Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus • Hacker News Board

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#441

Post by skinnymuch » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #31

Godel_unicode wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech is not the same thing as requirement that others listen. If someone has no audience, with all the platforms that are available, it's not because they're being censored. It's because nobody cares what they have to say.

This is not what is happening on these platforms. r/thedonald had millions of subscribers and not a single one was forced to listen. Then it was banned by reddit for thoughtcrime.

You could have brought up hard left subreddits getting banned too. Like Chapo. So it doesn’t seem like only the right is persecuted/appearing to continue the trope of how the right are such victims.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#442

Post by wcoenen » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

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…

> Bitcoin uses about .1% of the worlds power currently. 10x less than you have suggested

Your source says 0.2% on page 18, not 0.1%.

The New York Times says 0.5%. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...

Add to that the rapid growth we've seen in the past, and I believe it is reasonable to say that we're rapidly approaching 1%.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#443

Post by Geee » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

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…

PoW generates heat, which is not waste, if it is utilized. The endgame of Bitcoin mining is that every bit of heat is utilized, because that's the only way mining will be profitable. Running these miners is profitable even without block rewards (heat alone is sold at a profit).

You didn't take into account, that:

    - Bitcoin price growth won't continue forever; it'll find a stable price
    - Mining rewards halve every 4 years

Therefore, it seems that the heat demand of humans can run the Bitcoin network securely, even without block rewards. It won't "eat the world", but find a beautiful balance.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#444

Post by littlestymaar » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

thinkloop wrote: post #431

littlestymaar wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an alternative: 3. cryptocurrencies stop the Austrian economics fetishism and index the coin reward to the mining difficulty. That means getting rid of the fixed coin supply. That would stabilize the price of the token a lot (since price going up would increase the mining appeal, thus expanding the money supply, driving the price down) and also make it much more usable as a mean of payment (the number of…

The difficulty is where the security comes from. Bitcoin's goal is to have the highest possible prices and difficulty so that nation-states and alien civilizations can't hack it. It's very easy to have a cheap low-difficulty coin. Equally worthless too. You need to understand that proof-of-work is actually proof-of-waste - the waste, the difficulty, the cost, is the security.

You've misunderstood my point: I'm not talking about reducing the difficulty, I'm talking about (sub-linearly) increasing the mining reward as the difficulty grow.

Also the difficulty scaling is important even if you don't take security into account: if you don't raise it, then the block mining frequency rise progressively, and then you end up with more and more orphaned blocks, until you end up with parallel chains that don't really converge to a single coherent one.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#445

Post by DennisP » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #279

I'm trying to understand the central technical argument being made here. Please tell me if I got this right. --- Somebody has a stake in a PoS crypto currency. They can now do two things: 1) sell their stake 2) sign something fraudulent (like a double spend). Since there is no decentralized timestamp service, a node validating those two actions doesn't know how to order them, so different validating nodes come to dif…

PoS does produce a reliable monotonic sequence, it's just that it doesn't go back to genesis. Every few months you need a checkpoint hash. The idea here is that this is rare enough so it's easy to find the accepted checkpoint out of band, like we pretty much do for client software already.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#446

Post by xorcist » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

josnyder wrote: post #8

PoW systems rely on the "phone a friend method" as well. When you download a Bitcoin client from a "friend", you are trusting them to honestly introduce you to the network. If you fall asleep for a period of years, you have to trust your friends to honestly inform you of all of the PoW forks and policy changes that have occurred over that interval. The only difference is that PoS blockchain clients must be bundled wi…

No, policy changes makes for a new blockchain. That's what usually referred to as a "hard fork", as opposed to a "soft fork" where consensus rules are only allowed to get stricter, exactly beacuse ownership of a coin should be guaranteed forever.

You could follow the consensus rules set out from the beginning and you would still end up on today's majority chain.

I believe there were a couple of early bug fixes along the way, which makes this not strictly true. As in the original first release of the software not actually capable of downloading all of the chain, which some people love to point to as a proof of it being a fallible system. This is probably true but doesn't really detract from the original point of guaranteed ownership by never relaxing the consensus rules.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#447

Post by oblio » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

dan-robertson wrote: post #373

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…

A positive side effect of your (1.) scenario is that it results in a surplus of renewable energy (mining needs the cheapest energy and renewable energy is generally the cheapest). Having a surplus of cheap green energy is probably good for the economy, though a lot more than 1% would probably be needed to see significant benefits.

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

Or we could just have a surplus of green energy for everything else we need. And how can we even have a surplus of green energy when we're probably at a 90% of world energy production deficit?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#448

Post by light_cone » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #166

hopevillian wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, save all that money in a monetary system that is controlled and literally changed on the whim of it's creators... sounds vary familiar to another monetary system we currently are on... oh, well here are some interesting links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8LXLoTUJ5g https://twitter.com/CryptoLanroc/status/1458144922867957761 https://betterprogramming.pub/the-encyclopedia-of-smart-cont... https://twitter.com/…

So by "broken" you mean you can't actually break anything. Got it. MEV is well known, and the system operates just fine in its presence.

It's incredible how people who read a few articles think they have found the smoking gun, against a technology on which a lot of crypto researchers devote years of their time to make and analyze. They must think themselves are geniuses, and researchers are fools. Oh well, nothing new under the sun.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#449

Post by dnautics » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

xwolfi wrote: post #337

snet0 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ran…

> I can't accept that...

For your own sanity I suggest you stop taking the process of getting rich so seriously. It doesn't make sense, nor is the fact that it doesn't make sense a singularity in the grand scheme of time, it has been known since ancient days (I'm not religious, this is just evidence of it's timelessness): "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all"

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#450

Post by keymone » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

lottin wrote: post #432

keymone wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously I can’t change your decision to use this terminology, but ponder this: when the leader is elected every 10 minutes, do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain? No they don’t. So was it election of the leader or election of the block? And if it was an election, wouldn’t the result always be the same with largest miner always winning because they have most votes? As I said in a sibling thread…

> do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain? No they don’t. Of course, they have a choice. If didn't, miners would serve no purpose. We would just have one block and that would be the block that would be appended. The consensus would be achieved automatically, without any need of guessing secret numbers. > And if it was an election, wouldn’t the result always be the same with largest miner always wi…

> Of course, they have a choice

lol, no they don't.

a certain hash wins, every ~10 minutes. that hash is calculated from sha(block, nonce), where nonce is the randomized part that miner mutates to get different hashes. once a hash that satisfies the protocol is found - that's it, you can't choose a different block to append to the chain.

it is just laughable that i have to explain this level of basics.