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

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

#171

Post by dolmen » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

xwolfi wrote: post #144

aazaa wrote: post #107

> The granddaddy of all consensus mechanisms—behind Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, and (for the time being at least) Ethereum—is called proof of work. Essentially, PoW makes adding transactions to the blockchain computationally—and therefore financially—very expensive, so as to discourage fraudulent activity. ... This passage reflects a deep-seated, widespread misunderstanding of how/why Bitcoin works. I suspect the auth…

What I fail to understand, and thanks to your explanation, is why not use a central trusted ledger which would synchronize all transactions. It could surely work at the current speed of bitcoin and relieve the entire planet of the energy cost of bitcoin, providing the same safety that no double spend could happen. All you'd need is a small private army, a few lawyers, an historically accepted jurisdiction, and you'd…

You mean like... paying using a card number (VISA, Mastercard, Amex) on the Internet?

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

#172

Post by runeks » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #124

bitcurious wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This actually helps with decentralization since there are usually multiple exchanges and it's very rare for 1 exchange to hold more than 10% of all tokens.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but what’s the source of that estimate?

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

#173

Post by kerkeslager » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:33 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…

1. Including sarcasm in your post didn't achieve anything except to increase the reader's blood pressure and make people like you less. Let's keep this polite, please.

2. You're right that the rich get richer with PoW as well, but I think we can agree that the connection between existing wealth and increasing wealth is stronger with PoS--PoS is almost literally just a statement of "the rich get richer".

3. The "it adds the necessity to cause unnecessary environmental pollution" argument is simply incorrect. Much of existing mining is already done with renewable energy--it's the most cost-effective way to mine anyway in most cases.

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

#174

Post by teawrecks » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

admax88q wrote: post #158

aazaa wrote: post #107

> The granddaddy of all consensus mechanisms—behind Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, and (for the time being at least) Ethereum—is called proof of work. Essentially, PoW makes adding transactions to the blockchain computationally—and therefore financially—very expensive, so as to discourage fraudulent activity. ... This passage reflects a deep-seated, widespread misunderstanding of how/why Bitcoin works. I suspect the auth…

I would consider a double spend transaction to be invalid.

I agree. It seems to me that pow is specifically designed to make adding new transactions to the blockchains take a certain amount of time. If anyone could add to the blockchain instantaneously, imagine the same account being used to spend money on both sides of the earth at the same "time". Afaik general relativity says it would be virtually impossible to tell which one happened "first" in a decentralized way. So by slowing everything down, we force there to be a window for transactions to propagate.

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

#175

Post by biztos » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

bouncycastle wrote: post #140

aazaa wrote: post #107

> The granddaddy of all consensus mechanisms—behind Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, and (for the time being at least) Ethereum—is called proof of work. Essentially, PoW makes adding transactions to the blockchain computationally—and therefore financially—very expensive, so as to discourage fraudulent activity. ... This passage reflects a deep-seated, widespread misunderstanding of how/why Bitcoin works. I suspect the auth…

PoW is not the only way to solve double spending (and make sure that the blocks are ordered in a particular timeline), in PoS it is solved by randomly choosing which validator will create the next block according to an algorithm that all the nodes follow. So there's no race to find the next block, the block producer is known in advance. What's more, in PoS, you have guaranteed finality, meaning that after a certain a…

What if an attacker’s goal is to see another validator get slashed?

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

#176

Post by kevinak » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

Sargos wrote: post #164

rawtxapp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of those are custodial solutions which defeats the purpose of blockchains.

RGB isn't custodial at all.

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

#177

Post by ItsMonkk » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #141

dboreham wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to describe this is that PoW is a Cybil resistance measure.

Although just saying that doesn't really tell anyone much, who doesn't already know. A Sybil attack is the creation of a bunch of identities to subvert a system that is attempting to distribute power amongst a bunch of participants. The Sybil resistance of these schemes comes from allocating power in proportion to some form of commitment of a scarce resource, which could be indigenous to the system (e.g. proof of sta…

Exactly. The current techniques to Sybil resistance directly leads to plutocracy because of economies of scale.

I think the solution is fees based on transaction expediency. If I want a transaction to go through for the minimum possible fee I could schedule it for a year in advance. In one years time, the money would be available. If I wanted it sooner, say instantly, that transaction would cost say, 1x. So if it was a $100 transaction, the fee would be $100. Maybe 1 day is 0.1x, 1 week is 0.01x and 1 month is .001x.

If you want the best odds of double spending and choose to pick instantly, the fee is equivalent to the transaction, so you don't actually end up gaining anything.

Smart merchants will start essentially doing futures. I am going to need corn in one year, I setup the deal today, when it goes onto the chain I transact my corn.

Better still, we can use these fees to add to the supply. The only reason that a transaction would go through with a fee is if the profit of the transaction from both sides was above 0, so we can directly track a portion of the surplus of our currency.

We can calculate how much security we need based on the available currency at a certain time, and mostly the miners only earn enough of the fees such that we can ensure that we won't be harmed by a malicious attacker who does not care that they aren't getting anything. So the difficulty is based not on mining power, but on exploitability.

So what do we do with the rest of the fees including the new coins generated through those fees? We give them to people who have actively locked up coins as we want to encourage people locking up their coins, as the more they have locked up, the less risk there is that a double spend can occur. So that means if you know that you will not transact your coins for one year, you will transact with yourself and lock in, and essentially you get yourself a CD.

This is all super preliminary, and I am looking for problems with this setup, but it seems to work.

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

#178

Post by Slartie » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #173

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…

1. Including sarcasm in your post didn't achieve anything except to increase the reader's blood pressure and make people like you less. Let's keep this polite, please. 2. You're right that the rich get richer with PoW as well, but I think we can agree that the connection between existing wealth and increasing wealth is stronger with PoS--PoS is almost literally just a statement of "the rich get richer". 3. The "it ad…

1. It helps get the point across just _how crazy_ this is. Sarcasm isn't only a tool to personally attack people - it's also a tool to verbally emphasize objectively valid arguments.

2. That's the beauty of it! We arrive at the same result, but just skip the part where people need to buy tons of custom silicon that can't do anything other than burn energy for mining, and then burn energy. That part has a lot of not-so-nice side effects on the real world out there, from silicon shortage to environmental pollution.

3. It is entirely correct. Even if some mining in some places is done with renewable energy (which is far from the majority - otherwise: please provide proof for your statement regarding just "how much" mining is renewable-based), that renewable energy is removed from the market and thus can't be used to power other consumers, which then must use fossil-fuel based energy sources. It's not like there's not enough demand for energy in the world, especially of the renewable kind.

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

#179

Post by lvs » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

Proof of capacity, as they call it here, is the same as proof of work for all practical purposes until the network size stabilizes. Plotting space is energy intensive, and a miner must continuously plot to maintain the value of its existing plots as the network grows. If the network size stabilizes or shrinks, then it becomes more efficient than PoW, but in any growth phase it's the same.

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

#180

Post by danbruc » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

aazaa wrote: post #107

> The granddaddy of all consensus mechanisms—behind Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, and (for the time being at least) Ethereum—is called proof of work. Essentially, PoW makes adding transactions to the blockchain computationally—and therefore financially—very expensive, so as to discourage fraudulent activity. ... This passage reflects a deep-seated, widespread misunderstanding of how/why Bitcoin works. I suspect the auth…

Yes and no. Yes, proof of works prevents double spending or more generally establishes consensus on which transaction become accepted. But no, this could be achieved with many different consensus protocol and does in general not require any irrecoverable loss. Just issue a key pair to each human and make them send signed votes to establish consensus by simple majority.

The true reason something like proof of work is required is because the system is also anonymous and distributed where being anonymous is the more critical aspect. Because of that you can not know who is out there and can cast a vote. Are this votes from a million legitimate users or did one user just send a million votes? The solution to prevent users from casting arbitrary many votes is then to make it hard for them to cast a vote, you make them for example waste a lot of clock cycles for each vote.

But, as I said, not because this is inherently a requirement but because you want to establish consensus among members of an anonymous group of unknown size and them wasting a certain number of clock cycles is a rough proxy for everyone gets one vote assuming that everyone has very roughly access to the same amount of computing power.