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Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

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

#61
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of which the creators can grab an arbitrary part essentially for free.

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

#62
Haven't seen Chia mentioned in this thread and it was only briefly mentioned in the article — Proof of Space/Time seems to have the same security guarantees as Bitcoin without any of the electricity usage. It uses extra hard drive space but a recent report confirmed that a lot of that is using underutilized existing space, not space from new drives: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US47836321

Chia's on-chain language is also a functional LISP called Chialisp that is more secure and auditable than Solidity: https://chialisp.com/ They're having a $500k prize hackathon for building cool things in Chialisp at the end of July: https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/sirius-labs-launche...

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

#63
post #53

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.

Smart contracts don't need to be implemented at the base layer, you can have other layers and protocols and still transact in Bitcoin.

There is rsk, sovryn and rgb on lightning and you can still use Bitcoin with ethereum or other smart contract platforms.

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

#64
post #62

Haven't seen Chia mentioned in this thread and it was only briefly mentioned in the article — Proof of Space/Time seems to have the same security guarantees as Bitcoin without any of the electricity usage. It uses extra hard drive space but a recent report confirmed that a lot of that is using underutilized existing space, not space from new drives: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US47836321 Chia's on-chai…

> using underutilized existing space, not space from new drives

Chia is basically turning wasting electricity into wasting silicium (or whatever tapes/harddrives are made from). Because this "space" needs to be created as well. I don't really see how that is less wasteful in the long run.

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

#65
post #20

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…

This is actually quite fun to say out loud - "here is a revolutionary trustless system of currency, but you must trust a group of anonymous developers in the non-extradition offshore not to screw you with premine"

anonymous non-extradition seems like an irrelevant detail if node consensus is the entire extent of the contract

but the anonymous part does deter any social blowback

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

#66
post #40

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 you're looking at in in terms of transaction on the blockchain perhaps, but the reality is that a single transaction on the blockchain actually maps to many other transactions (for example, exchanges batch their outputs, so even though it appears as a single transaction, they could be paying hundreds of people at a time, likewise for lightning or other layers).

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

#67

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…

PoS is a pretty broken system imo, it essentially codefies "rich gets richer" into the protocol. The biggest holders now control both the supply on the exchanges and the protocol itself. It creates all kinds of weird issues (for example, what happens if an attacker gets a hold of a significant percentage of the coins, now they also have a great control over the network). Stakers don't have the same pressure to sell their coins because they are not actively spending money on hardware and energy which makes the system more exclusionary over time.

I can go on and on. For all of it's problems, PoW is simple and just works. It ensures that there will be constant supply of coins for sale and ensures that nobody can just become richer because they started rich.

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

#68
post #64
post #62

Haven't seen Chia mentioned in this thread and it was only briefly mentioned in the article — Proof of Space/Time seems to have the same security guarantees as Bitcoin without any of the electricity usage. It uses extra hard drive space but a recent report confirmed that a lot of that is using underutilized existing space, not space from new drives: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US47836321 Chia's on-chai…

> using underutilized existing space, not space from new drives Chia is basically turning wasting electricity into wasting silicium (or whatever tapes/harddrives are made from). Because this "space" needs to be created as well. I don't really see how that is less wasteful in the long run.

Well I mean the market for hard drives is already over 1 zettabyte a year so it seems a little ridiculous to make that comparison without taking into context the whole picture. Although yes, you're right, some resource needs to be consumed for any blockchain or database to work — in this case it's storage space (not necessarily hard drives).

To my mind, Chia puts existing underutilized space to work so it's not really wasting anything. The data seems to support that conclusion in the report I linked.

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

#69
post #20

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…

This is actually quite fun to say out loud - "here is a revolutionary trustless system of currency, but you must trust a group of anonymous developers in the non-extradition offshore not to screw you with premine"

"here is a revolutionary trustless system of currency, but you must trust a group of anonymous developers in the non-extradition offshore not to screw you with premine" and trust them to make immutable smart contracts 100% bug free to prevent scandals like DAO onwards, and trust shady mining cartels, and unregulated exchanges, and the shadowy cryptocurrency oligarchs manipulating prices, etc.

The fact is that this "revolutionary new financial system" doesn't remove trust - it just shifts trust to the less trustworthy.

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

#70

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…

PoS is a pretty broken system imo, it essentially codefies "rich gets richer" into the protocol. The biggest holders now control both the supply on the exchanges and the protocol itself. It creates all kinds of weird issues (for example, what happens if an attacker gets a hold of a significant percentage of the coins, now they also have a great control over the network). Stakers don't have the same pressure to sell t…

> nobody can just become richer because they started rich

Right. In PoW, they need access to limited semiconductor supplies and cheap electricity. Which are two things that can be bought with...what was that stuff called...? Ah, yes: money! So PoW does just the same - the rich tend to get richer - but it adds the necessity to cause unnecessary environmental pollution on the scale of an entire country to it. Oh, and all the crypto holders pay collectively for that unnecessary "work". What a stroke of genius!

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