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Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

yanmaani.github.io

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Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#551

Post by mrkramer »

ajuc wrote: post #536
mrkramer wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that market needs to decide whether Bitcoin is toxic commodity or not and what I mean by not is Bitcoin being useful like oil and gas are or any other commodity. And yes majority of people behave according to game theory because if they do not then they lose or in extreme cases die.

If people behaved like game theory says they should then lottery, addictions and casinos wouldn't exist.

Read again what I wrote >majority of people behave according to game theory because if they do not then they lose or in extreme cases die.

Majority of people are not addicts but those who are lose or in extreme cases die like for example alcohol addicts, drug addicts even casino gambling addicts who tend to suicide when losses amass and loans come due.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#552

Post by JoshTko »

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…

Carbon tax would solve this waste.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#553

Post by meribold »

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #523
notahacker wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

No, not true. Nodes can literally just choose to use the version of software that provides the best money. You can’t choose to use the US monetary policy from 1960, for example. This has happened multiple times with attempted hard forks of Bitcoin which have failed because once you change the monetary policy once, the promise of hard money effect disappears. So the original monetary policy remains in place and the or…

I imagine the idea of a hard fork of Bitcoin may become more popular as the supply limit is approached and transaction fees go up. The current transaction fee is only a few dollars but the cost is over a hundred. Eventually the fee will have to cover the full cost and a hard fork may start to look more interesting.

If this happens I can technically stay on the original protocol, but that would be rather pointless if a sufficient majority abandons it.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#554

Post by dcow »

seoaeu wrote: post #383
tzs wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Um, the difficulty of switching to renewable energy is directly proportional to the amount of capacity you need to build. That we’ll eventually reach net zero carbon so emissions now don’t matter is a rather outrageous claim

99.9% has nothing to do with crypto.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#555

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

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?

Air travel is about 2.5% of total carbon emissions and is incessantly discussed by climate activists.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#556

Post by pkulak »

kneel wrote: post #550
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.

> Bitcoin difficulty adjusts dynamically

As does the energy use by miners. So, energy use reacts to price, and then difficulty reacts to energy use. That's OP's point.

> if miners started to shut down...

Actually, that would be _very_ interesting. Then you'd have millions of dollars of hardware doing nothing. And doing nothing is losing money. Maybe at that point attacking the network is more profitable than watching your hardware depreciate.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#557

Post by boublepop »

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…

You cannot have PoW running on burning a free or cheap resource, the entire point of PoW is that the resource you are burning is costly, which pushes up the amount burned to close to the break-even point.

The amount of energy consumed now is not at its current level because of some fixed power requirement of the network. It’s there due to competition. If power was cheaper miners would run their ops using more power and the only thing that would change would be more energy would be wasted.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#558

Post by pkulak »

Kbelicius wrote: post #505
timbit42 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn't makes any sense. The amount of energy any PoW coin uses has nothing to do with the number of transactions that are made.

It absolutely does, since mining rewards are mostly from transaction fees.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#559

Post by kneel »

codyb wrote: post #513
rufi wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity will not be a problem for the world in the next 30 years... 1. We will all move to renewal or nuclear 2. Bitcoin will decentralize more as the miners will move where electricity is cheaper and thus will cover geography of whole world hydro,thermal,solar,wind etc.. 3. Bitcoin can be the main chain and all side chains can rollup and commits. 4. The btc uses will be huge and there will be no dearth of transa…

On point 4, when do these “huge uses” start to appear? Bitcoin’s been around for what… 13 years now? Seems to be speculators, scammers, money launderers, and phishing/hacking rings still. Everything that tries to accept bitcoin for payment seems to stop doing so relatively quickly. It’s intentionally deflationary so anyone who holds a bitcoin is incentivized to hold it, not use it. Just bizarre.

Companies are holding BTC instead of treasuries, nations are issuing Bitcoin bonds, millions of people are buying in as governments print themselves into sinkholes..

Where is the use case?

Bitcoin already proved its use case years ago, it already won. The only question now is how far can it go.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#560

Post by thinkmassive »

keymone wrote: post #391
lottin wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, yo…

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…

> 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.

Yes, they do get to choose the block. Transactions to include in the block are (usually) chosen from the mempool, which is unique per node (it’s similar but never exactly the same between any two nodes). Miners can also choose to include transactions that were never publicly broadcasted, and therefore never appeared in another mempool. Typically the transactions with highest fees are chosen, although fees can also be paid (or bumped) outside the mempool.

The miner of a block doesn’t get to choose the contents of every transaction, but they do choose which transactions to include when they win a block.

It seems like you’re hung up on terms that aren’t commonly used in the context of bitcoin mining, but are valid and are commonly used in the broader context of distributed systems.

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