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

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

#231

Post by atweiden » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #170

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.

That isn't a counter argument to the rich get richer. POW is still a race to the bottom that favors the well funded.

What commercial activity doesn’t “favor the well-funded”? That’s a rather moot point, wouldn’t you say?

Staking coins just means clicking a button and receiving a financial yield proportionate to your initial investment. Simply showing up with money on day one is enough to earn money on your money.

People financially invested in staking frequently pretend like button-clicking auto-yield is the exact same thing as A) procuring powerful computers which rapidly become obsolete year after year, and B) paying for electricity and hosting facilities for those computers over a long period of time. But the difference between the two scenarios is night and day, and no amount of waxing poetic over “commerce favoring the well-funded” will change that fact.

To act as if staking has exactly the same economic properties as mining is false equivalence.

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

#232

Post by atweiden » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #94

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.

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

Are you implying you can’t get liquidity from staked coins? This can be worked around by posting your stake as collateral.

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

#233

Post by kerkeslager » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

Kbelicius wrote: post #224

kerkeslager wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 balanc…

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

Just because a whitepaper says something doesn't mean it's has held up to peer review.

> 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."

Consumed coin age is not provable by looking at the chain--it's only provable by polling the network for consensus.

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

I mean, looking at it it seems you didn't read the first paper I linked, or indeed much of the literature on proof of stake which has been written in the last 9 years.

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

#234

Post by rawtxapp » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #170

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.

That isn't a counter argument to the rich get richer. POW is still a race to the bottom that favors the well funded.

There's a difference between a billionaire generating yield on their money by investing and taking risks vs the Fed just sending them x% of freshly printed money because they are already a billionnaire.

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

#235

Post by kerkeslager » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

billytetrud wrote: post #199

kerkeslager wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I can stake coins, unstake them, and then spend the coins. Now I've got a free license to mine blocks without risk of slashing Except you won't because you'll have to wait so long to be able to use the old coins that you'll miss the window of opportunity. Also, it doesn't matter because you need > 50% of the actively minting coins in order to succeed anyway. And if you had that, you don't need to worry about being…

> Except you won't because you'll have to wait so long to be able to use the old coins that you'll miss the window of opportunity.

What "window of opportunity"? Ostensibly these coins will remain valuable far into the future, and therefore the ability to spend them twice will also remain valuable.

> Also, it doesn't matter because you need > 50% of the actively minting coins in order to succeed anyway.

If you have the ability to mint blocks, you can use include signed transactions from the real chain to unstake and build majority on nodes you control.

I would discourage you from responding on this topic until you've read the first paper I linked, as you have not said anything that wasn't addressed in that paper.

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

#236

Post by atweiden » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #214

m3kw9 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Staking requires all those things too. Or you could pay a service to do it for you, but that applies to PoW mining as well.

Nothing against staking, but you and many other posters ITT are creating a blatant false equivalence between button-clicking and datacenter-construction. It’s not beyond the pale quite yet — we’ve all seen far worse from cryptocurrency promoters over the years — but you’re leaving open minded third parties little choice but to interject.

When’s the last time a billion dollar staking operation had to build multiple mining datacenters and fill them with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware? That’s just not required for staking. It just isn’t. They’re not equivalent operations. Not in any way. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

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

#237

Post by Kbelicius » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

jl2718 wrote: post #202

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that also what proof of work is? I mean, it is far easier for me, a non wealthy person, to stake some pos coin than to mine some bitcoin.

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

#238

Post by kerkeslager » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #185

kerkeslager wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you know you have the longest chain without having all the blocks? You need to reach consensus on which blocks exist, and you can't get that without talking to enough other nodes to be pretty sure you have enough blocks that a longer chain is unlikely. When there is a network split, nodes on one side of the split might think they have the longest chain and be wrong about it. Unless you know you have most of th…

Glad we've come to the conclusion that things I didn't say aren't true!

What I actually said is, "[I]f 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."

You're correct that this isn't a proof of consensus.

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

#239

Post by kerkeslager » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

billytetrud wrote: post #197

kerkeslager wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you're describing a very particular implementation of PoS. It's silly to say PoS doesn't work when what you really mean is that some badly designed PoS systems don't work. Slashing is a solution to a problem. It's honestly irrelevant if some PoS systems don't do slashing.

It's silly to respond to one particular claim in isolation, when I wrote a long post that addressed the limitations of slashing. Please don't respond to what I say out of context.

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

#240

Post by kerkeslager » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

dagss wrote: post #183

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…

Re 3), there is not anywhere near enough renewable energy to go around to phase out fossils is there? So make Bitcoin harmless you would have to postulate: - The energy could not have been transferred to reduce use of fossils - The energy could not have been stored to reduce use of fossils - Production of other, more necessary goods (batteries, aluminum, datacenters serving humanity in better ways) could not have bee…

Energy is not a fungible resource. Energy produced by hydroelectric plants in ghost cities in China is not useful for other purposes.

To be clear, I'm not saying that all or even the majority of energy used to mine cryptocurrency is currently renewable. I have no idea what the current state of things is. What I'm saying is that if we're looking to solve the problem of cryptocurrencies producing carbon and other emissions, using renewable energy is arguably just viable a solution as PoS, without some of the security problems that PoS has.

I do know that some Bitcoin mining operations are investing heavily in renewables, and given the cost of fossil fuels, I suspect that will give them a significant advantage in the long run.