wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The transaction fees and the constant $a$ would have to bee chosen such that you couldn't turn a profit by sending lots of money to yourself. But I think that would allow for a fair system with a good incentive structure. What if the goal isn't to profit from block rewards but to attack the network, though? What if you pass stuff around over and over between tons of addresses you own? (Any person can create an unlim…

This is a very helpful comment, thank you! I agree that any blockchain has to be resistant to Sybil attacks. And that may be an insurmountable obstacle for my idea but, so far, I haven't let that stop me from thinking about it. There do seem to be some properties of PoW/PoS related to the level of iniquity in control of the blockchain and to their incentive structures, and I think it is worth casting a wide net in se…

I agree. I don't know nearly enough about it all to be able to think of any, as well. I just know open, decentralized, trustless, permissionless, anonymous consensus in global peer-to-peer networks is a very difficult problem that people have been wracking their brains thinking about for decades. BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and Ethereum made some of the biggest breakthroughs, there.

It seems like everything might be a variation of one of two possible categories: economic game theory (Proof of Stake), or proof of committal of scarce, fungible physical resources. Everything else I can think of just seems like it'd be some form of centralization/oligarchy. But who knows?

(Proof of Stake is sometimes accused of being oligarchical, too, but I think it's still kind of the lesser of all evils, probably.)