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Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

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Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#91
post #27
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will see how proof of stake will work, and in FAQ is a paper about it. POS have one big problem, that you only have to buy coins once and stake them and you will get richer every day by doing nothing without any additional investment. Basically it will make rich richer and more centralized. We will see how it will works in future.

>Basically it will make rich richer and more centralized. So PoW doesn't have this problem? It costs money to run mining hardware and supply electricity. The more valuable a PoW coin is, the greater incentive there is to run more hardware. With Bitcoin specifically the block rate is limited via the difficult adjustment. With this in mind it sounds like whoever is mining will get richer faster and centralize the compe…

While you need to be rich to be able to mine Bitcoin, you also have to dump those mined coins on the exchanges to cover your running costs (electricity, hardware, server operators, etc).

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#92
post #36

As a Bitcoin miner ( https://toom.im ), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect. The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage is not proportional to its transactions. I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining. I'll say this in a third way: it takes ex…

That's a very dubious way of looking at it.

Blockchains all have a bottleneck. All transactions in the world have to go through the miner. And the situation is actually worse than that because we don't know who will solve the useless Proof of Work hashcash function ahead of time, so EVERY potential transaction is gossipped to EVERY potential miner, and then the miners ALL go to town wasting electricity. How great!

Anyway, because of this architecture (preventing double-spending by literally aggregating all ambiguities into N potential histories of EVERYTHING, and then having them duke it out with PoW or PoS or any other way), we literally have a cap on how many "TPS" (Transactions Per Second) can go through.

Before Bitcoin, no one ever asked how many transactions per second an Internet protocol could support. It would be ridiculous to ask that of HTTP, or FTP or SMTP because there is no central bottleneck: the number of websites, files and emails that can be sent increases with the number of computers on the network.

With Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based networks, this is not the case. The max number of transactions that fit inside a block is the most throughput you're going to get. The best thing to come out of these blockchains is Microsoft's Sidetree protocol championed by @csuwildcat but that's for identities, not currencies. So basically, you have a payment system which is super-secure and also super-wasteful.

It's as if BitTorrent required every computer to seed every movie, and BitTorrent maximalists called everything else that used a Kademlia DHT a ShitTorrent.

Except here, it's actually worse because you're not doing Proof of SpaceTime (like FileCoin) but you're requiring a growing number of computers to participate in a lottery proving they burn electricity and get rewarded sometimes. And this amount of computers is growing, just so we can do one operation (transfer money) 10 times a second. At least Ethereum made it into virtual machine capable of executingmore than one operation, thus enabling Turing-complete programming languages like Solidity, and smart contracts. Still, the way it's designed as a "world computer" it's basically a glorified mainframe, and gas is basically paying for time on the mainframe. It is the reason "flash loans" are even possible, they are artifacts of the idea that literally ONE transaction in the entire world can happen at any given time. Nice for atomicity guarantees, I guess, but overall not so great for almost every real world application.

Blockchains with global consensus about every transaction in the world are NOT what I would think of when I think "decentralized" in the sense of having no central bottlenecks. Actually @vbuterin wrote a great article years ago about the different senses of the word "decentralized".

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#93

Would eth2.0 have a significantly higher txs/mwh? I have read 99% reduction in some places. Seems well positioned to top this list.

Yes, due to the 2nd layer solutions it's going to bring along. You have the same idea in Bitcoin called lightning network (with growing adoption: 1ml.com).

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#95
post #6

This is a solid idea, but needs more currencies like Cardano and Polkadot that claim energy efficiency as their strength

Wouldn't it be harder to evaluate in PoS-based cryptocurrencies?

Not really, you can evaluate PoS-based by the bandwidth and the message complexity of their consensus mechanism and the space required to sync and run a node.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#97
post #64

This chart is nice, but you need to include the difficulty of the algorithm (difficulty to attack), the size of the blockchain (hard for anyone except rich people to participate if you need a server farm just to verify a transaction), developer activity, and each coin should have a collapsable subset of “layer-2” options (eg. Lightning and liquid for Bitcoin), and their statistics as well. Most importantly, A “transa…

I was going to comment on this as well - different coins made different decisions on how to scale their blockchains. Some have an expensive base chain with the intent of moving most transactions to layer 2. Some have a cheap layer 1 with lots of transactions. Some have a mix of the 2. There are different tradeoffs for each approach, but I'd love to see some of these scaling attempts included rather than just assuming that layer 1 transactions are the only ones that matter.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#99
post #6

This is a solid idea, but needs more currencies like Cardano and Polkadot that claim energy efficiency as their strength

Wouldn't it be harder to evaluate in PoS-based cryptocurrencies?

PoS still encourages using more powerful hardware and faster internet because it equates to more transactions. That said, I've seen people use Pi's as stakers. But you can still test the current draw per transaction much the same as with PoW currencies.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#100
post #81
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fun to see something with $5.5B market cap being called "esoteric" and "barely used". I wish I had a side project with similar market cap :P

This is a sign that market caps are irrelevant, the whole crypto scene is crazy, or both.

Market caps get extra weird for cryptocurrencies which are created as forks of an existing chain, because everyone who held the original coin at the time of the fork technically holds an equal number of the forked coins, even if the owners of those coins have never interacted with the fork.
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