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Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

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

#221

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

x4e wrote: post #42
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…

> Proof of Work on the other hand doesn't have this issue. The creator has the same ability to mine coins as anyone else does, so it doesn't have the same initial trust issues as Proof of Stake does. It certainly does. Many POW coins are kept private for a small amount of time so that the developers can mine without competition before making the network public.

That's not a proof of work issue - that's a people issue, and its auditable.

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

#223

Post by nootropicat »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #219
nootropicat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW empirically isn't secure. Attacks already happened, most notably on ethereum classic. If it was possible to rent enough hashpower all PoW blockchains would already be attacked because daily mining rewards are trivial compared to potential gains. The actual security relies on obfuscated proof of stake - how hard it is to attain enough mining hardware. Even so, attacking bitcoin is relatively cheap - even starting…

You are myopic in your comparison. "Most of the stake isn't for sale." Well if we are fantasizing about huge pools of capital shelling out the money necessary to get enough mining equipment for a majority hash rate, there is no reason the same pool of capital can't purchase stake at a premium. Do you think every holder is going avoid selling out to a high premium due to loyalty for the underlying protocl? No, especia…

>Well if we are fantasizing about huge pools of capital shelling out the money necessary to get enough mining equipment for a majority hash rate, there is no reason the same pool of capital can't purchase stake at a premium

There simply isn't enough for sale. Premium - premium to what? Try to buy 10M eth after mining is gone and price is going to increase several times. Staked amount is constantly increasing and eventually I expect most of eth's supply to be staked.

Even if an attacker somehow acquires enough stake, everyone else can simply fork them out. That's not really possible in PoW - a fork from an asic PoW to a gpu PoW is possible, but it would start with negligible security, and most likely the attacker would secure enough gpus before the (asic) attack to kill the fork. Nothing can be done after a gpu/cpu PoW chain is controlled by a censoring attacker.

>rational actors will sell to the highest bidder, who may be anonymous

Unlike bitcoin, staked eth generates yield, so the principal doesn't have to be sold - ever.

>Bitcoin's value will increase when mining is more decentralized (which is heuristically determinable enough to take the risk), which will increase mining decentralization.

Not sure what was the intention of this sentence - that as bitcoin goes up, mining decentralizes? In any case, mining has infinite economies of scale so it always centralizes. The recent China ban accelerated the process, most likely in the much more dangerous direction - with majority of mining to be done in America or under American control. So far, only America sanctioned crypto addresses, and there are already some American miners that explicitly enforce them.

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

#224

Post by Kbelicius »

kerkeslager wrote: post #166
bouncycastle wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are a bunch of ways in which you're not exactly correct here. First, you're describing a very particular implementation of PoS. Not all PoS implementations include slashing. This isn't a mere technicality: the most popular implementation of PoS (as measured by market cap) is Cardano's and it doesn't include slashing. And not all PoS implementations involve randomly choosing a validator. The bigger problem here…

> The bigger problem here is that proof of stake is actually a misnomer because doesn't actually provide proof, period--it's a consensus algorithm, not a proof algorithm.

From peercoin (first pos coin) whitepaper: "Roughly speaking, proof-of-stake means a form of proof of ownership of the currency."

> But if you're only connected to two nodes and those two nodes are showing you two different spends of the same balance, you have no way to resolve that conflict. In PoW (a real proof algorithm) you simply look at the longer chain.

From the same whitepaper: "The protocol for determining which competing block chain wins as main chain has been switched over to use consumed coin age. Here every transaction in a block contributes its consumed coin age to the score of the block. The block chain with highest total consumed coin age is chosen as main chain."

I mean, looking at it it seems that your main complaints were actually addressed some 9 years ago in the first PoS whitepaper.

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

#225

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by ballofrubber »

Slartie wrote: post #178
kerkeslager wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-s…

The second point is objectively wrong. PoW needs participants to spend capital in order to keep the organization running, thus not the rich get richer, but the more efficient get richer. PoS participants have no sell pressure and no way of being "better" than their peers, which is why it is incredibly broken.

