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Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

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341–350 of 381 posts

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

#341
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't bitcoin have the chance to double their transactions-per-second for a constant amount of power consumption, in the form of Segwit2x, and decide not to do so? The fact Bitcoin could be more efficient and chooses not to isn't really an improvement over being unable to be more efficient IMHO - in fact arguably it's worse.

Bitcoin strength and value is on decentralization. If you increase the block size, it will be seized by governments or large corporations. This has long being debated, and the reason it is like it is today, is that everyone really vested into it agreed (in a distributed way) to keep it as so. More on that here: https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/139399717145689293... And you can even buy books explaining this…

> If you increase the block size, it will be seized by governments or large corporations.

That doesn't make any sense. Any actor, like for example a government, might seize (control) a blockchain by having overwhelming mining majority (51% attack), but that has little to do with the size of the blockchain itself.

The only reason one might have to think that way is believing the false narrative that a BTC "full node" does anything to secure the network. Only mining nodes secure the network, having a copy of the full blockchain is not enough.

Edit: typo.

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

#342
post #302
post #300

People that complain that PoW cryptos spend too much energy don't understand that it's just another form of conversion of energy, just like every other action human take. Average Joe has a manual labor, his physical energy is converted into labor, which converts to fiat currency. The food that Joe ate also require some amount of energy to grow and become Joe's food. PoW mining converts raw electric energy into a digi…

You don't understand the point that you're arguing against. Producing fiat currency through manual labor uses a mix of renewable resources, and value is provided. You can't just dig in the ground and get paid for it. You have to do something that improves someone's business or life. Producing crypto is just turning coal (or whatever) into numbers. There is no intrinsic value created in that chain. If the crypto loses…

The cost of producing fiat currency is not the same for everybody.

Producing crypto keeps a secure ledger, claiming it's just producing useless numbers is the same as claiming that a TLS session is just playing around with numbers.

The value of fiat always goes to 0, resources have been destroyed in the world for no reason

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

#343
post #342
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand the point that you're arguing against. Producing fiat currency through manual labor uses a mix of renewable resources, and value is provided. You can't just dig in the ground and get paid for it. You have to do something that improves someone's business or life. Producing crypto is just turning coal (or whatever) into numbers. There is no intrinsic value created in that chain. If the crypto loses…

The cost of producing fiat currency is not the same for everybody. Producing crypto keeps a secure ledger, claiming it's just producing useless numbers is the same as claiming that a TLS session is just playing around with numbers. The value of fiat always goes to 0, resources have been destroyed in the world for no reason

If I pay someone to build me a house, I have a house and they have fiat. We converted energy into a house and fiat.

If I convert the same amount of energy into crypto, I have nothing with intrinsic value.

And before you say that fiat has no intrinsic value, consider that most people have fiat debt (loans, taxes, wages, etc.) that they can pay off with it. Currently very few people have any crypto debt.

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

#344
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nodes can simply choose not to publish their value if the result is unfavorable to them, and this tanks the whole procedure. This isn’t a problem unique to your scheme; they all suffer from things like this.

If a node publicly commits to providing a random value, but then doesn't follow the protocol by actually revealing it, then that node's stake can be distributed to the honest nodes and the procedure started again. The protocol could even increase the stake needed to be one of these random value providing nodes, every time such a failure occurred, to make such an attack more and more expensive.

Then the node that had their stake forfeited simply allocates their resources to a competing blockchain where that didn’t happen.

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

#345
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you confuse free market with "no rules, everything is allowed", which is not what I am proposing. Those monopolies you mention in the abstract are largely possible because laws make it much more difficult than it could be for competitors to arise. In a free market most monopolies are unstable and don't last long. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom and Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics both have chapters d…

> Those monopolies you mention in the abstract are largely possible because laws make it much more difficult than it could be for competitors to arise. This is just more libertarian apologetics. There have been more than enough examples ( cough intel *cough) of monopolistic practices caused by unfair market practices. Using dominance to force suppliers to exclusive use of your products is not a practice enabled by th…

> There have been more than enough examples (cough intel *cough) of monopolistic practices caused by unfair market practices. Using dominance to force suppliers to exclusive use of your products is not a practice enabled by the state.

Microchip fabrication is a very lucrative business, so why aren't there more competitors to Intel? I can think of at least two reasons:

1. It's a very capital-intensive industry. Here all government disincentives to saving, investment and business operation apply, mostly in the way of taxes, but also things like the SEC "accredited investor" qualification, restrictions to investment from foreign sources, barriers to crowdsourcing, licenses and bureaucracy, and a long etcetera.

2. Patents and copyright. Because of these government-granted monopolies competitors cannot copy products, so they represent another barrier to entry. Granted the idea behind patents is to incentivize private-funded research, but the drawback is reduced competition for the time the patents lasts. I believe patents are too long-lived in a world that moves at an ever-increasing pace.

If there were more real competitors there would be more suppliers willing to not sign with Intel. There would also be more competitors in the supplying space, of course.

>> Private ownership of all land might help

> Rivers too? And then what? I can sue you for polluting my downstream, but it's OK if a company just buys up the whole river, then they can ruin it to their heart's content?

