Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics • Hacker News Board

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#81

Post by nybble41 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

ordinaryradical wrote: post #74

meowface wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think most people (as in, core developers) just want whatever can actually be relied upon. If there were a silver bullet consensus algorithm that was decentralized and secure and also far less wasteful/plutocratic, everyone would probably switch to it. The idea that there's an easy, superior solution on the other side's grass and bad motives are just keeping people locked into a bad system is a convenient narra…

Nano/Raiblocks has been around for years, the original developer was also one of the first to work on Bitcoin, apparently, and the network has been live for some years and successfully transacting. I don’t think it’s a matter of the technology being unproven or unreliable. There was recently a 22 million dollar transaction that was both feeless and recorded to the network in It seems obvious though that to adopt the…

> Why go through the trouble of developing a photonic mining system if there’s already a viable alternative to PoW/PoS in the real world being used?

Nano has some interesting ideas but also some fairly obvious flaws, most notably the fact that there is no built-in economic incentive to run a Representative node and participate in the voting. Running a node is an expensive operation (in CPU time, memory, and bandwidth) and the protocol basically leaves this important function up to individual enthusiasm or goodwill. As a result there are a limited number of active voting nodes making decisions for the network.

The faucet-based initial distribution of Nano (XRB) is also arguably less egalitarian than Bitcoin's PoW-based mining rewards. If you weren't aware of Nano (RaiBlocks) while they were running the faucet then you had no chance to participate in that initial distribution. This is not quite as bad as full pre-mining where all the initial coins go to the developers and other may or may not be able to mine more later at a higher difficulty, but it seems likely that the developers and other early adopters would have received the majority of the output from the XRB faucet, which by design is all the XRB which will ever be produced.

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#82

Post by reginold » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #71

reginold wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate your thoughtful explanation and context. The shortcut on "whenever you see a headline about low energy PoW" is useful, I had been wondering about that. One thought - has there been anything on something like "Proof of Capability of Work"? ie "Yes, I have all this compute power potential, but I'm not using it". Oh shit did I just back into what you mean by VDF? Basically Proof of Sitting Around? I'm gonna h…

> Oh shit did I just back into... No, actually you didn't. > has there been anything on something like "Proof of Capability of Work"? ie "Yes, I have all this compute power potential, but I'm not using it". As far as I know, there has not. But I hope you are a physicist, because this idea is genius. The key role played by counterfactuals in quantum mechanical systems might make it technically possible to prove potent…

Hmm interesting! I'm a cat, not a physicist though.

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#83

Post by reginold » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

MinorTom wrote: post #70

reginold wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate your thoughtful explanation and context. The shortcut on "whenever you see a headline about low energy PoW" is useful, I had been wondering about that. One thought - has there been anything on something like "Proof of Capability of Work"? ie "Yes, I have all this compute power potential, but I'm not using it". Oh shit did I just back into what you mean by VDF? Basically Proof of Sitting Around? I'm gonna h…

> "Proof of Capability of Work" I'm not an expert on this, but: Practicality aside this is either still really wasteful (lot's of unused compute sitting around in some datacenter) or really susceptible to attacks (e.g. "proof of the capability to rent a lot of AWS servers for a few seconds - everybody can do that, and somebody will")

Wasteful: Unused compute sitting around in some datacenter is on the first order less wasteful than having it using tons of electricity to run a random puzzle. Less electricity usage. However, the second order effects may negate the effect i.e. miners instead buy up more units, which puts more pressure on manufacturing, which ends up using that extra electricity, and the energy waste is equal.

Attacks: that's exactly what you would need to build a tool for. You need to prove that you sit around, and not just promising to sit around. It's a tough problem! Proof of Not Work.

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#84

Post by acjohnson55 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 11:25 PM UTC

shanusmagnus wrote: post #47

ordinaryradical wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has already been implemented in at least one other crypto successfully. See: Nano (formerly Raiblocks). The crypto community, however, seems to have a very narrow focus on reproducing these plutocratic systems and incentives because everyone wants that power for themselves and wants to be first in whatever the Next Big Thing is. Crypto development as a whole seems to be hampered by these incentives and by an exc…

I don't think it's an excessive focus on BTC technology, so much as that BTC abstracts the core issues to their fundamental essence and forces the tradeoffs on those terms, without obfuscating them. For instance, POW is extremely clear: you make a sacrifice to create blocks / mint transactions. It's almost biblical -- the game theory doesn't work without the sacrifice, and sacrifice is, tautologically, a tradeoff of…

Bitcoin is not a pure or minimal system, contrary to the hype. There are all sorts of decisions built in to it that can be varied, and if the concept of a cryptocurrency does, in fact, have society altering promise, it's very worthwhile to have other technologies explore the space.