In a PoW system you have fierce competition and the drive to the cheapest energy. Which today is stranded energy, that the market would never buy.

It is hard to estimate what percentage is truly renewable. The biggest source of energy was hydroelectric. It is estimated that during rain season the renewable percentage is up to 70%. However even if you look at the lowest estimate of renewable energy (~25%) you get double the percentage of the best country.

Bitcoin is the true solution to monetizing cheap energy production. It removes a large risk associated with investing in renewables as the network is a buyer of last resort. Thus you know that your energy always sees 100% usage (which is a big problem with grids today)

Just a small thought experiment. Lets assume you want to build a charging station for EVs powered by your own solar farm at a somewhat remote location. 4 hours of the day you have a peak consumption of 100 units, the rest you only have 80 units consumption. Moving energy over large distances is incredibly expensive. Having a buyer for your energy (Bitcoin network) means that the investment carries a lot less risk.

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

#227

Post by sprafa »

rawtxapp wrote: post #63
sprafa wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin will eventually fade away, since the only significant thing that's actually happening in crypto space is actually smart contracts, and BTC will never implement that. In 10 years it it will be a historical curiosity. Also - shitcoins? So DOT, ALGO are shitcoins? You seem out of the loop.

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.

found the bitcoin maxi.

It's amazing how all the "smart" people here in HN are consistently wrong on blockchain, and even the ones who are attuned to it are usually involved in BTC and defend it hysterically.

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

#228

Post by jude- »

billytetrud wrote: post #196
kerkeslager wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two solutions you're proposing, each of which has problems: 1. You're introducing a requirement that all parties who wish to participate in the network must have diverse connections to the network. In practice many nodes do not meet this requirement. If a new node connects to only a few nodes, those nodes may return conflicting chains. With PoW, a longer chain has significantly more computational effort beh…

> transfer my coins to another address, and then use my original, "trusted" address to validate a chain of blocks Any new entrant would be able to clearly see the transaction on one of the chains and from that can determine that the chain not containing that transaction but instead using that output to mint blocks is the cheating block chain. Your attack wouldn't work.

An attacker only needs to fool the network for a short amount of time -- e.g. to double-spend someone. It doesn't matter to the attacker that they are eventually discovered; what matters is that they can get away with it before getting caught.

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

#229

Post by kerkeslager »

Slartie wrote: post #178
kerkeslager wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-s…

1. People are more likely to recognize they're wrong if you don't also call them crazy.

2. Uh, okay.

3. You've significantly adjusted your statement from "it adds the necessity to cause unnecessary environmental pollution", which remains incorrect.

> (please provide proof for your statement regarding just "how much" mining is renewable-based)

I don't need to provide proof for things I didn't say.

Keep in mind that proof of stake as a trustless consensus mechanism is largely hypothetical at this point. All the major "live" implementations (Polkadot, Cardano, Tezos) have large numbers of trusted validators.

We agree that carbon emissions and other pollution are a problem. What we don't agree on is the solution to that problem.

> [R]enewable 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.

Wrong. The energy that's cheap enough to make mining profitable is cheap because nobody else wants it. In extreme cases, electricity produced in ghost cities in China will literally be dumped into the ground if it's not used by miners. It takes very little competition from consumers to make mining unprofitable.

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

#230

Post by kerkeslager »

billytetrud wrote: post #193
kerkeslager wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two solutions you're proposing, each of which has problems: 1. You're introducing a requirement that all parties who wish to participate in the network must have diverse connections to the network. In practice many nodes do not meet this requirement. If a new node connects to only a few nodes, those nodes may return conflicting chains. With PoW, a longer chain has significantly more computational effort beh…

> On PoS, there's no such limitation There is no significant computational effort needed, but it is incorrect to say that PoS protocols do not limit the number of blocks that can be created. Most PoS systems do in fact have such a limitation.

Not one that can be verified by looking at the chain.

I encourage you to read the first paper I linked, instead of continuing to respond to parts of my posts out of context.

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