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Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

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Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#201

Post by atweiden »

22c wrote: post #183
atweiden wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is often claimed to be an advantage of PoS: you can't get an extra increase in rate of profits by being richer (beyond the linear increase you'd expect). With PoW on the other hand, the richest have the best access to the most innovative technology and so you get superlinear profits the richer you are. And yet, anyone who buys these proof-of-stake coins now, years after they were launched, suffers from having…

> But in relative terms, the earliest investors are mopping the floor with the later investors, because the earliest investors can stake orders of magnitude more coins. PoS networks are typically not going to be minting coins in perpetuity. Most PoS networks aim to reach a "zero issuance" state where the network can sustain itself on TX fees alone. It's also typically in a networks interest to decentralise TX verific…

> Most PoS networks aim to reach a "zero issuance" state where the network can sustain itself on TX fees alone.

Whether ICO investors are stakemining coins issued through inflation or transaction fees doesn’t matter — they’re still mining orders of magnitude more coins, at the end of the day. Their artificially low cost basis translates into them reaping outsized profits which dwarf that of later investors.

(And frankly, it’s absurd the PoS astroturfing has gotten so out of hand that this needs to be pointed out at all.)

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#202

Post by baby »

actinium226 wrote: post #115
wmf wrote: post #25

Txs / MWh is not a valid metric for most cryptocurrencies since power consumption is proportional to price, not transactions. Also, BSV and BCH are totally insecure so it's not really fair to compare them to secure cryptocurrencies.

Why are BSV and BCH insecure?

The cost of a 51% attack: https://www.crypto51.app/

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#203

Post by Taek »

wmf wrote: post #128
doomroot wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t the people spending the GWs of power already done that?

Ultimately the money comes from people buying in to Bitcoin and many of them are not aware of the power consumption or the fact that it's possible to achieve number go up with virtually no energy.

The people buying Bitcoin don't need to be aware that it costs 6 GW of power, any more than they need to be aware of the electricity costs associated with the manufacture of plastic, electronics, or other goods and services.

If we as a society feel like there is too much energy being consumed, we should regulate the production, and let the market come to equilibrium on a fair price for the cost of electricity. If you don't like the fact that coal plants are spewing millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, regulate the coal plants, not Bitcoin. Regulation of electricity will increase the cost of electricity, which will naturally reduce the total amount of electrify that Bitcoin uses - Bitcoin's energy use is proportional to the price of energy, not to the actual quantity of energy.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#204

Post by skybrian »

Taek wrote: post #185
skybrian wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't explain how to fix the problem. We need to drum up interest for a solution. The way I like to explain it is that Bitcoin is collectively giving away about $1.5 billion a month in prize money to miners. That's the root of the problem. Miners will spend up to $1.5 billion a month on electricity (mainly) and their other expenses. Currently it's about 10x Google's electricity usage.…

> We need to drum up interest for a solution. There is already massive interest in finding more efficient ways to solve the problem. It's a difficult problem to solve (as Elon Musk will likely learn in the coming year). The cost of proof of work is paid in two forms. The first is in the form of inflation. Merely holding onto Bitcoin means eating dilution as new Bitcoins are printed to fund the mining ecosystem. And t…

Holders of Bitcoin want to see the price go up, which makes the problem worse. So the primary incentive is very bad and that's how we got here.

More enlightened self-interest would be to want to see the price go up without using more electricity, but this is secondary to the primary incentive.

To get action from enlightened self-interest, there needs to be leadership for making changes. (Ethereum seems to have this?)

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#205

Post by Taek »

dcolkitt wrote: post #101
dvh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python 3 is better than python 2 and people will soon switch.

Well if Python 2 had a logic bomb that literally makes it unusable after the end-of-life date, that would be true.

Ethereum's original logic bomb was set to trigger in 2017. Then later it was updated to trigger in 2017. And then later it was updated to trigger in 2018, and then 2020, and currently I believe it's set to trigger in 2022.

But there's no political reason to believe that they won't just push it out again. It's just a ceremony at this point.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#206

Post by judge2020 »

SilverRed wrote: post #118
bogota wrote: post #47

Interesting but I’m not sure of the point. PoW by design is not energy efficient. The incentive is just not in the correct place. Interesting but if the goal is to show more energy efficient coins we need to be looking at different tech such as PoS. Although this might have just been a fun project someone put together in which case nice job.

Efficiency doesn't even make sense since mining can take up close to no, or infinite power. The amount of energy a PoW coin uses entirely depends on the cost of electricity, hardware, and profitability. When a coin spikes in value, the profitability goes up so more miners join in. A single PC would have enough processing power to run the bitcoin network. All of this power usage goes towards solving useless tasks whic…

If the coin's point is to become valuable to the point that people want it to trade it, then a PoW coin does have to require more overall compute power to crunch the numbers on the ever-increasing amount of transactions that might be attempting to double-spend on the chain. This is all because of PoW's lack of focus on efficiency when there is that much demand and that many transactions happening at once. Electricity, hardware, and profitability are all externalities that are the result by the amount of usage of a PoW coin, not the cause of it.

