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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

#231

Post by throwaway9980 »

BluSyn wrote: post #189
toomim wrote: 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…

"Energy used / total value secured" is a better measurement. "Double-spend prevented" isn't calculable. Important to remember that the energy used on mining both secures current and *PAST* transactions, that's the entire point of the block chain . I think "total value secured" captures this point. I find it frustrating that crypto-currencies are judged by their energy usage, meanwhile traditional fiat currencies are…

I don’t think you’re going to be able to secure the blockchain without those governments and militaries. Maybe you replace the massive banking industry with a new massive crypto financial industry?

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

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

#232

Post by ffggvv »

BluSyn wrote: post #189
toomim wrote: 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…

"Energy used / total value secured" is a better measurement. "Double-spend prevented" isn't calculable. Important to remember that the energy used on mining both secures current and *PAST* transactions, that's the entire point of the block chain . I think "total value secured" captures this point. I find it frustrating that crypto-currencies are judged by their energy usage, meanwhile traditional fiat currencies are…

>> I find it frustrating that crypto-currencies are judged by their energy usage, meanwhile traditional fiat currencies are secured by massive banking industries, governments, and militaries. The total energy required to maintain a secure and stable fiat currency is likely orders of magnitude greater than that of Bitcoin today.

1. By that logic bitcoin is also supported by the military, education system, banking industries etc. It relies on a secure society that has power and internet and computers and wealth for citizens to have and use these things as a prerequisite.

2. The military etc you mention actually is the basis of alot more in society than just fiat currency. So your formula "Energy used / total value secured". If you want to include those things in "energy used" then under "total value secured" you need to include basically all value ever created by humans in western countries which is in the hundreds of trillions (if not more). Not just fiat currency. And actually if we went back to the gold standard all those institutions would still need to exist to secure society. (banks, governments, and militaries existed long before we abandoned the gold standard.)

Overall its a silly concept/argument.

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

#233

Post by atweiden »

wmf wrote: post #227
atweiden wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most PoS networks aim to reach a "zero issuance" state where the network can sustain itself on TX fees alone. Whether ICO investors are stakemining coins issued through inflation or transaction fees doesn’t matter — they’re still mining orders of magnitude more coins , at the end of the day. Their artificially low cost basis translates into them reaping outsized profits which dwarf that of later investors. (And fra…

It seems like that argument could equally apply to PoW or startups.

> It seems like that argument could equally apply to PoW or startups.

It isn’t clear to me what you meant to say here. Early investors tend to be by far the biggest winners in general, crypto or not. However, we were discussing mining revenue, not profits in general.

Importantly, early PoW miners had to source new ASIC mining rigs from China year after year, pay to install those ASICs in datacenters, and pay for the electricity to power them. For the better part of a decade. Only then would they have continued earning bitcoin mining revenue at all.

Conversely, PoS staking yield requires little more than showing up with cash on day one. From then on out, PoS stakers earn mining revenue in proportion to their holdings. It costs them almost nothing to do this in perpetuity.

In addition, PoS is sadly linked with ICOs, pre-ICOs and pre-mines. These financial shenanigans allow early investors to stake disproportionately more coins than later investors. IMO it’s highly misleading to present this situation as being somehow “more fair” than PoW mining.

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

#234

Post by 22c »

atweiden wrote: post #201
22c wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in relative terms, the earliest investors are mopping the floor with the later investors, because the earliest investors can stake orders of magnitude more coins. PoS networks are typically not going to be minting coins in perpetuity. Most PoS networks aim to reach a "zero issuance" state where the network can sustain itself on TX fees alone. It's also typically in a networks interest to decentralise TX verific…

> Most PoS networks aim to reach a "zero issuance" state where the network can sustain itself on TX fees alone. Whether ICO investors are stakemining coins issued through inflation or transaction fees doesn’t matter — they’re still mining orders of magnitude more coins , at the end of the day. Their artificially low cost basis translates into them reaping outsized profits which dwarf that of later investors. (And fra…

There's typically a fixed number of rewards per block, or the emission rates are on a schedule based on block height.

Unless your argument is simply "stonks go up", in which case, sure, I agree. Is that a real problem?

If you bought $1000 of AMZN shares 20 years ago you'd have orders of magnitude more voting power than someone who buys $1000 of AMZN shares today.

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

#235

Post by baby »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #220
baby wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a good source on that? This is not the first time I hear this. Btw I’ve studied the consensus protocol and it fulfills promises of decentralization so I’m wondering why they are using some single points of failure pieces (it is decentralized from a safety perspective: you can’t double spend, but it’s possible that some pieces are centralized). My guess is efficiency.

https://algorand.foundation/faq Who manages the list of relay nodes? What about decentralization? > Currently, the Algorand Foundation manages the official list of relay nodes... > We are working on a model where the decisions on relay nodes will be done in a more decentralized way. As for the centralized domain, you can look it up in the source code but essentially it gets the list of relays from a SRV record on the…

Ok I see. In practice this reminds me of the issue of downloading the client and of seed peers that every cryptocurrency has:

- everyone downloads the client/code of a cryptocurrency from the same place

- that client also hardcodes a list of peers that you first connect to in order to discover more peers

The first issue is more problematic, and the second issue usually matters less.

