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

421–430 of 822 posts

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#421

Post by simondotau »

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 single percentage problem today. In order to become a mainstream everyday currency, use of Bitcoin will have to increase by three, four, possibly five orders of magnitude.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#422

Post by syspec »

inter_netuser wrote: post #369
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…

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.

What's the answer?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#423

Post by poontang1 »

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…

Bitcoin uses about .1% of the worlds power currently. 10x less than you have suggested: https://nydig.com/research/report-bitcoin-net-zero

The bitcoin reward also halves every 4 year, so even if price continues to appreciate, the effect is evened out by the fact that less is created every block over time.

Lastly, bitcoin mining to could sustained solely by using stranded energy, which would otherwise be unused. Flared gas in texas, for instance, could provide more power than the network currently uses. There is no reason bitcoin mining has to take power from anyone, and it will trend this way over time because the economics are in favor of finding the cheapest power source.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#424

Post by globular-toast »

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…

> When you withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything.

But I didn't withdraw my stake. I have a whole chain of blocks saying I never withdrew anything and it's perfectly valid because I signed it, and I still have a stake. Oh, you have another chain that says I did withdraw? Who are we going to believe? Who was first?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#426

Post by righttoolforjob »

dan-robertson wrote: post #403
righttoolforjob wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mining needs the cheapest energy and renewable energy is generally the cheapest The cheapest energy is the cheapest. It has nothing directly to do with it being renewable.

Right. The point is that you get renewable energy which is desirable rather than non-renewable energy. If the latter were cheaper the situation would be less appealing.

If it was cheaper there would be no need for bitcoin as a driver (and then also to completely waste it, in the broken window fallacy sense).

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#427

Post by mschuster91 »

poontang1 wrote: post #423
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…

Bitcoin uses about .1% of the worlds power currently. 10x less than you have suggested: https://nydig.com/research/report-bitcoin-net-zero The bitcoin reward also halves every 4 year, so even if price continues to appreciate, the effect is evened out by the fact that less is created every block over time. Lastly, bitcoin mining to could sustained solely by using stranded energy, which would otherwise be unused. Flare…

> Flared gas in texas, for instance, could provide more power than the network currently uses.

While the amount of gas that is flared off is immense (25-30% of the actual consumption of the US and Europe), the problem is that it is only flared off because there are no pipelines to transport the gas away and the amount that the small oil wells produce is too low to justify the cost.

If it were for me I'd force oil well operators to either build a small secondary pipeline for flare gas alongside oil pipelines or place a small power generator to contribute to the electric grid, but unfortunately "regulation" of any kind is seen as a bad thing in wide parts of the US.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#428

Post by floatboth »

tsimionescu wrote: post #169
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny "we the people" always decide this when it's about something that would actually empower us. Meanwhile, "we" didn't only not ban cars, "we" destroyed public transport in the US and lobbied the government to massively subsidize roads and cars. Just as an example. It's curious how much agitation there is concerning the energy consumption of PoW. I don't see nearly as many articles calling for restricting AWS…

Bitcoin is the base layer of a decentralized finance world completely out of the control of the traditional elites and banks, yes. It's also a new finance world completely under the control of an even smaller elite of devs and mining pool owners (see the hard fork of Ethereum that happened a long time ago, and the upcoming fork of Ethereum that will move it to PoS; sure, Ethereum isn't Bitcoin, but there is nothing f…

> elite of devs and mining pool owners

You forgot a (perhaps even more) crucial part: the exchanges/stablecoins!

They're the whole reason this clown show is considered "finance" rather than funbux.

And they're all extremely suspicious. And by suspicious I mean obviously fraudulent. The value of Bitcoin (!) is propped up by Tether printing fake dollars backed by nothing.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#429

Post by DennisP »

ricardolopes wrote: post #210
pshc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a recent ETH2 block: https://beaconcha.in/block/2604970#votes It was voted for by 8000+ validators. Many of them have been validating since beacon chain genesis a year ago. There are like 260k validators active right now. I find it highly unlikely some entity is going to come along and try to pretend their alternate history, with a whole new set of hundreds of thousands of validators (which wouldn’t be support…

ETH2 was years in the making, with multiple delays and not fully migrated yet precisely because of how unsafe standard PoS is. Vitalik and co spent years researching the best mitigations. Right now, it seems to be one of the best protected PoS chains. It's still fairly new, with novel mitigations, so it still doesn't stand the test of time against all possible attack vectors. In that sense, it still can't be consider…

PoS is more quantum-resistant though. If someone were to build a quantum computer capable of running Grover's algorithm on bitcoin hashes, they would get a quadratic speedup over classical miners. That's a threat that doesn't exist on PoS.

(Both would be vulnerable to Shor's but post-quantum signatures would fix that.)

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#430

Post by tiahura »

syspec wrote: post #422
inter_netuser wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the answer?

Indefinitely, because there is no viable alternative at this time.
Post reply on HN