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

How Monero’s proof of work works

blog.alcazarsec.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 244 posts

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#161

Post by rschneid »

dgacmu wrote: post #154
fluffypony wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. That's not the reason we changed it. We just got tired of tweaking things to prevent ASICs. I'll add that there was such a large influx of miners at the outset, that (statistically) it seems any crippling of the original algorithm was fairly futile - the edge was both short-lived and minimally impactful. We're over a decade later, and nobody mining in the first month (even with that unfair advantage) was able t…

Sorry, I was not quite saying my fun was the reason, but that the failure to create something GPU/ASIC resilient was the more general underlying cause. But be careful about "proven" in that last sentence - the absence of a solution isn't exactly proof, it's more of a proof that _either_ it is possible to create an ASIC-resistant algo _or_ it has not been worthwhile to ASIC-ify it given the economics of mining XMR and…

It's a proof that something is possible to show one example.

In this case the claim was ASIC-resistant PoW is possible, and the proof has been the historical behavior of miners after years of RandomX. Nobody said it would be eternally or entirely resistant to optimizations...

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#162

Post by flotzam »

kerkeslager wrote: post #94
Synaesthesia wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy some other crypto like Litecoin then exchange it for Monero, there are quite a few exchanges around that do it anonymously.

...such as?

https://kycnot.me/?categories=aggregator

https://kycnot.me/?categories=exchange

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#164

Post by Eisenstein »

sowbug wrote: post #157
Eisenstein wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that something we want though? Why would it be beneficial to let money be used for anything without restrictions? Society has always relied on interdependence, not complete individual freedom. You have to make the case for it.

Respectfully, I disagree that anyone has to make the case for it. That's exactly what freedom is: if society fails to "make the case" for prohibiting something, it defaults to legal. There's no general law requiring people to be good people, or to have common sense, which would be the same as defaulting to illegal. I presume you wouldn't like that, or the surveillance state that would be required to enforce it.

Complete individual freedom as a concept is not a human right. There has never been a society oriented on it and it is not self evident why it would be beneficial for society as a whole to allow an individual to do whatever they like. If you want the benefits of a society, you must reciprocate; otherwise you can go live in the woods by yourself.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#165

Post by littlecranky67 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #77
littlecranky67 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which automatically makes in possibly centralized (you can never ever guarantee that not a single entity - or group of colluding entities - hold the majority stake and thus excert control).

The same is true for PoW, though. You can never guarantee that a single entity or a group of colluding entities will not gain control of most of 50+% of the compute power required. If the compute hardware is useful for other purposes than mining your particular coin, the risk is in fact greater - someone could build or buy up this compute power, destroy the currency, and then use the assets for other purposes, recoup…

There is some information on energy usage (production and consumption). There is not much information on crypto ownership besides private keys

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#166

Post by tromp »

boldlybold wrote: post #155
tomjen3 wrote: post #114

I had hoped this would describe a system that did not use very large amounts of power. Sadly it does.

How can you have proof of work without consuming large amounts of power?

By having a small daily dollar value (the column "PoW Produced (24h) in [1]). All but the top 15 coins sorted by that column have less than $10k emitted per day in block rewards, which limits the power that miners can spend on competing for it.

[1] https://www.f2pool.com/coins

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#167

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

ballofrubber1 wrote: post #73
dhosek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the weird things about our world is that money is central to everything, but it’s hard to understand how it works. There’s a great deal of handwaving around how, for example, dollars are created, much of which is, in fact, not correct at all (most dollars are created not by the government, or even the Federal Reserve, but by private banks, via a mechanism which I will not pretend to fully understand). The big…

I’d argue that this is more of a feature than a bug. The assumption behind the “deflation is bad” argument is that spending itself is the goal. But spending is not automatically good. Productive spending and productive investment are good. Wasteful consumption, speculation, and forced risk-taking are not. If money holds its value, people become more selective. They still buy food, housing, tools, entertainment, exper…

>In a deflationary system, rich people just hold money, and earn more in interest from holding the money, than everyone else earns combined.

Wrong, in a 'deflationary' system the more a rich person holds money in proportion to the total money the less interest they are likely to extract/get. If they hold all the money interest they will be effectively get/extract will be zero.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#168

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

tromp wrote: post #166
boldlybold wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you have proof of work without consuming large amounts of power?

By having a small daily dollar value (the column "PoW Produced (24h) in [1]). All but the top 15 coins sorted by that column have less than $10k emitted per day in block rewards, which limits the power that miners can spend on competing for it. [1] https://www.f2pool.com/coins

That would mean all but the top 15 coins are exploitable for under $10k per day

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#169

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

ballofrubber1 wrote: post #73
dhosek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the weird things about our world is that money is central to everything, but it’s hard to understand how it works. There’s a great deal of handwaving around how, for example, dollars are created, much of which is, in fact, not correct at all (most dollars are created not by the government, or even the Federal Reserve, but by private banks, via a mechanism which I will not pretend to fully understand). The big…

I’d argue that this is more of a feature than a bug. The assumption behind the “deflation is bad” argument is that spending itself is the goal. But spending is not automatically good. Productive spending and productive investment are good. Wasteful consumption, speculation, and forced risk-taking are not. If money holds its value, people become more selective. They still buy food, housing, tools, entertainment, exper…

> But spending is not automatically good. Productive spending and productive investment are good. Wasteful consumption, speculation, and forced risk-taking are not. That is indeed a great distinction that you have pointed out.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#170

Post by jimmydorry »

newsy-combi wrote: post #128
dhosek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the weird things about our world is that money is central to everything, but it’s hard to understand how it works. There’s a great deal of handwaving around how, for example, dollars are created, much of which is, in fact, not correct at all (most dollars are created not by the government, or even the Federal Reserve, but by private banks, via a mechanism which I will not pretend to fully understand). The big…

I thought private banks create money the moment they take out a credit from the central bank. The central bank's job is to set the interest rate for those loans, et viola.

That's one method, but consider what happens when someone deposits a million dollars at a bank. This million dollars can be lent out to another person as a mortgage, and guess where that person accepts that money? That's right, a bank. That same 1 million dollars could be lent out to 10 different people, expanding the supply of money many times over. The only limit to this are the capitalisation ratios legislated and enforced by government (the bank must retain some % of total outstanding liabilities as capital it can move immediately). There are a few other ways I understand (and probably many more I dont) that the monetary supply can be expanded via, but that is the simplest one to conceptualise.
Post reply on HN