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

Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 301 posts

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#51

Post by bhaak »

atweiden wrote: post #48
Yizahi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that in USA legal system there is concept "spirit of the law" and afaik there were cases when a person was intentionally abiding the "word of the law" but breaking "spirit of the law" and was penalized for this. So anyway, Satoshi solo mine and anyone else's solo mine, is not technically a premine, but in a spirit - it is. Saying that solo mine is not a premine is true, but you know, I know, everyone knows tha…

In a premine, developers hard code coin balances for themselves into their own ledger prior to public mining becoming available. Satoshi clearly didn’t do this. It’s that cut and dry.

The definition of a premine isn't as clear as you put it. Or at least isn't always used in the same way.

With your definition, Ethereum only had a 16% premine.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#52

Post by atweiden »

subroutine wrote: post #43

PoW isn't necessarily bad, if the work can be made useful. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home I vaguely remember hearing about some coin proposing a Folding@home concept. Does anyone know of any novel Po(useful)W coins?

The ideal proof of work algorithm should serve no other useful purpose besides enabling disparate actors to provably sacrifice resources foreign-to-the-system. Anything the PoW algo does which is useful above and beyond provable sacrifice increases the incentive for PoW miners to attack the network.

For example, if you could either use your GPU to mine $COIN for $10/day or to mine $ANTICOIN for $1/day, you could attack $COIN in full knowledge that your GPUs would still earn $1/day of $ANTICOIN afterwards.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#53

Post by sprafa »

floatboth wrote: post #39

No matter how many non-PoW shitcoins you make, the main one (BTC) is not going to change and remains the dominant one . You can't solve the problem by creating more shitcoins, only by crashing the whole field into the ground.

Bitcoin will eventually fade away, since the only significant thing that's actually happening in crypto space is actually smart contracts, and BTC will never implement that. In 10 years it it will be a historical curiosity.

Also - shitcoins? So DOT, ALGO are shitcoins? You seem out of the loop.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#54

Post by perf1 »

danbruc wrote: post #23
davidhyde wrote: post #19

How about a proof of negative energy requirement? Like how much solar electricity you generate or CO2 you scrub out of the air.

Maybe someone has a really clever idea but I do not think anything rooted in the real world can work. You will always need some kind of sensor to record whatever it is that you are doing in the real world and you will have to prevent people from faking those sensor readings. If you had a central authority as root of trust you might be able to build some tamper-proof device that provides cryptographically attested val…

Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank pushes for a sustainable Bitcoin. His proposed solution is to have basically "certified" Miners mine clean Coins and never exchange them. Of course if this takes over Bitcoin isn't really decentralized anymore, but he thinks Institutional Investors would prefer that.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#55

Post by atweiden »

Retric wrote: post #40
floatboth wrote: post #39

No matter how many non-PoW shitcoins you make, the main one (BTC) is not going to change and remains the dominant one . You can't solve the problem by creating more shitcoins, only by crashing the whole field into the ground.

Bitcoin is far from #1 in terms of transactions per day which seems like the only important measurement of adoption.

If transactional demand were the only useful adoption metric for money, where would that leave gold?

The most important factor in a particular asset’s “adoption” as currency is its propensity to act as the unit of account for international settlement between nation-states.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#56

Post by Retric »

atweiden wrote: post #55
Retric wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is far from #1 in terms of transactions per day which seems like the only important measurement of adoption.

If transactional demand were the only useful adoption metric for money, where would that leave gold? The most important factor in a particular asset’s “adoption” as currency is its propensity to act as the unit of account for international settlement between nation-states.

Gold has more transactions per day than all crypto coins combined. In terms of value it’s moving ~200 billion dollars per day in exchanges.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#57

Post by CryptoPunk »

tromp wrote: post #14
Negitivefrags wrote: post #8

I'm not really convinced. Proof of Stake has a startup issue that Proof of Work doesn't have. If you want to have your coin begin as proof of stake you have to have some mechanism for how the initial coins are distributed and that method is usually going to involve the creators giving themselves a lot of coins. A lot of crypto projects have all sorts of ways of obfuscating this or claiming that the intial coins will…

Indeed; whereas PoS is only a consensus mechanism, PoW is both a consensus and a coin distribution mechanism. While Ethereum started out as PoW, its huge premine still constitutes a big trust issue.

Most of the premine was allocated via an open crowdsale.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#58

Post by danbruc »

perf1 wrote: post #54
danbruc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe someone has a really clever idea but I do not think anything rooted in the real world can work. You will always need some kind of sensor to record whatever it is that you are doing in the real world and you will have to prevent people from faking those sensor readings. If you had a central authority as root of trust you might be able to build some tamper-proof device that provides cryptographically attested val…

Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank pushes for a sustainable Bitcoin. His proposed solution is to have basically "certified" Miners mine clean Coins and never exchange them. Of course if this takes over Bitcoin isn't really decentralized anymore, but he thinks Institutional Investors would prefer that.

If you are willing to do that, then make them certified ledger maintainers and throw out the entire mining overhead and make them use a good old SQL database. Sprinkle as much cryptography on top of that as you want to feel happy about unforgeability and such. The only reason to have a mining process is to allow anonymity, when you give up on that, mining becomes pointless. Also Bitcoin has not been decentralized for a long time, the idea that every Bitcoin user gets a vote in the consensus process went out the window a decade ago.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#59

Post by atweiden »

bhaak wrote: post #51
atweiden wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a premine, developers hard code coin balances for themselves into their own ledger prior to public mining becoming available. Satoshi clearly didn’t do this. It’s that cut and dry.

The definition of a premine isn't as clear as you put it. Or at least isn't always used in the same way. With your definition, Ethereum only had a 16% premine.

“Premine”: previous to public mining, coins were distributed.

Satoshi absolutely didn’t premine Bitcoin.

Re: Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

#60

Post by danbruc »

runeks wrote: post #3

They don’t need to be, but it gives the best security guarantees. PoS is subject to threats that don’t exist for PoW, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27672759 .

They don’t need to be, but it gives the best security guarantees.

That is not true, the security has nothing to do with energy consumption, only with cost. If you had to verifiable set a million dollars on fire for mining a block, that would be as secure as proof of work without wasting energy. Also anything like mining is only necessary at all if you want anonymity, if you drop that requirement you unlock a vast space of very cheap solutions.

Post reply on HN