Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

coincarboncap.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 381 posts

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

#291

Post by lottin »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #211
arcticbull wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further the purpose of mining is to enable mutations to the chain as quantized into transactions. If you stop permitting mutations energy use drops to zero, ergo energy use per transaction is totally reasonable.

That's not how logic works. That would be like saying "you need light to your math homework so we will measure how many math problems you can do per lumen of light". The throughput of transactions is not coupled to the amount of electricity used to mine. They are two elements in the system, that doesn't mean they move proportionally in any way.

> The throughput of transactions is not coupled to the amount of electricity used to mine. They are two elements in the system, that doesn't mean they move proportionally in any way.

We know that. This is not an argument against cost per transaction being an adequate measure of efficiency for a transaction processing system.

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

#292

Post by lottin »

useryman wrote: post #288
lottin wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way the bitcoin network works, as far as I understand it, is by running a lottery every 10 minutes. The thing is there are many ways of running a lottery that don't involve burning tons of electricity in the process. In fact most lotteries don't burn any energy at all. Why the inventors of bitcoin decided to do it this way is beyond me.

> there are many ways of running a lottery that don't involve burning tons of electricity in the process You need something to be the limiting factor on the amount that you can try to win such a lottery. With proof of work, it's electricity. (assuming everyone is about as efficient as each other) Early on, they talked about it being proportional to cpu-time. That has become more abstract since.

The limiting factor can be the price of the lottery ticket. (It seems the most obvious limiting factor, by the way.)

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

#293

Post by useryman »

Sargos wrote: post #158
rawtxapp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally codefies "the rich gets richer" deep into the protocol. While I'm pro-eth, this makes it a lot less "fair" in my opinion. With PoW, miners can't really hold on to the coins for very long, so they have to dump it to cover electricity and hardware costs which always creates supply whereas with PoS, a staker can just hold on to the coins they get forever at no cost and their share of the pie keeps getting l…

The difference is that anyone can stake. It's going to be the default way to store ETH akin to a savings account for most people so pretty much everyone is going to share in that PoS issuance. This also doesn't affect new buyers as they are buying ETH to use it most likely so it's not being held long term. If they decide to buy long term then they also get the PoS issuance so everyone wins.

> The difference is that anyone can stake.

Unless you're entering a pool, you need 32 ETH to stake.

I remember when that wasn't a lot.

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

#294

Post by jillesvangurp »

vldr wrote: post #283

It doesn't mention any PoS solution (which are, compared to PoW) extremely energy efficient. They do mention in the FAQ that they're not included since they still depend on some sort of centralization, but as far as I know this is not true for, for example, avalanche ( https://avax.network ) It's not really clear who is behind this site and if there's some hidden agenda. Let's assume not (but with crypto you can neve…

I think Ethereum 2.0 is currently demonstrating at scale that proof of stake works fine and can be secure against hordes of very incentivized hackers trying to cheat. That should hopefully bury the whole proof of stake is centralized argument.

The notion of centralization has its roots in a different concept: permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains. Ethereum (1 and 2) and Bitcoin are both permissionless in the sense that anyone can become a node in the network and start earning gas. Ethereum 2.0 does not change that. You can still join and earn gas on it.

Permissioned blockchains such as Stellar, Ripple and a few other networks are more closed. You can join the network but you don't have the same status as the core nodes in the network that are explicitly configured to trust each other. This makes e.g. 50% attacks from the outside impossible. E.g. Stellar works this way. You can become a stellar validator but nodes have to specify which other nodes they trust and that gives the first nodes a lot of power.

In the case of Stellar there are only a few dozen validators run by organizations working with the Stellar foundation. Stellar has indicated that they want to gradually open up and eventually become permissionless. But as of yet they are too small to make that work and are relying a lot on a small set of validators run by just a handful of companies. There's a list of active nodes here: https://stellarbeat.io/nodes

Such permissioned networks are great for e.g. banks that need to make sure they aren't doing transactions via some dodgy nodes in North Korea, Iran, etc. Technically, blockchains like this are not that different from public blockchains. There's nothing stopping these from opening up except that they choose not to. For a lot of businesses, that's a feature not a bug.

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

#295

Post by lawn »

takeda wrote: post #163

Total noob, but I'm wondering since generating the blockchain (at least with bitcoin) is about finding match (or should I say) partial match of a specific hash. Could that information be somehow used to cracking encryption that relies on cryptographic hashes?

No, it gives you no information.

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

#298

Post by michaelt »

fidelramos wrote: post #280
homedepotdave wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The total energy required to maintain a secure and stable fiat currency is likely orders of magnitude greater than that of Bitcoin today.” No way. You hear this argument all the time — that fiat currency also uses tons of energy - but I just don’t think it’s true (relative to the amount of transaction throughout, and also in absolute terms). Bitcoin mining uses something like 0.5-0.6% of global electricity consumpti…

That is one of the important points point made by jtoomin in the first post of this thread: the energy consumption of a PoW blockchain if not proportional to the number of transactions. This means we could have everyone, everywhere, using a PoW blockchain with the same percentage of energy consumption as today (although it would probably rise as price would arguably also rise as demand increases, but it would eventua…

Didn't bitcoin have the chance to double their transactions-per-second for a constant amount of power consumption, in the form of Segwit2x, and decide not to do so?

The fact Bitcoin could be more efficient and chooses not to isn't really an improvement over being unable to be more efficient IMHO - in fact arguably it's worse.

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

#299

Post by dathinab »

fidelramos wrote: post #280
homedepotdave wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The total energy required to maintain a secure and stable fiat currency is likely orders of magnitude greater than that of Bitcoin today.” No way. You hear this argument all the time — that fiat currency also uses tons of energy - but I just don’t think it’s true (relative to the amount of transaction throughout, and also in absolute terms). Bitcoin mining uses something like 0.5-0.6% of global electricity consumpti…

That is one of the important points point made by jtoomin in the first post of this thread: the energy consumption of a PoW blockchain if not proportional to the number of transactions. This means we could have everyone, everywhere, using a PoW blockchain with the same percentage of energy consumption as today (although it would probably rise as price would arguably also rise as demand increases, but it would eventua…

This is only the case of you would arbitrarily increase the number of potential transactions per block.

But as far as I know the maximal number of transactions is capped in practice.

Furthermore the security of PoW is based on it being far more expensive to mess with it then to mine it. But if you push more mommy through the same number of blocks it's at some point breaking apart.

Lastly no one says it will ever consume all energy. That works be absurd. It's about the required energy (and hardware cost) in relationship to the provided value being unhinged and for security you need steadily increasing energy costs for increased usage.

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

#300

Post by spinny »

People that complain that PoW cryptos spend too much energy don't understand that it's just another form of conversion of energy, just like every other action human take.

Average Joe has a manual labor, his physical energy is converted into labor, which converts to fiat currency. The food that Joe ate also require some amount of energy to grow and become Joe's food.

PoW mining converts raw electric energy into a digitally transmissible currency

Post reply on HN