Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is impossible, because time, unlike electricity, is free.
So, you would take a job paying a cent per day, because your time is free?
Time is free. My usage of that time is not.
Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
361–370 of 822 posts
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#362Whether 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…
I don't think the author was arguing that PoW is perfect, only that PoS doesn't even solve some of the problems PoW does and is therefore even less viable as a currency.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The leader who wins has the privilege of proposing the next block. No, the hash that you win with, deterministically points to the only possible block that you can “propose”. Your understanding is completely backwards. You seriously don’t know how bitcoin works.
Whether leader election happens at the same time as the block is proposed or not is completely irrelevant to the nature of the problem from a distributed systems perspective. The point is that in each round, the leader both wins the election, and proposes the next block. There are other variants of proof of work in which the leader is allowed to continue generating new blocks for a period of time and (AFAIK) these in…
There is no leader election. You trying to insist on this terminology is like trying to explain that the earth is really flat by proposing some very special space metric.
All miners “vote” by hashing and one of them wins. They don’t win because somebody voted for them, they win because they happened to find a satisfactory hash. The chance to win that hash faster than other miners is proportional to hashrate. The hash is determined by the block of transactions entirely, so once you win the race, you don’t get to propose anything other than that one predetermined block.
Which transactions go into a block is decided before any mining for that transaction happens.
Just read, please.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course there is voting. Who do you think decides which transactions go in the chain, and in what order? The miner who wins leader election during this round (in Bitcoin anyway) does, and the rest of the nodes decide whether to accept its vote. The other nodes can also choose to reject this vote for a while, as long as after seeing it they don't accept a chain with less hashpower, and still follow the protocol (mor…
You have zero clue how bitcoin works. No, there is no voting and there is no leader election. Miners construct blocks with transactions and if they manage to find a signature - that block is appended to the chain. If somebody does it faster - they append their block. Please at least get the basics before you start arguing with people.
> No, there is no voting and there is no leader election.
Every 10 minutes a miner wins the right to append a block to the chain, by guessing a secret number. The chances of winning are proportional to the amount of money each miner has expended in the process of guessing the secret number. This is equivalent to holding a vote every 10 minutes in order to choose who gets to append the transaction block. Therefore, you're wrong. There's a vote. And if you can't understand this obvious fact about bitcoin, you have no business discussing bitcoin.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have it backwards. Nodes decide if they will append your block to their chain. A miner that decides to mine out of consensus blocks is just burning money, and will be on their own fork with their “100% votes” that nobody else uses. Give it a try, spend a few million on mining equipment and then try forcing something on the network. It’s not a democratic system, never was.
Nodes have zero decision power, as far as I understand. They just go with the chain that is the most expensive to produce.
That’s incorrect.
The proposed block must comply with the rules your node enforced, or it will not be accepted. It’s not just work, but also the entire consensus-set they must abide by.
Miners cannot force new rules, if there is no consensus.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#366Whether 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…
> 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…
> And this is the reason why I cannot take any climate change conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin's electricity use (or the electricity use of any other single application) is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to addressing climate change. Proof:
• Too much of what we does depends on electricity and has no even remotely feasible substitutes for it to be plausible to give up on electricity. In fact, switching more things to electricity, such as transportation and heating, is a large part of what we will have to do to address climate change.
• Therefore to address climate change we are going to have to switch to sources of electricity that are climate neutral, which cleans up Bitcoin (and all the other uses of electricity) from a climate standpoint.
EDIT: to clarify, of course Bitcoin's electricity use now has a climate impact. My point is that this will eventually be taken care of by the necessary switch to clean electricity for all our electricity production.
Until that happens we of course should be trying to clean up current electricity uses, but there are currently bigger fish to fry on that end than Bitcoin. To dismiss taking climate change plans seriously because most conversation is about things with bigger impact is not sensible.
If we take too long on the supply side and Bitcoin continues to grow it may move up the list to where it is one of those uses that we will need to address before we clean up the electricity supply.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#367Whether 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 centr…
The mining is a kind of ratchet. Not really, but psychologically, which is enough. As speculation goes up, people add more mining equipment, which “props up” the price.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#368Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#369Whether 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…
The real question is how much longer the USD will remain the reserve currency and what will replace it.
Europe is a museum. China would have to open its capital account, and that’s not going to happen.
The answer is obvious by now.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Attestations don't have a real world economic cost that can be validated trustlessly within the system. If you compromise or coerce enough validators, you can rewrite the history for no cost. That's what PoW provides that PoS just doesn't. Immutability. In fact, I would argue that one of the most important products of bitcoin, is providing the hardest, most immutable database human civilization has ever created. We c…
"once a piece of data gets confirmed and buried under a few days worth of bitcoin's PoW, it can never be changed or removed from the blockchain." Could someone put child porn in the blockchain? Would that have legal consequences for anyone using Bitcoin in places that have laws about such porn?
Some researchers found some legally questionable content already in there.