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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

#311

Post by Nursie »

baby wrote: post #250
wmf wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 50% of the crypto market is PoW. It's not just HN that isn't adopting the new tech.

This is true, but things are changing. If you look at the top coins: - #2 ethereum is moving to PoS - #3 binance is PoS (tendermint) - #4 cardano is PoS (ouroboros) - #6 tether is a token - #7 XRP is BFT-based (I think PoA?) - etc. Basically there's only Bitcoin, Dogecoin (lol), and Bitcoin Cash in the top 10 that are still proof of work. If you look at the top 50 it's even more biased towards non-proof of work.

> ethereum is moving to PoS

"Any day now" for the last several years.

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

#312

Post by WanderPanda »

fidelramos wrote: post #303
michaelt wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I completely agree, increasing the maximum block size is the simplest way to scale. Bitcoin BTC refused to do that, keeping the 1 MiB maximum block size instituted by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2010 as a spam-prevention measure, which led to raising transaction fees as users compete for the scarce block space. That is also the reason why Bitcoin Cash BCH was born in August 2017: to raise the maximum block size and allow the…

> In other words, blockchains should be decentralized enough that no single entity can take control of the network, but too much decentralization is inefficient, so an equilibrium must be found.

I believe that is the hardest problem that bitcoin didn‘t solve. The hashrate is governed by the price and a arbitrary halving schedule. There is no mechanism to regulate the hashrate to a certain setpoint where attacking the network is not feasible. This issue becomes even more severe when the block reward is dominated by fees in the future. In that scenario the hashrate is not so much determined by the price anymore but the available block space and the utility of on-chain transactions. It is really hard to judge bitcoins security model considering all these variables. But for now the solution seems to be to vastly overcommit hashrate

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

#313

Post by Retric »

Gatsky wrote: post #290
root_axis wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> traditional fiat currencies are secured by massive banking industries, governments, and militaries This argument makes no sense. Bitcoin doesn't obviate the need for militaries, banks, or governments, those things would exist regardless of the type of currency being used. Furthermore, these institutions have functions that go far beyond "securing fiat currency", not to mention the fact that bitcoin's existence reli…

I would like to offer a different perspective. The end of gold backed currencies in the 70s and replacement by fiat currencies hinged on the middle east oil states agreeing to sell oil in USD, in return for global policing by the US[1]. There is thus an intimate relationship between the current system and fossil fuels and the military, which goes beyond just ‘existing infrastructure’ arguments. This doesn’t mean we s…

That’s a common misconception. Selling oil in any currency has minimal impact on the US or USD, a buyer needs USD just long enough for a transaction and the seller gets rid of USD ASAP. The value is if 3rd parties need to hold some value worth of USD and the USD has inflation, then those 3rd parties need to constantly buy more USD to make up for inflation. In effect the US gets to print money and get stuff for free.

As to long term hyper inflation, you can only get long term hyper inflation if the country prints more currency. Suppose 1 trillion USD was worth 1 apple, and the US economy was even 1% as large as today, and their was the same number of USD in circulation, and the IRS only accepted taxes paid in USD. Now suddenly a lot of people really really want USD to pay taxes as their hypothetical tax bills are larger than the amount of USD possible to acquire. Except people constantly need to pay taxes so that can’t happen. What can happen is significant shifts in USD’s vale, aka it can go up or down within a range or the US can print a lot more currency.

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

#314

Post by rcxdude »

lottin wrote: post #282
skybrian wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

The lottery isn't the point, it's a side effect. The network needs consensus on what transactions have happened and which haven't. The main difficulty in getting this when you can't trust the nodes that someone can just spin up an arbitrary number of nodes to overwhelm the consensus, if the consensus just goes by majority vote. If you want to prevent this you need to tie the consensus to something which is scarce, which is what proof of work does. As a side effect of how this is implemented, it becomes a lottery.

If you implement proof of stake, for example (where the scarce resource becomes the currency of the network itself, which is a lot trickier to implement and especially quite hard to bootstrap from nothing because in the early days of a currency there's going to be only a few people owning it), then there's no need for the reward process to be a lottery (though it still can be).

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

#315

Post by rcxdude »

GBiT wrote: post #44
meowkit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You right, but I will write how I think. Incentive in not only to run more hardware, but to run more effective hardware. This incentivises innovation. In POS you don't need to do anything else. Just stake coins. No innovation, you can always be a monopoly if you have the cash to make a one-time investment. In POW you always have to invest to be competitive and have the most competing hardware.

> This incentivises innovation

What useful innovation has come out of mining? Mostly I see very innovative ways to cheat energy markets and create ewaste.

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

#316

Post by Geee »

GBiT wrote: post #19
danielvf wrote: post #3

Cool chart! Interesting to see how much of an outlier Bitcoin is. The middle tier currencies in this list (USDC, USDT, etc) are built on Ethereum, so once Ethereum finishes its switch over to proof-of-stake, both they and Ethereum will drop down to almost nothing in terms of power used per transaction.

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.

No one is getting richer in PoS. The currency inflates at the same rate. It's similar to stock split. You get more shares in the same ratio as the value is reduced.

In PoW, energy is used to mine more coins. Thus, total value of the currency grows.

There's a difference between inflation from thin air, and inflation from added energy / work.

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

#317

Post by lottin »

rcxdude wrote: post #314
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.

The lottery isn't the point, it's a side effect. The network needs consensus on what transactions have happened and which haven't. The main difficulty in getting this when you can't trust the nodes that someone can just spin up an arbitrary number of nodes to overwhelm the consensus, if the consensus just goes by majority vote. If you want to prevent this you need to tie the consensus to something which is scarce, wh…

It's still a lottery, except the way you buy tickets is by wasting electricity. The more electricity wasted the more lottery tickets you have. It doesn't need be like this, just buy the tickets with effing bitcoins and you achieve the same result without wasting electricity.

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

#320

Post by prepend »

Are there any coins with a reasonable transaction cost? It seems shocking to me the USD-normalized cost per transaction given that the actual cost should be near zero.

Visa/MC has a cost of like $.25+some percent so I suppose represents the cost of having a trusted oracle with fraud, review, etc.

This seems like it should be the standard to beat for whether a currency can actually be used for anything normal and necessary to get wide uptake.

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