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#85

Post by sonoffett » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 1:36 AM UTC

sonoffett wrote: post #42

jlokier wrote: post #24

Heh. I worked on a type of photonic PoW in 2019 (but it wasn't silicon photonics). - It's faster and lower power for the hash rate. It's worth it. But not as fast and low power as hoped. - It's a great advantage for the early adopter who can mine that bit faster than everyone else for a short time. That was the motivation for the project. - Contrary to the title of the article, making hashing faster for less energy d…

As an aside, the algorand layer-1 chain uses VDFs to select a validating set per block, weighting member selection by how much crypto each account owns. They call it Pure Proof of Stake. It definitely reduces the energy consumption and increases network throughput, of course with trade offs. See: https://www.algorand.com/technology/research-innovation/rese...

I can't seem to edit my comment, but I'm mistaken. Algorand uses Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) and not VDFs at all.

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#86

Post by md2020 » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 10:50 PM UTC

smus wrote: post #57

casi18 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want to bring climate change under control then coordination and communication tools that cross national borders are necessary. That is what many of us working in crypto are focused on, you might not yet value it, but we do. How do we collectively, as a planet, decide what is acceptable usage of energy and what isn't? Who gets to use machines and who doesn't? And how do we do that in a way that isn't authoritar…

>Is it wrong to use my gpu playing video games all day, or is the moral panic only applying to certain uses of computers? Is it wrong for you to leave a warehouse full of computers idling to play a computer game? Yes. This is one of the more outrageous false equivalences I've seen. It stops being a moral panic when crypto consumes more electricity than the entire nation of Argentina.

“crypto consumes more electricity than country X” is such a tired and low-effort talking point. There are things more useless than crypto that consume more energy than certain countries.

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#87

Post by md2020 » Sat, Oct 02, 2021, 11:00 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #45

casi18 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we want to bring climate change under control then coordination and communication tools that cross national borders are necessary. That is what many of us working in crypto are focused on, you might not yet value it, but we do. How do we collectively, as a planet, decide what is acceptable usage of energy and what isn't? Who gets to use machines and who doesn't? And how do we do that in a way that isn't authoritar…

If every person on the planet were using their GPU to play a few hours every day, they would probably not reach the amount of energy used by the Bitcoin blockchain alone. All of the things you are citing require cooperation and discussion and democratic discourse. An algorithmically driven opaque protocol controlled by a handful of technocrats (the people developing the major clients and the ones running the major mi…

Another thing that was put in place for corporations with lobbying power and wealthy people is the current US monetary policy of quantitative easing to infinity. This makes the rich richer and decimates the purchasing power of those who have few assets (poor and/or working class), and the government which you seem to have so much trust in does this knowingly. Note that even outside of the US, this does matter, since the USD is the de facto global reserve currency.

Re: Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics

#88

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 3:59 AM UTC

md2020 wrote: post #87

tsimionescu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If every person on the planet were using their GPU to play a few hours every day, they would probably not reach the amount of energy used by the Bitcoin blockchain alone. All of the things you are citing require cooperation and discussion and democratic discourse. An algorithmically driven opaque protocol controlled by a handful of technocrats (the people developing the major clients and the ones running the major mi…

Another thing that was put in place for corporations with lobbying power and wealthy people is the current US monetary policy of quantitative easing to infinity. This makes the rich richer and decimates the purchasing power of those who have few assets (poor and/or working class), and the government which you seem to have so much trust in does this knowingly. Note that even outside of the US, this does matter, since…

I do not have that much trust in the government. However, the government, unlike corporations or algorithms, is the one thing I have some minute amount of democratic control over, corrupt though it is. Moving things like monetary policy away from corrupt government control directly into private hands, or moving it into completely inflexible algorithmic control (with the algorithm in turn controlled by private individuals) can only make things worse.

And note that, while QE is useful to the rich, it also permits things like giant infrastructure bills that help everyone. We've seen in Greece what can happen when money supply is constrained (in that case, by EU policy preventing one country from just printing euros), and it's definitely not the rich who lost. QE is being used to serve the rich not because it's inherently in their benefit, but because almost everything in our society is being used to help the rich.