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

91–100 of 301 posts

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

#91

Post by ajkdhcb2 »

danbruc wrote: post #60
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 spa…

>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

Sure, but nobody has found a way to do that, nor has anybody found an alternative to PoW that doesn't have terrible security tradeoffs. It doesn't help to say something magical could have better properties - you need to find something that actually works in practice by satisfying all requirements

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

#92

Post by floydnoel »

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.

The absolute number of transactions is of little importance. Bitcoin moves around a billion+ dollars an hour. Ethereum is 1/10 of that. So Bitcoin is definitely #1 in terms of transacted value per day, which is the only important measure of adoption.

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

#93

Post by fleddr »

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…

No, they are far from the same. It's true that BTC mining is capital intensive, yet it is highly competitive and risky, and most miners get a decent profit, yet need to sell the vast majority of mined coins to run their operation. Miners can never move on some parabolic increase of wealth as the very protocol itself prevents this.

Rather, we should look at holders. Bitcoin is fair in the sense that it does not have rich get richer built in.

If I'm rich and own 1,000 BTC whilst some poor slum has 0.001 BTC, neither of us has an advantage within the protocol. The rich person does not get free extra coins just for owning lots, nor do they have any additional say anywhere within the protocol.

With PoS, just having lots of money means you get free new money, as well as an extra say in the protocol itself.

Further, you should speak of electricity consumption combined with the energy mix. Electricity consumption does not automatically translate into pollution.

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

#94

Post by shawnz »

rawtxapp wrote: post #77
norswap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW also codifies "rich gets richer" - mining begets return on invested capital in exactly the same way that PoS does. In fact, arguably PoW is worse, because it has economies of scale that PoS does not have, so the rich truly do have an edge in PoW.

A PoW miner has to spend to cover their costs, a staker doesn't have any cost to cover, providing a cryptographic signature requires no energy on an ongoing basis, just an initial investment. PoW requires constant investment or you'll be left behind.

PoS requires constant investment in terms of lost time value of money.

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

#95

Post by psychlops »

hanniabu wrote: post #75
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…

> Etherium 2.0 has been supposedly just around the corner for years and it never really arrives. They've been pretty public that it's years away for a while now. Nobody has ever said it's just around the corner until recently when it was given priority over the merge and is now estimated to be completed Q1 2022 (or Q4 2021 in the unlikely best-case scenario). > Proof of Work on the other hand doesn't have this issue.…

> Unless they ninja mine (pre-mine) like Satoshi did....

What proof would you offer of a premine by Satoshi?

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

#96

Post by fleddr »

norswap wrote: post #71
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…

PoW also codifies "rich gets richer" - mining begets return on invested capital in exactly the same way that PoS does. In fact, arguably PoW is worse, because it has economies of scale that PoS does not have, so the rich truly do have an edge in PoW.

It's exactly opposite.

When rich, with POS, you need to do nothing at all. No investment, no risk, no competition, you can just park your money and tap new money.

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

#97

Post by Glench »

317070 wrote: post #80
Glench wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some resource needs to be consumed, but we have payment systems that are currently multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin or Chia, so that is kind of a baseline. (Think Visa or Mastercard) Secondly, Chia is a small coin, it did not make a dent in the global market yet. I can believe that so far nobody really bothered to invest in storage. However, imagine Chia would be as large as say Bitcoin, then…

> Some resource needs to be consumed, but we have payment systems that are currently multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin or Chia, so that is kind of a baseline. (Think Visa or Mastercard)

Well yeah, but blockchains obviously offer different benefits/drawbacks than those platforms which is why they exist.

> Secondly, Chia is a small coin, it did not make a dent in the global market yet. I can believe that so far nobody really bothered to invest in storage.

There are currently 30 EiB of storage securing the network which is about 3% of the total storage market sold every year and a much higher percentage of the retail HDD market. Chia also has significantly more full nodes than Bitcoin. And it's only been out for a few months.

> it is arguably more damaging to the environment as there are more toxic chemicals involved in tape than in burning electricity.

Tape drives don't work with Chia. But you're speculating about an environmental impact that is already happening today with hard drives. Maybe you should send a letter to Google or your local politician about the environmental impact of their hard drives if you're actually concerned about that :)

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

#98

Post by shawnz »

danlugo92 wrote: post #83

https://endthefud.org/ There's a Proof of Stake section describing all of its shortcomings compared to Proof of Work. Plus a lot of bitcoin fud debunking.

Seems like a nicely researched collection of links, although I think they are a bit too quick to dismiss PoS as a lost cause. Perhaps PoW really is the superior system for now, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to research PoS systems.

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

#99

Post by cryptica »

Proof of Stake is superior to Proof of Work because with PoW, it's possible for someone to take over the network and tamper with the data if they control more than 50% of the mining power. The cost of buying new mining hardware grows linearly as you buy more of it. On the other hand, with PoS, an attacker would need to control more than 50% of tokens, the cost of acquiring tokens grows exponentially as you approach the 50% mark (it likely won't even come close) since bids drive the token price up.

PoS uses far less electricity than PoW, it's incomparable by orders of magnitude. A typical PoS network uses less electricity than a typical mid-size tech company... PoW uses the electricity of an entire country.

With PoS, if the initial distribution is done fairly without ill intent, then it tends to decentralize further by itself over time as early adopters cash out and newcomers buy in.

Finally, a lot of PoS projects are focused on interoperability, this means that they aim to grow into an ecosystem with multiple similar PoS tokens (with different use cases). It allows for free movement of value between different blockchains and they develop into a hierarchy connected via a network for exchanges and decentralized exchanges. There is no fairer, more decentralized system (logically, politically and architecturally) than a multi-token PoS ecosystem.

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

#100

Post by rawtxapp »

hanniabu wrote: post #75
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…

> Etherium 2.0 has been supposedly just around the corner for years and it never really arrives. They've been pretty public that it's years away for a while now. Nobody has ever said it's just around the corner until recently when it was given priority over the merge and is now estimated to be completed Q1 2022 (or Q4 2021 in the unlikely best-case scenario). > Proof of Work on the other hand doesn't have this issue.…

Satoshi mined it the same as anyone else and his stash is as good as gone for all practical purposes.
Post reply on HN