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

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#541

Post by gruez » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #427

poontang1 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wel…

>[...] 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 [....]

Maybe it's too costly for a reason? Building power lines or pipelines to the middle of nowhere has economic and environmental costs as well, so top down legislation forcing every single well to do it might result in worse overall outcomes. For instance, the resources it takes to construct a pipeline/power line to the nearest town might be more than the electricity/methane that can be generated from the well.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#542

Post by toss1 » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #366

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…

> 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 giv…

Not quite

Even if BTC and every other POW cryptocurrency converted this afternoon to 100% renewable energy use (and we ignore the carbon cost of manufacturing the hardware), it is STILL a huge climate problem.

Why?

1) Because that ~1% of total energy consumption is being squandered on maintaining the cryptocurrency instead of any other use. Thus, it prevents those clean energy sources from displacing CO2-generating sources which would otherwise be taken offline.

2) Even if the BTC energy is entirely derived from some power source that could not be used by others, perhaps all geothermal generation on a remote volcanic island, it will still add net heat to the atmospheric system. and, of course, we still have the energy use and CO2 spewage of fabricating and moving the mining equipment into location.

So, no, this problem is NOT taking care of itself.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#543

Post by gruez » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

radu_floricica wrote: post #515

mschuster91 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wel…

Yeah, but this exposes the issue with "bitcoin takes X percent of the energy production, therefore it's evil". If you want you can build a generator near those wells. It's just cheaper to get the energy from somewhere else, because energy is fungible. A watt is not good or evil, it's the same as any other watt. Which means crypto energy consumption can be offset just like anything else, and is exactly as evil as any…

>because energy is fungible

no it's not. A watt that's in the middle of south dakota, with no power lines in sight, is worth much less than a watt in southern california and is connected to the power grid.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#544

Post by dlubarov » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #291

dawnbreez wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But...if you no longer have value on the network, doesn't that mean you no longer have enough stake to control the network?

You can fork far in the past, before you cashed out. Any new entrants into the network will not be able to distinguish your fork from the real chain. You cannot be slashed for this in the real chain because you already cashed out your stake there. This 'long range attack' is different from a 50% attack because it doesn't affect nodes that were running before the attack happened. But a situation where new entrants int…

> But a situation where new entrants into the network are uncertain of the 'true' fork is not tenable in the long term.

This is an important point to consider, but it can be mitigated with exit delays. E.g. with Eth2's current settings, if an attacker had 2/3 stake at one point, I believe it would take them 6-7 months to exit all those validators. So while it's true that new entrants must sync from a trusted checkpoint, the checkpoint can be quite old.

Let's say my client has a hardcoded list of checkpoints, with a new one added once a month. The client would only accept forks containing all of those checkpoints in their history.

It seems like there are two ways an attacker with commit access might try to corrupt this checkpoint list. First, they could try to add bad checkpoints over a period of 6-7 months, until they've fully exited and can safely perform a long-fork attack. This seems impractical, since the bad checkpoints would be noticed by existing node operators (who would get stuck after upgrading their clients), and 6-7 months seems like plenty of time to raise the alarm.

Alternatively, an attacker could just delete 6+ good checkpoints, and replace them with 6+ bad ones, all at once. This would violate the convention of adding monthly checkpoints, so it should be easily recognized as a malicious change. One could argue that it might go unnoticed anyway, but sneaking in such a change seems roughly as hard as sneaking in any other clearly-malicious client change.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#545

Post by madacol » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

Laforet wrote: post #20

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…

Is the threat of long range attacks in PoS any worse than PoW in practice? Bitcoin for example still relies on a list of hardcoded nodes for bootstrapping clients. Not to mention very few people actually bother to verify the full chain (360GB and counting) from genesis. As for auditing the the integrity of the code or binary, it is signed by GPG keys hosted on public key servers accessed using X509 certificates pinne…

I verified the full chain a couple of weeks ago (But I admit I trusted umbrel to choose the "correct" bitcoin-core software to run), It took less than 3 days to sync on a Rpi4

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#546

Post by politician » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:44 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 is the optimal strategy for searching physics for the most effective means of transforming energy to electricity. There’s zero waste in this search — it directly converts electricity into money driving pure demand for more electricity which motivates the search for more efficient generation. It’s more efficient than Aluminum production in this regard— the economy can only absorb a certain amount of Aluminum.

A carbon tax would effectively and immediately steer this search away from using fossil fuels for generation.

People who clutch their pearls over PoW are unwitting Malthusians lacking an appreciation for E=mc^2.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#547

Post by Aunche » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:46 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…

>Lastly, bitcoin mining to could sustained solely by using stranded energy, which would otherwise be unused.

You can make that argument about any sort of waste of electricity, like blasting your A/C with the windows open. The problem is you can't guarantee that people are only using wasted energy. People don't mine Bitcoin to generously find a use for surplus energy. They do so for a profit. Also, people will require mining for Bitcoin transactions regardless of whether there happens to be surplus energy.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#548

Post by lukifer » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

pibechorro wrote: post #500

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.

Not to mention pow mining is not location or resource specific. It encourages cheap and efficient use of energy. Miners preffer low cost, surplus energy and will relocate wherever that may be. Pow can use nuclear, thermal, wind, solar and alsoo dirty fuels, just like a Tesla. If you have an issue with the use of dirty fuels, then campaign against that specifically, throwing pow under the bus entirely is short sighted…

While I think it's fair to properly account for the carbon footprint of traditional banking and state military infrastructure, it is an utter fantasy that crypto is in direct competition with them. Crypto has been steadily integrating with existing banking institutions and regulations over the last five years; and barring some kind of new free-market, secrets-based "killer drones as a service", no distributed hash table can supplant raw military hegemony (aka, the $5 wrench attack [0]).

I think crypto has a lot of socially useful potential, beyond mere speculative gambling and Austrian-school value storage, but that's in addition to the centuries of momentum in our real-world political economy; crypto-currencies are unlikely to replace that entirely, anymore than the internet replaced the New York Times.

[0] https://xkcd.com/538/

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#549

Post by vanusa » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

wcoenen wrote: post #442

poontang1 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

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

The raw figure it uses for gross power consumption (62 Twh) is also unsourced.

Meanwhile, the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance puts the figure at around twice that - 110 Twh.

Not that we had any reason to grant credence to what a bitcoin "investment" company says about the matter, anyway.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#550

Post by kneel » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:52 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…

>1. The resource usage overshoots and PoW collapses because it gets banned everywhere.

Bitcoin difficulty adjusts dynamically with available hashpower, in other words if miners started to shut down the network would lower it's difficulty to keep blocktimes stable.

The chain will not collapse because someone somewhere will always keep it going.