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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

#591

Post by dcow »

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…

You’ve created an impossible straw man: crypto is only running on renewables and the rest of the world isn’t because crypto hogs it all. That’s just not ever going to be reality.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#593

Post by dcow »

otiose_tortoise wrote: post #588

This article completely misunderstands proof-of-stake and the distributed consensus space in general. Both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake are mechanisms for making distributed consensus sybil-resistant. Distributed consensus is the problem of getting a bunch of computers to agree on some state when some of the computers can behave maliciously. In the case of cryptocurrency, the state is a log of transactions, which…

The main point the author is making is that PoS doesn’t require spending of any scarce resource on a per block level so the accuracy of the distributed clock is not to be trusted. I don't think they misunderstand their argument. You’re just not replying to it.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#594

Post by keymone »

codyb wrote: post #526
keymone wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice to see you rationalizing expenditure that goes towards murdering people. Are you the people talking down to bitcoiners about being wasteful and not caring about future of humanity? Give me a break.

How many people aren’t murdered because of armies though? Humans have been grouping and fighting each other for thousands of years now. You’re under the impression everyone should just… what… pretend it doesn’t happen? When attacking a neighbor state costs more (because your neighbors have arms too), it’s less likely to happen. The cold war had plenty of awful hot action with proxies and third parties but the entirel…

But when conflict is resolved by energy expenditure, it involves even less suffering.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#595

Post by michaelmrose »

inter_netuser wrote: post #260
Dylan16807 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens. You don't think those get very wasteful in the real world? And there's no equivalent to a real war situation. You can set it up so you don't need to defend against the equivalent of enemy armies. > The vast majority of mining today uses susta…

I disagree that standing armies and nuclear weapons are a waste. They guarantee your security, which you seem to take for granted. Your views on this could change if you spend a few years in a warzone under artillery fire. It is of course not 100% perfect analogy, nothing is, but I believe you understood the point I tried to get across: it's a security service, and that costs money. Blackwater stationary guard roles…

Pools in the US use 14 billion kwh it's hard to imagine it being even global orders of magnitude more than Bitcoin.

It's also hard to see how push button Armageddon has possibly made us more safe than nobody having nukes. We are only more safe than if only our enemies had them. The same could even be said of armies.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#596

Post by [deleted] »

lukifer wrote: post #590
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoB: Proof of Bullshit

PoW should actually stand for Proof of Waste. It's not even unprecedented in nature: many species will intentionally waste energy or resources to demonstrate mating fitness, as with a peacock's tail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

[deleted]

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#597

Post by Kbelicius »

pkulak wrote: post #558
Kbelicius wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No they are not. For mining a block of BTC a miner gets a reward of 6.25 BTC. Transaction fees, by looking at the past few blocks, don't go much beyond 0.05 BTC. That is not even close.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#598

Post by SilasX »

bouncycastle wrote: post #238
inter_netuser wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only some, it seems, are more equal than others. https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/760232885483806720

I'm not sure what you are linking to. This looks like a tweet from 2016.

I think what the parent referring to is the DAO hack (from 2016) and how Ethereum’s response was to renege on “Code is Law” (and the integrity of the blockchain) in order to void those transactions (smartcontract exploits), which is a case of centralization resurfacing because VB could subvert the proof of work system when his own money was at risk.

Ethereum Classic is the fork that refused to rewrite the blockchain to void the hack, and the linked tweet is VB affirming that he’s only working on the main (reneging) Ethereum fork (which goes by ETH), not Classic (goes by ETC).

Not sure why the parent linked that tweet, maybe Twitter just makes it too hard it identify what tweet you actually want.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#599

Post by yowlingcat »

Magnusmaster wrote: post #585
marcus_cemes wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's burning electricity (that could in an ideal world be renewable, maybe one day) to provide a service to the network, therefore making it more secure by providing additional processing capacity that is controlled by a good actor, making it harder for a bad actor to get 51% of the pie. It is a waste, but there are also a lot of other sources of wasted resources/energy that we could tackle first and get larger retur…

The service is worthless if you can trust a central authority like a government that 99.99% of people do.

There are many countries where people cannot trust a central authority like a government to keep their savings remotely safe and stable in value.
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