My guess is that algorand rely on relay nodes because they are targeting a high throughput, and thus need quick communication between nodes.

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

#236

Post by clarkmoody »

ericjang wrote: post #213
BluSyn wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Energy used / total value secured" is a better measurement. "Double-spend prevented" isn't calculable. Important to remember that the energy used on mining both secures current and *PAST* transactions, that's the entire point of the block chain . I think "total value secured" captures this point. I find it frustrating that crypto-currencies are judged by their energy usage, meanwhile traditional fiat currencies are…

Do you have an estimate of energy used / total value secured ? If I am understanding correctly, an upper bound on "total value secured" would just be the total transaction volume moved in a block?

Each block secures the entire chain. The lower bound of the total value secured is market cap of the coin. In the case of Bitcoin, the upper bound is the value of the entire "crypto" ecosystem, including all tokens, companies, jobs, infrastructure, etc.

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

#237

Post by c1sc0 »

skybrian wrote: post #171
wpietri wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented." Not for a general audience. The purpose of a currency is to enable transactions. Internally, I get why people involved might fuss about the metric. But from the societal perspective it's reasonable to ask, "What does it cost per unit of value created?"

Okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't explain how to fix the problem. We need to drum up interest for a solution. The way I like to explain it is that Bitcoin is collectively giving away about $1.5 billion a month in prize money to miners. That's the root of the problem. Miners will spend up to $1.5 billion a month on electricity (mainly) and their other expenses. Currently it's about 10x Google's electricity usage.…

One way would be to simply start to do CO2 offsets of the total estimated energy spent per block mined. It’s a fun thing to calculate & dream about but enforcement would be hard.

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

#238

Post by atweiden »

22c wrote: post #234
atweiden wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most PoS networks aim to reach a "zero issuance" state where the network can sustain itself on TX fees alone. Whether ICO investors are stakemining coins issued through inflation or transaction fees doesn’t matter — they’re still mining orders of magnitude more coins , at the end of the day. Their artificially low cost basis translates into them reaping outsized profits which dwarf that of later investors. (And fra…

There's typically a fixed number of rewards per block, or the emission rates are on a schedule based on block height. Unless your argument is simply "stonks go up", in which case, sure, I agree. Is that a real problem? If you bought $1000 of AMZN shares 20 years ago you'd have orders of magnitude more voting power than someone who buys $1000 of AMZN shares today.

> If you bought $1000 of AMZN shares 20 years ago you'd have orders of magnitude more voting power than someone who buys $1000 of AMZN shares today.

Equities typically aren’t masquerading as global currencies. Fairness does matter, here.

It’s absolutely material that the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” had no reasonable expectation of profit at the time of launching Bitcoin c. 2009, for instance.

It’s also material that Bitcoin miners couldn’t continue mining bitcoin absent continuously ordering new ASIC miners from Asia, whereas PoS miners can plop down cash on day one, and mine the same proportion of coins forever at little to no additional cost.

AMZN investors aren’t typically peddling narratives involving fairness the way PoS investors are. These people are claiming PoS is “more fair” than Bitcoin. It’s profoundly incorrect, but also rather unsurprising.

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

#239

Post by c1sc0 »

skybrian wrote: post #229
wmf wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one sense the solution is PoS. But Bitcoin will never ever ever adopt PoS, so we need to somehow convince hodlers and traders to switch to another cryptocurrency in a way that doesn't look like discrimination (e.g. outright banning PoW). A global carbon tax is an obvious yet oh so difficult possibility. Some kind of memetic warfare might be more feasible.

Discriminating against PoW algorithms seems fine? It's like discriminating against fossil fuels.

Which is fine.

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

#240

Post by skybrian »

atweiden wrote: post #210
skybrian wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holders of Bitcoin want to see the price go up, which makes the problem worse. So the primary incentive is very bad and that's how we got here. More enlightened self-interest would be to want to see the price go up without using more electricity, but this is secondary to the primary incentive. To get action from enlightened self-interest, there needs to be leadership for making changes. (Ethereum seems to have this?)

> To get action from enlightened self-interest, there needs to be leadership for making changes. (Ethereum seems to have this?) Knowledge preceedes enlightenment. For example, Git is also green-friendly, and shares a virtually identical consensus model to pure PoS consensus designs. It’s just that “green-friendliness” wasn’t a design goal of cryptocurrency — creating a lasting store of value sans institutions, exchan…

Saying "just use git" seems simplistic. But I could imagine a Debian-like organization that chooses a pool of trusted servers run by independent organizations in multiple countries, where they all have to agree, and with a full transparency log like DNS.
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