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

Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

yanmaani.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 822 posts

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#331

Post by sandworm101 »

snet0 wrote: post #307
drclau wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is already approaching 1% of global electricity consumption, if it hasn't passed that point already And this is the reason why I cannot take any climate change conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of cryptocurrencies. Whatever the promises of cryptocurrencies were, now most (all?) degenerated into a mechanism for speculation, and effectively into a self-sustaining and self-promoting mechanism…

You can't take a discussion of climate change seriously unless it specifically addresses a single-percentage problem?

A rapidly-growing 1% problem, one that has the potential to nullify other costly gains. Such problems need to die young, before they grow into 5/10/50% problems.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#332

Post by lottin »

ogogmad wrote: post #310
lottin wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of merely depositing them somewhere?

In a blockchain, the chain keeps splitting. Your tokens live on multiple competing chains simultaneously. In PoW, you are forced to pick one of those chains to mine on. In PoS, you can stake on all of them simultaneously. The splitting is unavoidable and happens constantly. Multiple competing future states are constantly being created, and the network has to eventually arrive at a consensus about which possible futur…

> Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS.

Maybe I'm missing something... if miners are required to send the tokens to an invalid address, are these tokens not lost irrevocably?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#333

Post by ogogmad »

lottin wrote: post #332
ogogmad wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a blockchain, the chain keeps splitting. Your tokens live on multiple competing chains simultaneously. In PoW, you are forced to pick one of those chains to mine on. In PoS, you can stake on all of them simultaneously. The splitting is unavoidable and happens constantly. Multiple competing future states are constantly being created, and the network has to eventually arrive at a consensus about which possible futur…

> Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS. Maybe I'm missing something... if miners are required to send the tokens to an invalid address, are these tokens not lost irrevocably?

No. Did you not read the comment you were responding to?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#334

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

tommek4077 wrote: post #287
wcoenen wrote: post #268

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…

It is not about spent electricity bills, it is about spent time. This is the problem that needs to be solved, how can you make the work more time consuming without beeing able to go around this with computing here: electric power.

It is impossible, because time, unlike electricity, is free.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#335

Post by meribold »

inter_netuser wrote: post #214
mission_failed wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of work just burns electricity for the random chance of winning a lottery

Simply because something is intangible and invisible, like atoms, does not make it any less valuable. It's a system with an immutable monetary policy. Literally unprecedented in human history.

> It's a system with an immutable monetary policy.

Is it though? It seems minor protocol tweaks aren't uncommon and hard forks managing to eclipse the original protocol in popularity are also conceivable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#336

Post by mbar84 »

wcoenen wrote: post #268

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…

It's important to remember that the direction of the causal link is from the value of each satoshi to the cost of electricity use by miners, not the other way around. People value sats, for whatever their reasons. Because they value sats, the mining costs can be financed. If people had no reason to value sats, there would be no mining. The best way to undermine Bitcoin energy use, would be to talk to your local central bank.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#337

Post by xwolfi »

snet0 wrote: post #307
drclau wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is already approaching 1% of global electricity consumption, if it hasn't passed that point already And this is the reason why I cannot take any climate change conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of cryptocurrencies. Whatever the promises of cryptocurrencies were, now most (all?) degenerated into a mechanism for speculation, and effectively into a self-sustaining and self-promoting mechanism…

You can't take a discussion of climate change seriously unless it specifically addresses a single-percentage problem?

He probably speculates, like the degenerate speculators, that it won't end up there.

Why push around everyone to consume differently while distributing vast amount of tax money that immediately go into more wasteful crypto ? It will not stay at 1% and I agree with the OP that it's going to be difficulty to reduce electricity wastage on one end while ignore the elephant baby in the crib taking over the room.

I'm a random internet person in Hong Kong. I have a friend mining half his rent in a hotel room who decided that he doesn't need to pay rent the "normal way" anymore, he can just sleep next to a cluster of mining machines in a hotel room. Is he the stupid one, or am I, paying 3000 USD of my own money monthly ? I have another friend who lost half his saving in shitcoin speculation, I have colleagues who made a 10x profit this year, I mean it's all fucking around me and it's very hard to say it's just a 1% part of an important problem.

I feel sometimes it's going to become the main problem. I can't wait for a mega crash to calm down all this excess. I can't accept I'm the idiot working the traditional way to make traditional money paying for traditional things while the futuristic gamblers mine their hotel room fees on a bet I'm going to eventually be forced into using their tokens at whatever cost when it becomes legal tender, locking the future price into making them billionaires.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#338

Post by ced »

keymone wrote: post #293
wcoenen wrote: post #268

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…

It’s a system with feedback loops, it’ll eventually level out at some equilibrium. You didn’t provide an actual argument for why it should definitely collapse.

Is there any forecast of where the equilibrium happen? Say, if you're in a 1000-people closed society where cryptocurrency is the only thing used to buy stuff, what's the economic calculation for the long-term energy consumption? Seems like there should be papers about that...

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#339

Post by light_cone »

lilyball wrote: post #242
darcys22 wrote: post #103

He lost me at the part where he thinks you can sign messages after withdrawing your stake. The whole point of proof of stake is that you can only sign blocks or messages while you have something staked. When you withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything. He also didnt need to spend 1000 words going on about the history of bitcoin and proof of work. This is literally just a filler piece with a provocative cl…

What do you mean by "allowed to"? In a PoW system, the PoW is a distributed timekeeping device. That's the actual operation the PoW does, and the distributed timekeeping is then what you can build a blockchain on. PoS doesn't not do distributed timekeeping . If you sign a block now, then go back later and sign a different block with the same key, there's no distributed clock that can be used to prove which was actual…

The clock issue is an excellent point, but the ethereum PoS have a nano scale PoW mechanism for this exact problem. Look at VFD "Verifiable Delay Functions" [1].

In short:

If you take the pbkdf2 key derivation function: its job is to slow down hashing a thousand fold or so, so that hashing an entire search space becomes impractical. You give your secret in input, and it gives you a hash, let's say, in 1 second. You'll have to spend the time again to recompute the hash. With a faster machine, you can compute in maybe 100ms, but still, there is a limit in how fast you can obtain the result.

Now change the cryptographic properties of pbkdf2, so that you can go back from the output to the input in constant time, so you can find the secret from the hash in O(1). Then, it becomes useless for actual secrets, but you now have an instantly verifiable proof that a certain amount of time (or serial computation) had to pass to get from the input to the output. Plug the input to the previous block hash, and embed the result in the next block, and you have your clock, based on physics and provable historical facts.

[1] https://vdfresearch.org

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#340

Post by lottin »

ogogmad wrote: post #333
lottin wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS. Maybe I'm missing something... if miners are required to send the tokens to an invalid address, are these tokens not lost irrevocably?

No. Did you not read the comment you were responding to?

Yes, I read it. As far as I can see, it talks about 'staking', so it doesn't address what happens when the tokens and 'expended' as opposed to 'staked'.
Post reply on HN