281–290 of 822 posts
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Even extremely generously scaling it up by population that still means Bitcoin uses three orders of magnitude more.
Billion kilo is already the same magnitude as tera (it’s kilo-> mega-> giga -> tera: 1000^3). Did I miss something or is your comment factually incorrect?
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This is a common misunderstanding. Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. PoW is a service to the network, to create an immutable ledger. It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change. It's just a boring industrial business, like smelting aluminum or iron.
Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of work just burns electricity for the random chance of winning a lottery
If you work with software development - which you probably do - I'd suggest checking what you do for a living, how much energy it consumes and how much physical product it generates.
The main reason proof of work works so effectively is that it deals in physics with the actual expenditure of electricity as the punishment system for failing to produce the correct desired outcome.
Abstracting this away again, we have reality itself to content with. Evolutionarily we have evolved in respect to the dominance hierarchy (https://youtu.be/rUiG5_GcMyY) Where effort itself is a necessary precursor to ascending the ranks and being fit to lead.
Not to get too metaphysical, but essentially it boils down to:
- Social Status is based on real world implications and not self derived from the perceived ranking itself, that is if it is to be most stable across time. Being labeled the boss is essentially useless long term unless you truthfully represent the ideal or most capable individual. (Michael Scott from the television series The Office is a funny example of this)
- PoS offers reliability for the system based on its election of stake amount in the system that favors inventors, early adopters, and pre ordained position holders where distribution was not derived from effort in the real world with non-reversible consequences (burning electricity)
- Instead the selection mechanism its own value structure which may or may not accurately assess competence for reliable trust in a domain where zero-trust is key to consensus.
- Outsourcing consensus to something mediated by the laws of physics is more stable across time, and is yet another abstraction upon competence taking it outside the realm of US Dollars for social proof, but also adding in the component of physical consequences towards the chain of proof.
I'm also thinking as I write this that it would be important to consider changes in the environment as useful to the selection pressures. Why purely basing it upon success (stake) at one point in time is non-useful as the rules of the game may change, or reputation lost or abused in a PoS system would not accurately reflect changes in the need for rotation of positions of voting authority.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a common misunderstanding. Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. PoW is a service to the network, to create an immutable ledger. It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change. It's just a boring industrial business, like smelting aluminum or iron.
Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of work just burns electricity for the random chance of winning a lottery
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of work just burns electricity for the random chance of winning a lottery
PoW produces something intangible. You're probably basing on an assumption that tangible products are more worthy or justifiable of resources consumed than intangibles. If you work with software development - which you probably do - I'd suggest checking what you do for a living, how much energy it consumes and how much physical product it generates.
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> hashing algo You mean Proof of Work algorithm. Which is not quite the same as hashing function [1]. [1] https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-min...
hi tromp! good to see you are on here too. ...just re-using the terms for continuity and simplicity sake. yes, a PoW algo is probably better generic term, although I am not confident complex algos would be accepted as first-line replacements by the wider community. am I wrong in that assessment?
You're right that Bitcoin will never accept a change of PoW. At least not until SHA256 shows signs of being broken.
Whether PoS will work, I don't know. But the author didn't realize that PoW is certainly doomed. PoW miners tend to spend more and more resources on finding blocks, until the cost approaches the rewards. But the rewards go up as the cryptocurrency becomes more popular, because the price and transaction fees go up. Therefore, a PoW cryptocurrency tends to "eat the world" as it becomes bigger. That's why Bitcoin is alr…
(my day job is developer on Proof-of-Stake Algorand block chain, I'm a developer, this may not be polished official PR) Article's theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up. Let's say I start a new node and verify history since the beginning. Somewhere along the line I'm connected to a malicious node which hands me a fictionalized block. It would need to have been signed by not just one but about 30-45 account…
PoS is Plutocracy on Steroids. You've outlined only one, the most obvious and least probable, mode of failure. The more subtle and wildly prevalent failure mode is that the consensus will be set by the few whales, who will maximize their rent extraction at the expense of numerous small players, which will include most later adopters, aka the entire population of Earth. It's already visible on smaller scale in DAOs, e…
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"who gets to decide" it's called "we the people" or democracy if you will. We as a society decide that cryptocurrency aren't worth destroying the world over, and that's about it.
If bitcoin mining uses renewable power (and pays for it), is that destroying the world or is that encouraging renewable adoption? If bitcoin mining uses co2 producing power (because the economics supports it), is that the fault of bitcoin or the government for not sufficiently taxing the negative externalities of that means of production?
There is no market in the world where you are going to decrease consumption by increasing the demand. That's just not how economics works.