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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

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Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#111

Post by Qub3d »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #74
toomim wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again. It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in sp…

Proof of Stake is worth being highly skeptical of. The fact that most people blindly support the idea when it seems to leave fundamental questions swept under the rug is worrying. I wish I could give a further critique, but I'm not familiar enough with the subject. There have been several persuasive comments posted to HN on the brittle nature of Proof of Stake, and the lack of hard answers to basic problems. Tacking…

What is proposed here is not proof of stake. Proof of stake relies on either random selection (lottery) or wealth/age of investment(equity). This is a new beast.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#112

Post by oppositelock »

paulgb wrote: post #51
durkie wrote: post #45

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ( https://electrek.co/2017…

The problem is that with a competitive mining market, Bitcoin energy use will rise until the cost of mining a block is equal to the reward for that block (i.e. market equilibrium). So if the cost of energy goes down but the price of Bitcoin stays constant, the amount of energy expenditure will be (approximately) equal. Likewise, if the price of Bitcoin goes up, the amount of energy used will go up accordingly. The re…

Mining rewards will be gone in a couple of years, then all that's left are fees to pay for mining - meaning, for securing the blockchain.

Higher energy costs mean higher transaction fees, which mean a disincentive to transact, and vice versa. The end state of bitcoin is a hash rate which corresponds to how much people are willing to pay for transactions. It may be a lot lower than it is today.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#113

Post by wpietri »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #38
kiddico wrote: post #2

One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either... Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

If Bitcoin reached 2 trillion dollars, it would use about 2% of the world's power. It seems tough to argue that a 2 trillion dollar GDP doesn't merit a 2% increase in power output.

GDP is (hopefully) creation of value per unit time, so as others point out, comparing it with the notional value of a currency at a point in time is not sensible. It's like comparing watts versus KWh, or your annual income with your bank balance. But there's a bigger mistake here.

The point of the economy is to create value for humans. There is plenty of non-value-creating activity that can be denominated in dollar terms, but that doesn't make it actually valuable. For example, this season's hurricanes will cause something like $200bn in economic activity. But that doesn't mean we should have more hurricanes. [1] People bet at least tens of billions annually on sports, but getting people to double or triple that doesn't actually make anybody richer. Similarly, Bitcoin is only a true economic positive to the extent that it actually creates new value for humans.

If Bill Gates went on a Bitcoin buying spree, he could easily drive the nominal market cap way up. But we'd have no more economic value in the world. If Bitcoin enthusiasts got bored and turned off all the servers, we'd have little less economic value in the world. That's because most Bitcoin use is not economically productive. Most of it is, like gambling, just moving existing economic value around between people.

I go on at length like this because it's vital that startup people understand the difference between creating value and just shuffling who controls existing value. Only the former is sustainable.

[1] To think otherwise is the broken window fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#114

Post by narrator »

toomim wrote: post #47
kiddico wrote: post #2

One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either... Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again. It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in sp…

So instead of just using energy we'll be wasting physical resources on making hard drives? Doesn't sound eco-friendly to me. It does sound like a good way to drive up costs for the NSA to store everyone's data. That's a really clever way to fight mass surveillance.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#115

Post by SilasX »

mrb wrote: post #110

« A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week » This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use. For example the transaction rate could…

You're right, in a sense. However, mining is using a certain amount of energy per block, and each block has a limited amount of transactions. So it's reasonable to amortize the cost of the bitcoin network over the transactions and so, in another sense, each transaction maps to its share of the power consumed in a block.

It would be equally fair (and it would be fair) to say that the shipping cost of a CD is equal to its mass- or volume share of the cost of the truck delivery, and indeed, that's how you'd correctly quantify e.g. the environmental cost of Netflix's DVD-by-mail (it doesn't work to just say "one more disc doesn't cost any more so the environmental cost is zero"):

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#116

Post by mikeash »

mrb wrote: post #110

« A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week » This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use. For example the transaction rate could…

Wouldn’t doubling the transaction rate require forking the network?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#117

Post by mrb »

mikeash wrote: post #116
mrb wrote: post #110

« A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week » This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use. For example the transaction rate could…

Wouldn’t doubling the transaction rate require forking the network?

No. If segwit use jumped to 100% (currently stands at ~10%) then the transaction rate capacity would roughly double.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#118

Post by mrb »

SilasX wrote: post #115
mrb wrote: post #110

« A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week » This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use. For example the transaction rate could…

You're right, in a sense. However, mining is using a certain amount of energy per block, and each block has a limited amount of transactions. So it's reasonable to amortize the cost of the bitcoin network over the transactions and so, in another sense, each transaction maps to its share of the power consumed in a block. It would be equally fair (and it would be fair) to say that the shipping cost of a CD is equal to…

But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption.

Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#119

Post by mandelliant »

craigc wrote: post #80
mandelliant wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't thi…

Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense. When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens. Curious to read about and see how that works

Yeah, same. Competing with Bitcoin is a tall order, but Bram is a pretty smart guy so there's definitely a lot of potential here. Thanks to dpiers for the description below, too!

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#120

Post by nerdponx »

kiddico wrote: post #2

One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either... Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

There were some attempts at actually doing useful work with all that proof of work:

https://curecoin.net/

http://foldingcoin.net/

https://golem.network/

http://primecoin.io/ and a detailed article about it https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocur...

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