Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by rawtxapp » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

humperdink wrote: post #84

rawtxapp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish there would be more debate about the equity of a cryptocurrency amongst the tech community. Why should the least well off in society be part of a crypto-coin whose supply has been given to early adopters and insiders? Ultimately the social compact of the economy you create will involve everyone, so we should design a coin that solves hard problems, not just narrowly defined ones that conveniently benefit a nar…

Bitcoin had by far the fairest distribution and the largest holder (Satoshi) hasn't touched his coins and for all practical purposes they are gone. You just can't replicate the same conditions which lead to it's existence today.

From what I've seen, the main purpose of like 90+% of altcoins is to benefit their developers and investors and they'll likely all die and disappear.

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

#112

Post by haakon » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #86

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…

Didn’t Satoshi premine a large number of coins?

No. Bitcoin was launched publicly and announced, and anybody could mine, even on the most dinky laptop. Nothing was mined prior to launch (aka a premine).

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

#113

Post by viraptor » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #93

Slartie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

> 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.

Why would we care about "advantage within the protocol" while ignoring the whole world around it? A similar absurd description is: one person is holding $1B in their hands, another is holding $1 - neither has more say about the money nor any advantage within the system as long as they don't spend it. It's true, but not very meaningful - we do things with money we own.

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

#114

Post by cryptica » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

erdos4d wrote: post #88

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.

This is only because crypto is still a curiosity. Once a coin gains enough mass adoption to actually function as digital cash by normal people, it will leave Bitcoin in the dust. My bet is on Monero for that, but whether I am right or not, I'm 100% certain that coin won't be Bitcoin.

I think this conclusion is correct. I can think of two reasons why no other token has been able to surpass Bitcoin:

- Network effects arising as a result of having many crypto markets which use BTC as the base currency. This gives BTC a lot of exposure on trading platforms. BTC is therefore a gateway to the crypto ecosystem; kind of like a reserve currency.

- Most big mainstream investors don't have any interest in advancing the field. Their main concern is preventing crypto from disrupting their existing corporate interests. They will buy a majority stake in a crypto and then encourage founders to waste time and resources... They want to create jobs to keep developers busy on useless activities; that way these developers are not competing with corporate interests. Also, because all these wasteful crypto projects occupy all the top rankings on coinmarketcap and occupy most investors' trading screens, it prevents smaller, more promising projects from getting any attention so it prevents the crypto industry from becoming disruptive. (Though at best this will probably only delay things by a decade or so until new exchanges start launching and start listing different non-mainstream tokens).

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

#115

Post by bitcurious » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

317070 wrote: post #64

Glench wrote: 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.

> Chia is basically turning wasting electricity into wasting silicium (or whatever tapes/harddrives are made from).

That depends on the price of chia. The economics as intended by the chia team are that buying hdd just to farm chia isn’t profitable - only using spare capacity is. We’re already pretty close to that point, with the breakeven on new hdd purchases being about 1 year assuming no further network growth, which of course is a bad assumption.

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

#116

Post by username90 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #106

fleddr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With PoW, you do nothing except maintain your mining hardware and burn electricity. With PoS, you do nothing except maintain your staking hardware and burn the time value of the money you are staking. From that perspective there is no difference. The difference is that with PoW, the richest participants can afford the most efficient hardware, giving them a super-linear advantage. In PoS, it's still true that the "ric…

Mining coins is a risky business, you can very easily lose money there. Proof of stake isn't, you have codified it into the inner workings of the coin that the rich gets richer. Not through interest or banking or investment returns, its just the fundamental law that the rich get richer. That is a significant difference.

It is like, imagine if USA had written in the constitution that the rich should get richer? Would you defend that move by saying "Well, the rich gets better investments anyway so this wont make a difference!".

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

#117

Post by fleddr » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #106

fleddr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With PoW, you do nothing except maintain your mining hardware and burn electricity. With PoS, you do nothing except maintain your staking hardware and burn the time value of the money you are staking. From that perspective there is no difference. The difference is that with PoW, the richest participants can afford the most efficient hardware, giving them a super-linear advantage. In PoS, it's still true that the "ric…

Are you serious? You equate running a complicated, deeply competitive business with highly variable yields (can even be negative) with just parking money, and call both "doing nothing"?

If you reason like that, I suppose in your world fireworks is the same thing as a rocket bringing us to Mars?

Is running Amazon and making a profit the same thing as just milking interest from a bank account?

These differences aren't trivial, they are massive. In a PoW world, most rich people don't mine, they just hold the crypto. In a PoS world, said rich people auto-mine by just holding crypto.

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

#118

Post by bitcurious » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #99

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 t…

> 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.

You don’t need to own tokens to have control over them, you just need to offer staking as a feature. See Coinbase.

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

#119

Post by haakon » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

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.

If you don't mind a completely centralised cryptocurrency, https://solarcoin.org distributes coins based on how much solar energy you produce.

That's great, but doesn't really compete with Bitcoin and others, which aim for censorship-resistance through decentralisation.

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

#120

Post by Proven » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

humperdink wrote: post #84

rawtxapp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish there would be more debate about the equity of a cryptocurrency amongst the tech community. Why should the least well off in society be part of a crypto-coin whose supply has been given to early adopters and insiders? Ultimately the social compact of the economy you create will involve everyone, so we should design a coin that solves hard problems, not just narrowly defined ones that conveniently benefit a nar…

> Why should the least well off in society be part of a crypto-coin whose supply has been given to early adopters and insiders?

First, it wasn't given, it was largely earned or purchased at market price (in the cases of PoW, Proof of Burn, and ICO, for example). Second, they don't have to be, they chose to be (or not).

> I wish there would be more debate about the equity of a cryptocurrency amongst the tech community.

There's equity of opportunity, as in any free market.

There's no need to discuss this at all, IMO.

How come noone feels strongly about fiat money given to Wall Street, or deficitary budget spending that benefits any particular group(s)? They haven't even created anything, and they benefit from it every year by stealing from others.

That is 100 times worse because it's outright theft and taxpayers, savers and holders of the currency have no choice but to participate. And you want to debate forced crypto-giveaways, or how to replicate this corruption to the world of cryptocurrencies. Unbelievable.