Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

Post by hanniabu » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

aaronhayes wrote: post #28

simiones wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Don't Proof of Work coin issuers do the same? Even Satoshi has a pretty large amount of Bitcoin.

There were no pre-mined bitcoin distributed. Satoshi mined his coins in the early days but crucially anyone could participate and mine at the same time.

Post by FabHK » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

atweiden wrote: post #59

bhaak wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by rawtxapp » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

Slartie wrote: post #70

rawtxapp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Post by cableshaft » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

CryptoPunk wrote: post #9

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…

>>The problem with that is that it's never going to be in the interest of the miners to actually change to it. Miners have no way to stop a hard fork. That is entirely dependent on what client users and service providers run, and miners have no control over that. And Ethereum 2.0 has already launched its Phase 0 (first of three phases), on December 1st, 2020.

Post by 317070 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

Glench wrote: post #68

317070 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reall…