People rarely ruin their own property, on the contrary they make an effort to preserve it and keep their value high. Public-owned property, on the other hand, has no such incentive. This is why people don't treat a hotel room or AirBnB with the same care as their own house. Like it or not humans are moved by incentives, not by ideals, so we should take that into account when designing our policies. In other words: policies should be judged by their results, not by their intentions.

In the case of the river it might make sense to have some kind of joint ownership by people and/or companies involved with it. Please notice that private ownership doesn't mean individual. Even assuming that a single company or individual owns the river and that they have more to gain by polluting the river than keeping it clean, they couldn't just dump whatever they want in there, as it gets to the sea. An effort should be made to factor in all negative externalities.

> This is just nonsense.

I don't think so, and neither do many renowned economists. I think you lack imagination or are misconstruing the libertarian proposals. The idea is not "get rid of every and all regulations", but being aware that regulations, taxes and centralization of the economy have rippling effects that, when combined, greatly reduce the wealth generation for all of us.

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

#346
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that anyone can stake. It's going to be the default way to store ETH akin to a savings account for most people so pretty much everyone is going to share in that PoS issuance. This also doesn't affect new buyers as they are buying ETH to use it most likely so it's not being held long term. If they decide to buy long term then they also get the PoS issuance so everyone wins.

> The difference is that anyone can stake. Unless you're entering a pool, you need 32 ETH to stake. I remember when that wasn't a lot.

The base protocol uses 32 ETH for technical reasons but yes, as you said, pools like RocketPool, Lido, etc along with exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and even everyday banks also allow staking any amount of ETH by anyone to take advantage of the stable staking returns. In a practical sense there's no barrier to staking ETH and it'll likely be the default way to hold ETH long term as a low risk savings vehicle.

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

#347
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say you shouldn't measure it. I said people are buying other things for their money. Simply measuring transactions/energy ignores all that. Monero provides decentralized trustless private untraceable transactions, Ethereum provides decentralized trustless transactions that execute smart contracts. The energy consumption is merely the cost of all those features.

> The energy consumption is merely the cost of all those features. This is a big assumption, and almost certainly untrue.

Why?

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

#348
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lottery isn't the point, it's a side effect. The network needs consensus on what transactions have happened and which haven't. The main difficulty in getting this when you can't trust the nodes that someone can just spin up an arbitrary number of nodes to overwhelm the consensus, if the consensus just goes by majority vote. If you want to prevent this you need to tie the consensus to something which is scarce, wh…

It's still a lottery, except the way you buy tickets is by wasting electricity. The more electricity wasted the more lottery tickets you have. It doesn't need be like this, just buy the tickets with effing bitcoins and you achieve the same result without wasting electricity.

It’s not that easy. You can’t secure Bitcoin with a lottery run on Bitcoin, because then you could forge your own tickets and forge the drawing, too.

The proof of stake proposals don’t seem to work that way. They seem to be more a matter of stakeholders having machines that vote about who is trustworthy.

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

#349
post #343
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of producing fiat currency is not the same for everybody. Producing crypto keeps a secure ledger, claiming it's just producing useless numbers is the same as claiming that a TLS session is just playing around with numbers. The value of fiat always goes to 0, resources have been destroyed in the world for no reason

If I pay someone to build me a house, I have a house and they have fiat. We converted energy into a house and fiat. If I convert the same amount of energy into crypto, I have nothing with intrinsic value. And before you say that fiat has no intrinsic value, consider that most people have fiat debt (loans, taxes, wages, etc.) that they can pay off with it. Currently very few people have any crypto debt.

crypto/fiat is not an apples to apples comparison. it's an apples to oranges. cryptos are a new class of asset

If you convert energy into crypto, you have crypto, may not have intrinsic value for you. right now it's worth 42k usd for somebody

which of those have/don't have intrinsic value: - gold, silver and other precious metals - stocks - options - house - car - fiat - cryptos

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

#350
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those monopolies you mention in the abstract are largely possible because laws make it much more difficult than it could be for competitors to arise. This is just more libertarian apologetics. There have been more than enough examples ( cough intel *cough) of monopolistic practices caused by unfair market practices. Using dominance to force suppliers to exclusive use of your products is not a practice enabled by th…

> There have been more than enough examples (cough intel *cough) of monopolistic practices caused by unfair market practices. Using dominance to force suppliers to exclusive use of your products is not a practice enabled by the state. Microchip fabrication is a very lucrative business, so why aren't there more competitors to Intel? I can think of at least two reasons: 1. It's a very capital-intensive industry. Here a…

> so why aren't there more competitors to Intel? I can think of at least two reasons:

So, just completely ignore the anti-competitive contracts it forced on suppliers, and other market-dominating tactics it was convicted of, in favour of some handwaving about patents.

Good, honest argumentation there.

> People rarely ruin their own property

Again, utterly naive given what we know happens in the real world. Companies can and will act like utter sociopaths in pursuit of short term gain.

> I think you lack imagination

And I think you lack any attachment to what people and companies actually do, here in the real world, rather than what you imagine economic incentives might make people do.

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