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Children Playing Blockchain

jott.live

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Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#61

Post by capnorange »

dperfect wrote: post #28
capnorange wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the bricks are the blocks not the currency, here the value is in able to write their own names on the bricks with a sharpie.

Still doesn't make sense to me. > If they add their brick to the top, other students will pay them (in bricks) to write their own names on it with a sharpie Other students are paying in bricks ? Is that supposed to be transaction fees, mining (that's the sudoku puzzles), or what? And is there any indication that a name on a brick means anything (or can be exchanged for anything)? Is there a limit to the number of nam…

sorry, I read it wrong trying to compare it to bitcoin.

I think the author is only demonstrating PoW/PoS and not Bitcoin itself.

> Other students are paying in bricks?

This is the transaction fees.

> Is there a limit to the number of names on bricks?

Not necessary.

> And is there any indication that a name on a brick means anything (or can be exchanged for anything)?

Pride, having taken part in building the biggest building.

> Can those names be verified at any instant, anywhere in the world with near 100% confidence?

This is only about PoW/PoS, not decentralisation. Ofcourse, PoW/PoS is meaningless if participants are not able to validate.

So, in the end it's all about the pride in being able be a part of the tallest set of bricks, hah!

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#62

Post by DennisP »

hmrtn wrote: post #48

Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.

I didn't really see it as being critical of blockchains in general. It's just comparing two blockchain technologies and pointing out that one has a more level playing field.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#63

Post by cwkoss »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #46
spurdoman77 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it - holders can mint new blocks. With proof of work there is actual work involved tol, not just minting money with your capital.

> Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it That's certainly true with a very simple PoS mechanism. I don't think that type of PoS is used in practice with any major cryptocurrency (please correct me if I'm wrong though). The one I'm most familiar with (Cardano) uses delegated proof of stake, so users delegate their stake to a stake pool and share in the rewards. The platform supports, encoura…

No type of PoS is used in practice with any major cryptocurrency

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#64

Post by wmf »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #46
spurdoman77 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it - holders can mint new blocks. With proof of work there is actual work involved tol, not just minting money with your capital.

> Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it That's certainly true with a very simple PoS mechanism. I don't think that type of PoS is used in practice with any major cryptocurrency (please correct me if I'm wrong though). The one I'm most familiar with (Cardano) uses delegated proof of stake, so users delegate their stake to a stake pool and share in the rewards. The platform supports, encoura…

Delegation has nothing to do with it. If you own, say, 1% of staked coins you get 1% of the staking rewards in perpetuity in exchange for doing almost nothing.

I don't consider this a problem but it's a fact that PoS works that way.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#65

Post by chrisco255 »

hmrtn wrote: post #48

Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.

Agreed. I think HN's general sentiment against blockchain and crypto is completely counter to the hacker mentality that PG promoted. And it's frustrating, because this is one of the most intellectually stimulating communities on the web. And I see crypto developments rapidly becoming the most disruptive technology of this decade, if not century and we can't discuss it without bikeshedding. Seems to me like there might be a market for an HN-like community that is focused on crypto tech and developments exclusively (and I don't think Reddit or Twitter quite fill the same niche that HN does).

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#66

Post by pcthrowaway »

gus_massa wrote: post #47
pcthrowaway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it That's certainly true with a very simple PoS mechanism. I don't think that type of PoS is used in practice with any major cryptocurrency (please correct me if I'm wrong though). The one I'm most familiar with (Cardano) uses delegated proof of stake, so users delegate their stake to a stake pool and share in the rewards. The platform supports, encoura…

If some group owns 50% of Cardano, what prevents them to from crating two fake pools with 25% and 25% and avoid the penalties? (Or 100 groups with .5%, or whatever is needed.)

(TL;DR: operators can't make more than ~7% annual return on their stake in the long run, and non-operators (people with only 50 ADA for example) can earn ~6-7% by delegating to the most profitable pools.)

