Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 301 posts

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

#241

Post by atweiden »

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.

Premine means coins were distributed prior to a public mining phase. If public mining was available, and no coins were distributed prior to that, the coin wasn’t premined.

Despite the definition of “premine” being extremely clear cut and objective, apologists for premined coins often liberally redefine and butcher the definition for financially-motivated, self-serving reasons: “See, Bitcoin is premined too. XYZ did nothing wrong.”

Just to understand how ridiculous this is, if we’re going to redefine premine to mean “any coin perceived to be unfairly distributed”, then we might as well not even use the word at all, because biased investors will use the term to describe every cryptocurrency they’re not invested in.

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

#242

Post by atweiden »

hanniabu wrote: post #72
aaronhayes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were no pre-mined bitcoin distributed. Satoshi mined his coins in the early days but crucially anyone could participate and mine at the same time.

Ninja mining is no different than premining

Ninja mining, cripple mining, and instamining are variants of post-launch infidelity. N.B. explicit, out-in-the-open premining can be considerably less of a faux pas, assuming it isn’t obscene.

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

#243

Post by kerkeslager »

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.

The unstaking transaction can be on both chains and it's irrelevant to the attack. What matters is that a history exists starting from a block validated by the cheating validator. The fork starts from before the unstaking transaction.

That's not a difficult thing to reason out, but you wouldn't have to reason it out if you had read the paper I linked.

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

atweiden wrote: post #236
shawnz wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by raedah »

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…

Decred solves this. In hybrid PoW/PoS, coin holders vote with their equity. Skin in the game provides the greatest incentive for proper decision making. Decred was started by Bitcoin developers early on when they saw that Bitcoin had a problem with governance and decision making. Bitcoin's consensus rules are set in stone. Decred has a measurable and defined process for consensus rule upgrades.

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

#246

Post by jude- »

nootropicat wrote: post #223
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 even…

Staking ETH isn't risk-free or hassle-free -- you have to keep a validator running and online, on pain of getting slashed. If you're not going to outsource your validators to $CLOUD_PROVIDER or $EXCHANGE (which you shouldn't, since why trust them?), then you have to be forever vigilant of your uptime.

This is painful enough that most people will happily outsource it while collecting yield. What will almost certainly happen is ETH holders will self-organize into a handful of large well-connected staking pools run by exchanges. Heaven forbid your exchange gets hacked or goes offline.

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

#247

Post by 317070 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #123
317070 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some resource needs to be consumed, but we have payment systems that are currently multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin or Chia, so that is kind of a baseline. (Think Visa or Mastercard) Secondly, Chia is a small coin, it did not make a dent in the global market yet. I can believe that so far nobody really bothered to invest in storage. However, imagine Chia would be as large as say Bitcoin, then…

> we have payment systems that are currently multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin or Chia, so that is kind of a baseline. (Think Visa or Mastercard) Credit cards offer none of the desirable properties found in many cyptocurrencies such as decentralization, privacy, security, full custody of funds... It makes little sense to compare the two, especially in terms of "efficiency".

It does. I am trading off decentralization, privacy, security, ... with (for Bitcoin) more than how much energy I would use in a year and CO2 I would use in a life, per transaction.

They do offer a comparable product, and you need to compare their upsides and downsides.

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

#248

Post by jude- »

runeks wrote: post #165
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…

> Such an attack is impossible in PoS, because unlike mining chips, acquiring enough staking tokens is simply impossible for sufficiently distributed coins - there isn't enough for sale and most owners are anonymous, making sanctions unenforceable. This is only true in the absence of software bugs. In the presence of buggy node software, a worm can spread through the network, compromising all the private staking keys…

You don't even need that. A buggy DeFi contract will happily give an attacker all its ETH.

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

#249

Post by Paradigma11 »

fleddr wrote: post #96
norswap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW also codifies "rich gets richer" - mining begets return on invested capital in exactly the same way that PoS does. In fact, arguably PoW is worse, because it has economies of scale that PoS does not have, so the rich truly do have an edge in PoW.

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 PoS you tap new coins but your share of the chain stays the same. The only thing happening is that you are not penalized by inflation. This is just a mechanism to incentives hodlers to participate in the security of the network by staking.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

atweiden wrote: post #231
jayd16 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN