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New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

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Re: New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

#21

Post by m463 »

I wonder if this kind of thing, while momentarily painful, can't benefit society in the end.

I think WWII was horrible, but it might have kickstarted civilian aviation.

California's PG&E electricity prices are a travesty, but there is a real market for solar panels in california, which means solar R&D is being funded.

Chip shortages are causing real investment to be made in fabs now, which means better designs and cheaper products 10 years from now..

Electric cars need batteries, so battery tech has gotten a real boost and we get better batteries for all kinds of other things.

The pandemic ... mRNA for cancer?

Re: New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

#23

Post by bitcoinmonger »

I believe this will further impact the environment.

An increase in the demand for SSDs will result in an increase in the production of hard drives. The construction of these hard drives requires energy, and this energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

Just another nail in Bitcoin's coffin.

Re: New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

#24

Post by DonHopkins »

bitcoinmonger wrote: post #23

I believe this will further impact the environment. An increase in the demand for SSDs will result in an increase in the production of hard drives. The construction of these hard drives requires energy, and this energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels. Just another nail in Bitcoin's coffin.

I thought you believed bitcoin didn't run on coal. Why the sudden return to reality?

Re: New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

#25

Post by DonHopkins »

anonytrary wrote: post #9
creshal wrote: post #4

Getting really fucking tired of these ponzi schemes creating massive collateral damages. Can the "industry" just move on to proof of stake and contain their damages to themselves?

Proof of stake is an oligarchy. The only proof-of-X that works is if X guarantees one person has the same voting power as another person. Finding X is currently an unsolved problem in mathematics and computer science. No cryptocurrency does this.

How about Proof-Of-Poverty?

Re: New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

#26

Post by wmf »

DennisP wrote: post #10
anonytrary wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake is an oligarchy. The only proof-of-X that works is if X guarantees one person has the same voting power as another person. Finding X is currently an unsolved problem in mathematics and computer science. No cryptocurrency does this.

It's only oligarchy if stakers have governance rights over the protocol. That's true of some PoS chains but not all. Otherwise, it's just people with more money getting the same percentage returns as anyone else, which is actually a better situation than legacy banking (where bigger accounts get better rates) or proof of work (where there are physical economies of scale).

There's an argument that a 51% attack (or threat thereof) is a form of governance so all miners/stakers ultimately have governance rights.

Re: New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

#28

Post by anonytrary »

wmf wrote: post #26
DennisP wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only oligarchy if stakers have governance rights over the protocol. That's true of some PoS chains but not all. Otherwise, it's just people with more money getting the same percentage returns as anyone else, which is actually a better situation than legacy banking (where bigger accounts get better rates) or proof of work (where there are physical economies of scale).

There's an argument that a 51% attack (or threat thereof) is a form of governance so all miners/stakers ultimately have governance rights.

Exactly what I was going to say. Governance is social weight, which is exactly what you have if you buy your way to 51%. Proof of person also suffers from this because decentralized collectives can conspire and/or collectively make decisions (as we saw with $GME), but it always guarantees that any person ultimately has exactly the same fundamental weight as any other person.

It is an extremely hard problem and I think it is impossible to achieve true decentralization because many other things are centralized, like human relationships. Mom, dad, sister, brother, girlfriend, boyfriend, best friend, business partner, etc. will always share increased affinity with you when making certain decisions. Unfortunately, I believe the human flaw is that we are more likely to agree with people based on relationship rather than on merit. Humans are corruptible and can be convinced to sway in a certain way, and therefore create gravity wells of centralization.

It sounds crazy, but a classic example is "cliques" in high school. There's the jocks, the goths, the nerds, etc. They are like little planets of centralized thinking, dancing together in the uncertain space of adolescence.

Re: New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

#29

Post by DennisP »

wmf wrote: post #26
DennisP wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only oligarchy if stakers have governance rights over the protocol. That's true of some PoS chains but not all. Otherwise, it's just people with more money getting the same percentage returns as anyone else, which is actually a better situation than legacy banking (where bigger accounts get better rates) or proof of work (where there are physical economies of scale).

There's an argument that a 51% attack (or threat thereof) is a form of governance so all miners/stakers ultimately have governance rights.

Ethereum just had a brief encounter with that threat. It's switching to a system that burns most transaction fees instead of giving them to miners. The miners took exception to that, and made a lot of noise about a "demonstration of force" in which at least 51% of them would move to the same mining pool, showing they could attack if they wanted to.

The rest of the community called their bluff. The miners backed down and the change is scheduled for July.

Miners don't have that much power because if users, apps, exchanges, data feeds, and tokenized real-world assets are all referencing the new hard-forked chain, then miners have a choice between running that fork or going out of business. A chain with just miners has little economic value and can't support all those GPUs.

Under proof-of-stake, a 51% attack is even less of a threat. A double-spend attempt results in destruction of all your stake. A long-term censorship attack could be maintained, but if it's egregious then users could remove your stake with a hard fork, and if there's support for that from all the above entities, it'll work.

Miners and stakers are not governors. They're service providers.

Re: New cryptocurrency could potentially cause an SSD or hard drive shortage

#30

Post by tromp »

There's little performance advantage to SSDs over hard-disks since the proof of space only requires a few blocks to be read every (on avg) 5 minutes. This leaves them unable to compete against the much cheaper hard-disks.

Furthermore, the ROI on hard-disks bought just to mine this may be decades as there is already a glut of unused hard disk space. So there's no hard disk shortage to be expected.

As downsides to chia I see

1) the huge premine.

2) the large complexity of the proof of time + proof of space system.

3) the fact that the mining chain cannot commit to the tx history (instead the miner's private key signs for a block of txs as belonging to the mined header)

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