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Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need to Be Energy Intensive

spectrum.ieee.org

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

#251

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]

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

#252

Post by skybrian »

kerkeslager wrote: post #238
skybrian wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough. But looking at the longest chain you have (from the two nodes you can connect to) and assuming it's valid is not sufficient. You also need some reason to believe there isn't a longer chain out there. (In practice this is by waiting for a certain number of "confirmations.")

Maybe that's assumed in "simply look at the longer chain" but I thought I'd point it out.

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

#253

Post by atweiden »

redisman wrote: post #162
erdos4d wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only because crypto is still a curiosity. Once a coin gains enough mass adoption to actually function as digital cash by normal people, it will leave Bitcoin in the dust. My bet is on Monero for that, but whether I am right or not, I'm 100% certain that coin won't be Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is like the digital gold. We can all agree on that. I don’t understand why the maxis can’t be happy with that and have to sully any other competitor in the space that are actually trying to be a currency or dozens of other potentially useful things. Bitcoin is obviously not good for small and fast transactions for example. Designing a new blockchain that is good at that is innovation. Not a “shitcoin”.

Unfortunately, there’s really no way for anyone to ever accuse any cryptocurrency of being superfluous without its investors feeling personally attacked on some level. This frequently causes them to lash out.

Also unfortunate is the fact many internet users take silence as evidence of consent, and so just doing the obvious thing here — not having this conversation at all — would actively promote ignorance (see: “Bitcoin is obviously not good for small and fast transactions”).

> Designing a new blockchain that is good at that is innovation. Not a “shitcoin”.

Blockchains don’t create efficiencies: if not for decentralization and censorship resistance, which inherently come at a higher cost than centralization, there would be little point in the technology at all. A plain immutable database with cryptographic proofs of inclusion — e.g. ImmuDB — hosted by a trusted org would perform orders of magnitude better than a blockchain at the very same tasks.

As most people can plainly see, what passes for “innovation” in the blockchain space is often a solution in search of a problem, launched first and foremost as a courtship display to HNWIs, socially signaling for them to invest in the cryptocurrency at hand under the guise of it being “innovative”. Ethereum 2.0’s newly introduced “RocketPool” (RPL) token [1] is an unwitting quintessential example of this:

    So if insurance isn't the real reason, then why do node operators
    need to buy an additional 10% in RPL ($5,600 at current prices)? The
    only logical answer is to force buying pressure and pump the token.

    Adding a token means the protocol is now more likely to contain bugs,
    audits are more difficult, users are confused, and taxes become
    a nightmare.

    I hope greed isn't the real driving force behind the RPL token,
    but that's the only conclusion I can draw. They increased smart
    contract risk for a payday, and it's possible the entire Ethereum
    ecosystem will pay for it.
“Gee, do we really need this new token and blockchain?”

“Couldn’t there be other ways of doing this which aren’t obviously designed to enrich the founders?”

Put simply, launching a superfluous blockchain and token is just poor etiquette, and the people who point out this dynamic don’t deserve to be dismissed with endearing terms.

Bitcoiners have nothing against defi, it’s just a question of whether a new token or blockchain is needed to do the things these people purportedly want to do for the world, or whether the new token/blockchain is really just a pretense for self-enrichment.

HTH

See also: Nomic [2], SmartBCH, or Stacks

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/ncqqu2/rocketpoo...

[2]: https://nomic.io/

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

#254

Post by 22c »

atweiden wrote: post #232
shawnz wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are more effective ways to make money in PoS networks than staking.

Staking is not all that profitable, really. The rich get richer at a rate which is comparable to a Vanguard ETF but the price volatility is much higher than a Vanguard ETF.

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

#255

Post by 22c »

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…

> button-clicking and datacenter-construction

Which of these two scenarios seems to favour the rich, in your mind?

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

#256

Post by atweiden »

22c wrote: post #255
atweiden wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> button-clicking and datacenter-construction Which of these two scenarios seems to favour the rich, in your mind?

Running a proof-of-work mining business isn’t risk-free: being wealthy alone is no guarantee of success. Conversely, with button clicking for autoyield, success is all but guaranteed.

There’s really no comparison. Running a business with high fixed and variable costs, and considerable competition is far more difficult to pull off successfully than a passive investment. Which one do you think favours a “gilded elite” more?

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

#257

Post by billytetrud »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #209
billytetrud wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

Well, generally a 51% attack doesn't requier expending cost as much as it requires accumulating capital. With PoW, that capital is mining hardware. With PoS, that capital is the currency itself. In both PoW and PoS, a double spend could be done in a way that doesn't "cost" the attacker anything. But it does require accumulating so much capital that its hopefully extremely unlikely that any one person or group (even a government) could accumulate that much. An attack would generally substantially decrease the value of the capital accumulated (again, mining hardware or coins) and so there is a cost there. But it isn't the kind of thing where you can say "1 attack costs X dollars and 2 attacks costs 2X dollars", so the value of a particular double spend isn't really that relevant.

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

#258

Post by billytetrud »

jude- wrote: post #228
billytetrud wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Again, that's simply not true. Let's go through the hypothetical attack:

1. The attacker accumulates some coin then spends it / sells it. 2. The attacker starts building a chain using their old keys 3. The attacker presents this chain to a new entrant that they've eclipsed 4. The attacker buys something from the eclipsed victim

Any self respecting PoS protocol would have long cooldowns that would force step 1 and step 2 to be pretty far apart (on the order of months). In step 3, a fake chain would not fool new entrants because the new chain would be growing at a much slower rate than expected (because only the attacker is building on top of it). So there's two reasons that the attack wouldn't work here.

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

#259

Post by billytetrud »

kerkeslager wrote: post #243
billytetrud wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The fork starts from before the unstaking transaction.

So what? The fork wouldn't be built on by anyone but the attacker. Any new entrant would have software that expects a blockchain being built substantially faster (or with substantially higher difficulty).

> you wouldn't have to reason it out if you had read the paper I linked.

I have read Peolstra's "pos.pdf" that PoS detractors incessently reference multiple times. The paper's conclusion is not correct. All the problems he presents are solvable at once (eg in this protocol: https://github.com/fresheneesz/validatedProofOfStake). He doesn't consider that hard coded checkpoints handily solve the problem of long-range revisions.

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

#260

Post by billytetrud »

kerkeslager wrote: post #235
billytetrud wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> What "window of opportunity"?

The window of opportunity to use your old keys (with old coins) to create a malicious chain.

> 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.

If the attacker is building their own chain, no one else will be building on top of it. Anyone will see that the chain has very few coins actively minting and will be immediately suspect, even if they're eclipsed. If they're not eclipsed, they'll go with the honest chain, which would be clearly longer unless this was a 51% attack situation.

>I would discourage you from responding on this topic

If you're going to be rude, I'm just going to ignore you. Its pretty insulting to tell me that. I've written two different consensus protocols, and analysed the security properties of many more. I very much doubt you've put anywhere near as much work into understanding the attacks and solutions around consensus protocols. So please don't be pompous.

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