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

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

#201

Post by m3kw9 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #132

fleddr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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"? No, what I am really saying is that PoW mining and PoS staking aren't so dramatically different in complexity like you are saying. They are actually both complicated businesses with variable yields. The only difference is that with PoW, the benchmar…

Staking takes a few clicks, mining require physical setup, maintenance, rent, buy, to me that’s orders of magnitude more steps than staking.

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

#202

Post by jl2718 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #186

danbruc wrote: post #45

The fundamental problem that needs to be solved is voting power allocation. You have a group of people that wants to use a cryptocurrency and you want to allow everyone to voice his opinion about what transaction are valid and should be recorded and which are not so that you can determine the consensus. Your first problem is to decide who gets to vote. Does everyone get to vote or do you have to participate in the sy…

Algorand solves this by using a verifiable random function, with the output weighted according to the user's stake. It's quite elegant. Paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/377

Which is ... proof of stake. Literally vote allocation by wealth.

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

#203

Post by sparkie » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #74

atweiden wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Premine”: previous to public mining , coins were distributed. Satoshi absolutely didn’t premine Bitcoin.

And yet, Satoshi has huge holdings just as if premined.

That's because the other 7+ billion were not smart enough to compete with him for nearly a year, despite it being made public at the time Satoshi began mining.

The "pre" in premine means "before," as in, they mine themselves the coins before they publicly release the knowledge required to begin mining. Satoshi didn't do this. There was no premining of bitcoin.

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

#204

Post by psychlops » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #130

psychlops wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless they ninja mine (pre-mine) like Satoshi did.... What proof would you offer of a premine by Satoshi?

It’s perhaps not technically a premine but practically it is. There’s a protection however - if any of those coins ever move Bitcoin will have a very interesting day.

The problem with labelling it a premine is that it is, intentionally or not, a loaded FUD term commonly used to describe scam coins and to enrich "founders".

Bitcoin was not premined in any sense of the word and Satoshi was quite verbose and open about his reasoning and launch date as well as supplying working mining code publicly.

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

#205

Post by Geee » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 6:04 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…

If the central trusted ledger starts censoring transactions, blocking users or producing invalid blocks with additional rewards to themselves, then what? Just keep going with it and accept the new reality? Then we would be back at what we have now - the current central bank monetary system.

Trustless decentralized architecture makes the Bitcoin network incredibly robust against attacks on its principles. It can't be changed (without users/capital switching over to new version), stopped or censored by anyone.

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

#206

Post by dolmen » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #153

Technically, the consensus mechanism is the mining lottery, which is how transaction order is finalized, preventing double spends. The scheme for commitment of a scarce resource (e.g. PoW, PoS) is the Sybil resistance scheme, which is what makes lottery participation conform to some notion of fairness. You have to buy your lottery tickets.

Can you win at the BTC mining lottery with just one ticket? Is it worth mining with a slow machine?

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

#207

Post by cryptica » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #133

cryptica wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Much of the BTC as base currency isn’t actually BTC on the blockchain - but “BTC” held by the exchange and transferred between customers via a database and NOT on chain.

I'm a blockchain developer and I wrote a DEX from scratch so I know exactly how that works :)

It doesn't change the fundamentals.

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

#208

Post by cryptica » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

runeks wrote: post #172

cryptica wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm a blockchain developer. Worked on a top PoS blockchain for several years then launched 2 additional PoS blockchains since. I've also analyzed many other PoS blockchains over the years.

Exchange wallets improve the security of a PoS blockchain because these wallets are high-exposure and community can be confident that the different exchange wallets belong to different entities.

Because the ledger is public, existing big token holders can agree to HODL some % of their tokens if they are concerned that an attacker is trying to acquire 50% of all tokens. The main concern in PoS are 'sock puppets' - One person controlling multiple accounts pretending to be multiple different people (to evade detection). Because exchange wallets are well known, community can be confident that they are not sock puppets; this means that exchanges add some degree of security to the blockchain... In aggregate, those tokens are safe; it's extremely unlikely that all exchange wallets would be hacked at the same time (unless there is something wrong with the blockchain code).

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

#209

Post by catlifeonmars » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

billytetrud wrote: post #187

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…

> any scheme to replace proof-of-work needs to maintain that element of irrecoverable loss of value for a failed double spending attack. As others have said, this is not true. All that is required is that it is expensive to successfully double spend.

More expensive than the value of the 2nd spend (in terms of expected value)?

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

#210

Post by noxer » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 6:38 PM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #188

admax88q wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would consider a double spend transaction to be invalid.

Which one was the first spend and which one was the double-spend? You are talking about a distributed network where there is no universal time by which this can be measured. The blockchain is the solution to this problem. It provides an ordering which is to be universally agreed upon, because the only way to disagree with the ordering is to use >51% of the amount of electricity securing the network to state your disa…

> Which one was the first spend and which one was the double-spend?

The answer to that question is actually that it doesn't matter. Seems weird at first but if you think about it, no one who uses the system cares which one is "the first" the only thing people care about is that once one is picked it will not change later on aka finality. And for that a majority must agree on one. Which one again doesn't matter at all.

FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) "blockchains" make use of that. Each node signals which Tx it saw first but if no super-majority can be reached it simply switches to the Tx that has more votes. The sole purpose is to agree on one which makes the second Tx unfunded and thus fail.

Bitcoin and bitcoin-like system cant do this. They always have some kind of lottery that decides who writes the Tx. There is no agreement and thus no finality and that's the whole reason why double-spends can happen.