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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

#331

Post by wpietri »

lottin wrote: post #286
matheusmoreira wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But from the societal perspective it's reasonable to ask, "What does it cost per unit of value created?" Then you have to define value. I don't think it's transactions. Any random bank can make transactions. People can transact with cash. Cryptocurrencies create value by providing other properties such as decentralization, trustlessness, privacy. For example, Monero enables private and untraceable transactions and…

Economic value is measured by how much people are willing to pay for it. Transactions have economic value, because people are willing to pay a fee in return for having a transaction processed. And cryptocurrencies are transaction processing systems. So it absolutely makes perfect sense to measure how efficient these systems are processing transactions, and the way to measure that is by looking at how much it costs to…

> Economic value is measured by how much people are willing to pay for it.

That's an ok general rule, but it breaks down in a lot of circumstances. Look at scams, for example. People pay quite a lot for them, but at a societal level, they have strong negative value.

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

#332

Post by lottin »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #323
lottin wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic value is measured by how much people are willing to pay for it. Transactions have economic value, because people are willing to pay a fee in return for having a transaction processed. And cryptocurrencies are transaction processing systems. So it absolutely makes perfect sense to measure how efficient these systems are processing transactions, and the way to measure that is by looking at how much it costs to…

> Transactions have economic value, because people are willing to pay a fee in return for having a transaction processed. Why transact via cryptocurrencies instead of other systems? Because of these other desirable properties. They're the value cryptocurrencies add to the world and the reason why people choose to them despite the inefficiency. People transact in Ethereum because they want to run smart contracts. Peop…

The fact that some people don't care about efficiency doesn't mean we shouldn't measure it. For example, a lot of people buy cars that are fuel-inefficient. Does that mean we should stop measuring car efficiency? No, that's a ridiculous argument. If you don't care about efficiency because you care more about other stuff, at least you should be aware of the trade-offs, and also have the intellectual honesty to admit that you don't care about efficiency, instead of pretending that efficiency is not important.

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

#333

Post by dane-pgp »

wyager wrote: post #165
dane-pgp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if this is how it works, but it should be possible to avoid the "re-roll" problem: Each node picks a random value, and publishes the hash of it to the blockchain, then, when the network has reached finality on what all the hashes are, the nodes publish the random values themselves, and the network takes the XOR of all of them.

Nodes can simply choose not to publish their value if the result is unfavorable to them, and this tanks the whole procedure. This isn’t a problem unique to your scheme; they all suffer from things like this.

If a node publicly commits to providing a random value, but then doesn't follow the protocol by actually revealing it, then that node's stake can be distributed to the honest nodes and the procedure started again.

The protocol could even increase the stake needed to be one of these random value providing nodes, every time such a failure occurred, to make such an attack more and more expensive.

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

#334

Post by xref »

irae wrote: post #330
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.

Bitcoin strength and value is on decentralization. If you increase the block size, it will be seized by governments or large corporations. This has long being debated, and the reason it is like it is today, is that everyone really vested into it agreed (in a distributed way) to keep it as so. More on that here: https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/139399717145689293... And you can even buy books explaining this…

Just says “tweet unavailable” for me, and I don’t understand how a 2mb block means a government can “seize” Bitcoin where they can’t with a 1mb block

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

#335

Post by fidelramos »

Nursie wrote: post #328
fidelramos wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say "no government" or "no laws", I asked for free market. For a free market to work one of the important aspects is open competition with low barriers of entry. I believe most governments today do the opposite: their laws add barriers to competition, leading to inefficiencies that are in detriment of the general public. Examples are all around us, from cities forbidding Uber as a competition to taxi compani…

> I believe most governments today do the opposite You're entitled to your beliefs, OTOH I believe that the free market cannot work unfettered. Monopolistic behaviour of large corporations shows us this again and again and again, as do environmental and Labour abuses and a million and one things people will do to screw each other over for a fast buck. I think your view is extremely naive.

I think you confuse free market with "no rules, everything is allowed", which is not what I am proposing. Those monopolies you mention in the abstract are largely possible because laws make it much more difficult than it could be for competitors to arise. In a free market most monopolies are unstable and don't last long. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom and Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics both have chapters dedicated to monopolies and how states are the main reason they can be sustained.

Negative externalities, like environmental damage, should ideally be internalized, although I grant that this is not always easy. Private ownership of all land might help, as public ownership dilutes responsibility.

> I think your view is extremely naive.