Longer answer: The most you can get from staking is an annual 6-7% return on your stake. I don't fully understand how their saturation parameter works, but here's the general idea: Currently a stake pool with .2% of all ADA staked is considered 'saturated'. This means (in my working understanding, I suspect things are a bit more nuanced) that ADA delegated to them beyond that .2% doesn't receive additional rewards. Therefore it's in the delegators' interest to avoid delegating to pools with greater than .2% of all ADA, and oversaturation works against the stake pool operators as well.

What this means in practice, is that this theoretical group owning 50% of ADA could set up 250 stake pools and fully saturate them for maximum profitability. However, other users can also delegate to those stake pools and share in the rewards. While the operators may receive 1-2% more rewards than non-operating users (there's a limit to how much 'extra' the operators can take, but this extra percentage is intended to incentivize running stake pools), at a certain point of oversaturation (if their pools are profitable enough), it would make more sense for them to just add more stake pools to (or delegate to other pools which are under-saturated) rather than let their existing pools be significantly oversaturated.

cardano.org has an insightful blog post: https://iohk.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/900004671183-Chan... and a useful calculator: https://cardano.org/calculator/?calculator=operator

which are both worth looking at if you're interested in knowing more

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#67

Post by mcbuilder »

I'm new to the concept of PoS. Would the underlying mechanism of Burstcoin be proof of stake, i.e. large amounts of HDD space instead of computing the solution hash problems? Or is Burstcoin still proof of work? I'm just curious because the proof of space model seems much more environmentally friendly instead of solving random problems with massive amounts of computation.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#68

Post by capnorange »

Jasper_ wrote: post #35
capnorange wrote: post #10

> but without 2 years of constantly solving sudoku under their belt, they couldn't compete with the more experienced sudoku-solvers Inaccurate analogy. Miners are more limited by cheap electricity/cooling than CPU which is more generally available.

The top Bitcoin mining pools in China create their own mining ASICs in house for competitive advantage. You just can't compete without spending years catching up to their hardware designs.

As long as selling ASIC's are profitable -> more R&D and eventually everyone has access to the most capable ASIC's.

Off the top of my head, data from 2 years back(things might have changed now). Bitmain, one of the top 3 mining pools, 90% of their revenue was from ASIC sales rather than mining.

As long as Bitmain has competitors, they should always be able to put out the best ASIC's to the public.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#69

Post by 0x64 »

spurdoman77 wrote: post #20
ronsor wrote: post #2

> The first class lost the students that simply couldn't keep up with the increasingly difficult sudokus. This is the story of every proof-of-work cryptocurrency. After a certain point, they only serve to make the rich even richer. Look at Bitcoin for example, where over 50% of the hashing power is controlled by big Chinese mining operations.

Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it - holders can mint new blocks. With proof of work there is actual work involved tol, not just minting money with your capital.

On Ethereum's proof of stake network, over 90% of the rewards come from simply attesting correctly to the state of the chain every 7-or-so minutes. Block rewards are a nice little bonus, but effectively irrelevant in terms of rewards in the long run since the block proposer is selected randomly. Sure, controlling more validators improves your chances of being selected for proposing the block, but it's still a random process.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#70

Post by pcthrowaway »

cwkoss wrote: post #63
pcthrowaway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it That's certainly true with a very simple PoS mechanism. I don't think that type of PoS is used in practice with any major cryptocurrency (please correct me if I'm wrong though). The one I'm most familiar with (Cardano) uses delegated proof of stake, so users delegate their stake to a stake pool and share in the rewards. The platform supports, encoura…

No type of PoS is used in practice with any major cryptocurrency

If by major cryptocurrency you mean "only bitcoin and ethereum", then sure. Cardano is the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap (currently; it's neck-and-neck with a couple more, so this is subject to change still), and has used PoS from day 1 (though I've read some people consider it not "true" PoS because of how they solve the issues of ownership consolidation, and it's also been called "delegated PoS")
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