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

471–480 of 822 posts

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#471

Post by flarex »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #11

PoS is a flawed system that enriches the project founders primarily. Just look at Charles Hoskinson or Gavin Wood. PoW is apparently bad for the environment. So it leaves us in an interesting situation. The Ethereum project has shown that the concept of decentralization only applies when it's on their terms. It's not a true principle.

PoW equally rewards early participants because they take the lions share of the initial blocks. Satoshi is a multi-billionaire. There are very few blockchains that don't heavily favour early adopters and for good reason: it acts as a bootstrapping mechanism for the community. Why would anyone participate in a chain they would get heavily diluted rewards when there are many others that reward early loyalty?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#472

Post by notahacker »

javert wrote: post #457
meribold wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Every time there is a fork, the market decides how much to value each of the forks. Personally, I think people will value bitcoin as good money if fiat money fails. And because they are seeking good money, will value the fork(s) that preserve bitcoin's prior monetary policy. A fork that changes the monetary policy drastically (particularly, changing the 21M cap) would obviously make for bad money in practical terms.

> Every time there is a fork, the market decides how much to value the forks

So literally the same as every monetary policy change involving every currency that didn't use PoW in history...

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#473

Post by [deleted] »

lottin wrote: post #440
seoaeu wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops miners from sending their tokens somewhere, then hard forking from a previous block where they didn’t send them? This has a clear answer in PoW, but not in your scheme

Easy, you put the transaction in the previous block. So the miner can only mine a block if they have already made the expenditure.

[deleted]

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#474

Post by xyzzyz »

gefhfff wrote: post #387
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, like others have stated, the climate challenge is switching our entire energy production (plus other fossile fuel end-uses) to net-zero or net-negative emissions. If Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, it would give a small reduction in energy use, but at best it buys you 6 months extra to decarbonize electricity production.

"small" 6 months can be a tipping point happening or not. Additionally, each produced ton of green house gases is contributing to climate change right now The more electricity to decarbonize the more difficult.

edit: deleting the comment because I misunderstood the context

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#475

Post by timbit42 »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #378
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…

3. Speculators move to yet another doge coin where the cost is still lower than the rewards. Hasn't that happened already a number of times? If everyone was still aboard the Bitcoin bandwagon, it would have stopped being profitable long ago; however you have plenty of other bandwagons to jump into. They are all technically practically interchangeable. I assume this is also the reason PoS will never work. People will…

If Bitcoin dropped PoW and miners switched to other PoW cryptocurrencies, then that would be a huge reduction in power consumption worldwide because all the other PoW coins combined probably don't have the transactions Bitcoin does.

Additionally, the Lightning Network drastically cuts mining power consumption.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#477

Post by thesausageking »

TheDong wrote: post #128
thesausageking wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?

There is a difference between each of those uses of electricity and PoW. PoW is throwing away electricity for the sake of it, and resists getting more efficient. If the goal is for the bitcoin network to cost $1M to do a single double spend, then PoW has to use $1M worth of electricity every 10 minutes. Let's say we live in a future where we suddenly have 10x as much electricity. Due to supply and demand, electricity…

Videogames share that property. The Atari 2600 was ~5 watts. That's about what the Playstation 5 consumes during rest mode; when you're playing it, it takes 150-200 watts.

It really sounds like you're rationalizing banning Bitcoin because you don't see any value in it. That's a dangerous way to decide who gets to use electricity.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#478

Post by keymone »

lottin wrote: post #470
keymone wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Where do you think the transactions included in the block come from? The miner picks them.

and now the weaseling starts. i asked a very specific question:

1. once the "leader" is "elected" 2. do they have a choice of what block to append?

you said they do, which is fundamental lack of understanding of how bitcoin works.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#479

Post by mym1990 »

Geee wrote: post #443
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 y…

If the rewards halve every 4 years but the price keeps going up, wouldn't miners just increase infrastructure to mine the same amount of rewards?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#480

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

inter_netuser wrote: post #146
brianolson wrote: post #133

(my day job is developer on Proof-of-Stake Algorand block chain, I'm a developer, this may not be polished official PR) Article's theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up. Let's say I start a new node and verify history since the beginning. Somewhere along the line I'm connected to a malicious node which hands me a fictionalized block. It would need to have been signed by not just one but about 30-45 account…

PoS is Plutocracy on Steroids. You've outlined only one, the most obvious and least probable, mode of failure. The more subtle and wildly prevalent failure mode is that the consensus will be set by the few whales, who will maximize their rent extraction at the expense of numerous small players, which will include most later adopters, aka the entire population of Earth. It's already visible on smaller scale in DAOs, e…

That’s absurd.

People will opt out of currency regimes that are abusive. This is not like a terrestrial government where you are fucked for life because a bureaucracy controls the land you live on. You don’t have to immigrate to escape a corrupt currency. And you don’t have to all-in in one currency.

If you own dozens of coins, you liquidate the shitcoin that is controlled by corrupt tycoons.

Post reply on HN