Isn't it interesting that I think the same about your view? :)

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

#336

Post by CyberDildonics »

arcticbull wrote: post #268
CyberDildonics wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A better analogy would be trying to use a 7-seater dump truck as a school bus, then complaining when the 'haters' analysis is based on "gallons of gasoline per available seat-day." As if the fact the gallons of gasoline per seat-day changes based on external factors (i.e. with the weather or traffic) makes any difference? It legitimately does not matter that (i) not all 7 seats may be populated each day or that (ii)…

No one is complaining and no one said "haters", these are things you hallucinated. I'm not defending bitcoin, I'm just pointing out that you have huge misunderstanding about how it and cryptocurrency works in general even though these things have been explained to you over and over.

Bitcoin's electricity use it because of its sustained price. If the miners could not consistently sell for high prices the overall electricity use would go down. Price/electricity usage going up or down does not affect throughput over the long term.

Bitcoin's throughput is from being artificially crippled to sell a second layer. If the maximum block size was raised, it would have more throughput. The max block size does not change the amount of electricity used from the block reward.

The same way that you would not measure your internet connection on mb per kw/hr since the energy used by 10mbs service is going to be the same as 1000gbs service. The two things are barely correlated.

Energy per transaction is barely correlated. I know it is simple and easy to look at two numbers and pretend they depend on each other, but that isn't the dynamic here, which is why everything you are saying is nonsense.

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

#337

Post by matheusmoreira »

lottin wrote: post #332
matheusmoreira wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Transactions have economic value, because people are willing to pay a fee in return for having a transaction processed. Why transact via cryptocurrencies instead of other systems? Because of these other desirable properties. They're the value cryptocurrencies add to the world and the reason why people choose to them despite the inefficiency. People transact in Ethereum because they want to run smart contracts. Peop…

The fact that some people don't care about efficiency doesn't mean we shouldn't measure it. For example, a lot of people buy cars that are fuel-inefficient. Does that mean we should stop measuring car efficiency? No, that's a ridiculous argument. If you don't care about efficiency because you care more about other stuff, at least you should be aware of the trade-offs, and also have the intellectual honesty to admit t…

I didn't say you shouldn't measure it. I said people are buying other things for their money. Simply measuring transactions/energy ignores all that. Monero provides decentralized trustless private untraceable transactions, Ethereum provides decentralized trustless transactions that execute smart contracts. The energy consumption is merely the cost of all those features.

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

#338

Post by Nursie »

fidelramos wrote: post #335
Nursie wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe most governments today do the opposite You're entitled to your beliefs, OTOH I believe that the free market cannot work unfettered. Monopolistic behaviour of large corporations shows us this again and again and again, as do environmental and Labour abuses and a million and one things people will do to screw each other over for a fast buck. I think your view is extremely naive.

I think you confuse free market with "no rules, everything is allowed", which is not what I am proposing. Those monopolies you mention in the abstract are largely possible because laws make it much more difficult than it could be for competitors to arise. In a free market most monopolies are unstable and don't last long. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom and Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics both have chapters d…

> Those monopolies you mention in the abstract are largely possible because laws make it much more difficult than it could be for competitors to arise.

This is just more libertarian apologetics. There have been more than enough examples (cough intel *cough) of monopolistic practices caused by unfair market practices. Using dominance to force suppliers to exclusive use of your products is not a practice enabled by the state.

> Private ownership of all land might help

Rivers too? And then what? I can sue you for polluting my downstream, but it's OK if a company just buys up the whole river, then they can ruin it to their heart's content?

This is just nonsense.

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

#339

Post by wmf »

shawnz wrote: post #325
atweiden wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In PoW coins you permanently lose the "stake". So that just means that to achieve the same level of security in a PoS coin, you have to stake a lot more (since you are only losing the time value of the stake). PoS network security reduces down to top-down human intervention: because PoS networks are unmined, they lack all hashing power which could otherwise be used to build a quantitative fork ranking protocol. Whe…

I'm not sure what you mean. Isn't the typical fork selection method for proof-of-stake to choose the chain with the most validators?

Unfortunately it's more complex than that. You can't rely on number of stakers for anything because of sybil attacks. You also can't rely on amount of stake because some of it could be double-staked (you can detect this but it still may not help you choose which fork is legit). The solutions to PoS fork choice don't really fit in an HN comment.

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

#340

Post by lottin »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #337
lottin wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that some people don't care about efficiency doesn't mean we shouldn't measure it. For example, a lot of people buy cars that are fuel-inefficient. Does that mean we should stop measuring car efficiency? No, that's a ridiculous argument. If you don't care about efficiency because you care more about other stuff, at least you should be aware of the trade-offs, and also have the intellectual honesty to admit t…

I didn't say you shouldn't measure it. I said people are buying other things for their money. Simply measuring transactions/energy ignores all that. Monero provides decentralized trustless private untraceable transactions, Ethereum provides decentralized trustless transactions that execute smart contracts. The energy consumption is merely the cost of all those features.

> The energy consumption is merely the cost of all those features.

This is a big assumption, and almost certainly untrue.

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