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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

#561

Post by dcow »

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…

Why is nobody talking about XCH (or XFX if you don’t like the size of the pre-mine)? It will have similar issues as PoW in the long long run (at a fraction of the cost), but it’s a clear iteration on the energy consumption issue of PoW chains that doesn’t concede the entire consensus idea is broken and advocate for switching to an oligarchy.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#562

Post by kneel »

pkulak wrote: post #556
kneel wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Would be interesting to watch someone try to amass ~0.5% of the world's energy/miners to perform a 51% attack on Bitcoin.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#563

Post by pkulak »

Geee wrote: post #491
arbuge wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PoW generates heat, which is not waste, if it is utilized. There are far more energy-efficient ways of generating that heat than PoW. This is an (extremely) flawed argument. PoW is roughly akin to resistive heating. Heat pumps are about three times as energy-efficient as resistive heating. This does not even begin to take into account that there is no practical way to transfer the heat generated in massive server f…

There's also the need to heat water, and that requires resistive heaters. Also, heat pumps don't really work in colder climates as the only heat source. Resistive heating is the most common way to heat spaces with electricity.

Heat pumps can run at greater than 100% efficiency at nearly any temperature possible outside. And they can heat water just fine.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#564

Post by politician »

toss1 wrote: post #542
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…

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 s…

A while ago, I asked folks if PoW happened entirely off-Earth using the Sun. Predictably, that was still a problem to some people which, to me, says everything.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#565

Post by leishman »

eftychis wrote: post #171
inter_netuser wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And Proof of Work is better because the haves buy equipment the have-nots can't buy to vote? Unless you have a citizenship based voting of some short where a single person gets a single vote and they actually vote (automatically I guess and assuming without delegating to the big whale because "I am bored") what do you think agreement via resource scarcity implies? P.S. Also lobbying...

Yes PoW is way better because miners need to constantly expend resources to maintain their right to participate. PoS validators keep their throne for life at virtually no cost.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#566

Post by sktrdie »

Djrhfbfnsks wrote: post #494
sktrdie wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally someone actually mentioning the code. In PoS "trust" must exist along several points in time before you can engage with the system - and the most notable point being trusting that the rules (written in the code) are of your desire. With PoW you don't care about the software code. The rules are dominated by the PoW because it literally proves to you which is the chain where most people are interested in, becau…

If you don't trust the code of a PoW client, how could you trust it to not simply empty your wallet as soon as you import your private key?

I was talking about the consensus part. You don't need any client code to understand which is the agreed-upon chain, you verify the hash was generated using lots of energy.

For transacting indeed you need to trust the various clients, but that's easy and can be done once. With the consensus isn't being tampered with, and, more importantly that others are using other types of rules.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#567

Post by qnsi »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #527
LittlePeter wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "they"? Why would they be scared of it? Did you buy more Ethereum after seeing this article? And if you did not see this article you would be still be buying Ethereum, but "less" right?

“They” is Bitcoin holders, of which I will no longer be one by Dec. 1. Proof of work makes no sense anymore and proof of stake will take over with the launch of Ethereum 2.0 in 2022. I’m unbiased, this is just the market and math I see coming.

you have money invested in Ethereum. Obviously you are biased

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#568

Post by waltbosz »

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…

> ... stranded energy, which would otherwise be unused. Flared gas in Texas, for instance, could provide more power than the network currently uses.

I do like the idea of using energy that would have otherwise gone to waste. Or the concept of putting mining hardware in remote areas where there is energy to be tapped, but no customers for it. I wonder about all the steam that emits from a nuclear plant's cooling tower. It seems like such a waste to let all that energy just go up into the air.

One thing that troubles me is the various reports of theft associated with mining. I occasionally see various stories of energy and CPU-time theft. Plus there was that truck full of GPUs that was recently stolen.

I wonder what parallels could be drawn to the California gold rush. Theft was probably rampant then too.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#569

Post by dan-robertson »

righttoolforjob wrote: post #535
d0gbread wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interpreting your comment as: x = x As if that's insightful. But in the spirit of HN, can you say more? My understanding is that renewables are the cheapest and will likely continue to trend in that direction, causation or not. So are you suggesting maybe there's a chance of a super inexpensive non-renewable overtaking this trend?

I was responding to someone's argument along the lines of mining needs energy, the cheapest energy is renewable, therefore mining would drive an increase in the supply of renewable energy, and a forthcoming decline of mining would free up a supply of renewable energy. I broke this chain of logic by pointing out that renewable is an unnecessary consideration and that mining activities will choose the cheapest option r…

I’m really struggling to understand what you’ve written. I certainly don’t feel like my “chain of logic” has been broken. Maybe I just don’t understand your argument. Or maybe I’m just being stupid.

To be clear, I think:

- having surplus (or cheaper) energy is good

- generating relatively more energy through renewable resources is good

- renewable energy is cheaper and so lower energy prices promote renewable energy more (but also reduce the supply in general)

- Current bitcoin mining increases demand and therefore generation and, to some extent, prices while supply catches up

- a drop in bitcoin mining would lead to a surplus of (renewable) energy which I think would be good

Can you help me find what the source of confusion is?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#570

Post by xur17 »

sp332 wrote: post #495
suikadayo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s delayed? Beacon chain has been running on mainnet since last December-ish. http://beaconcha.in

The merge was going to happen by the end of this year, but miners complained https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441399 and then it was delayed again. https://www.coinhighlight.com/2021/10/ethereum-eth-devs-look...

> but miners complained https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441399 and then it was delayed again

To be clear, it wasn't delayed because miners complained, it was delayed because it wasn't ready yet.

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