> When a coin spikes in value, the profitability goes up so more miners join in. A single PC would have enough processing power to run the bitcoin network.

well, yes, but then a single miner could and would control the entire network since 'why would any give up their compute power for free to ensure the network is not being hit by double-spend attacks, when someone else is already doing it'. The whole point of a PoW coin having huge fees and thus returns for the miners is to incentivize a decentralized ledger. I don't think Satoshi intended for it to eventually consolidate into just a few huge mining companies which theoretically could perform a double-spend attack, but it's not something that could have been protected against with a few more if statements (although, if this happened, the coin would tank in value, which is probably the inherit safeguard).

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#207

Post by mondoveneziano »

atweiden wrote: post #181
mondoveneziano wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But almost any other activity only benefits from getting more efficient. Compare today's efficient LED lighting technology with what was available a few decades ago. With proof-of-work on the other hand, efficiency is actively counteracted . If a proof-of-work cryptocurrency holds its price, its energy usage can only go up. You are also assuming that only renewable energy will be used for mining in the first place. I…

Total energy costs from PoW mining won’t rise to exceed PoW mining revenues unless miners are willing to mine at a loss. In an efficient market, one where PoW mining profits have been driven down to zero, total energy use should remain constant if market price is held constant. PoW mining energy efficiency may increase, though. The rest of your post could be read as a criticism against incomplete application of hypot…

How can efficiency increase in a way that decreases energy use?

Let's say a new ASIC comes out that mines twice as efficiently, i.e. 2x less energy per calculation. Because miners can now afford to run twice the amount of ASICs on the same energy budget, this means that eventually miners are mining twice as fast.

The network however needs to keep the block rate constant (6 blocks per hour in Bitcoin), so it counteracts by adjusting the difficulty. In this case, mining a block becomes twice as difficult. In summary, everyone has now twice the amount of ASICs consuming the same amount of energy, still mining at 6 blocks per hour.

The misconception is that the "work" in "proof-of-work" is meaningful by itself. It is actually not, it is a lottery whose probability to win is adjusted exactly so that statistically, all miners in the world together will mine 6 blocks per hour on average.

As for "mining at a loss": I am not convinced there is a general principle that only allows for absolutely clean energy to make mining profitable, across the whole world and in any situation. We have already seen a coal plant being ramped up for the purpose of mining in New York, and hash rate going down when coal plants in China got flooded.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#208

Post by Taek »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #107
wyager wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the kind of thing where if it fails, it's going to fail explosively and unexpectedly. Proof-of-stake is vulnerable to various miner collusion attacks that Bitcoin is not vulnerable to. The gist of it is that casting multiple conflicting votes (sometimes way after you cast your original vote) doesn't require any additional resources in a proof-of-stake system, whereas casting additional votes in a proof-of-work s…

I may be wrong, but collusion is hard to achieve via provably random selection procedures for validators of transactions, etc.

This is a massive over-simplification of the problem. A strong proof of stake construction has to consider all forms of Sybil attacks, all forms of wealth concentration (a significant problem in most cryptocurrencies - the top 3 exchanges often hold more than 30% of the supply of the token), low participation rates, outsourced participation (most large crypto holders hire the same small set of groups to do the staking process on their behalf), among other significant issues.

It's a hard thing to get right.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#209

Post by Taek »

Milkman128 wrote: post #137
jv0010 wrote: post #126

Chia (XCH) coin would be interesting to see on that list seeing it basis was being an eco friendly crypto

If you can account for the resources of each hard drive it kills

There's probably enough data out already on how long hard drives last while mining Chia to make a reasonable estimate. It kills hard drives fast enough that a large percentage of hard drives which were mining at genesis are now dead.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#210

Post by atweiden »

skybrian wrote: post #204
Taek wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to drum up interest for a solution. There is already massive interest in finding more efficient ways to solve the problem. It's a difficult problem to solve (as Elon Musk will likely learn in the coming year). The cost of proof of work is paid in two forms. The first is in the form of inflation. Merely holding onto Bitcoin means eating dilution as new Bitcoins are printed to fund the mining ecosystem. And t…

Holders of Bitcoin want to see the price go up, which makes the problem worse. So the primary incentive is very bad and that's how we got here. More enlightened self-interest would be to want to see the price go up without using more electricity, but this is secondary to the primary incentive. To get action from enlightened self-interest, there needs to be leadership for making changes. (Ethereum seems to have this?)

> To get action from enlightened self-interest, there needs to be leadership for making changes. (Ethereum seems to have this?)

Knowledge preceedes enlightenment. For example, Git is also green-friendly, and shares a virtually identical consensus model to pure PoS consensus designs. It’s just that “green-friendliness” wasn’t a design goal of cryptocurrency — creating a lasting store of value sans institutions, exchangeable pseudonymously over the internet, was.

As it were, pure PoS consensus suffers from the misfeature of not even having a quantitative fork ranking protocol — i.e. it lacks a way to objectively compare the truthfulness of divergent blockchains [1]. In PoW networks, cumulative hashing power can be simply and easily mathematically compared to produce cold, quantitative consensus. In PoS networks, there is no hashing power, and human intervention is required — just like Git.

Which begs the question, why do PoS networks even need a blockchain? I think we all know the reason for that, though — Git doesn’t have a hype train. Git just isn’t good enough at separating the general public from their hard-earned money.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27144921

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