Why do unsophisticated, redundant, vitriolic takes like this get upvoted on HN so much? Is there some common ax to grind here? The strongest point here is the strawman presentation of the altered security model that PoS can be proven to form consensus under. Reading the source he cites is far more informative: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov... The majority of the article frames distribut…
I would love to see the same content / angle of this article re-written. I think it could be condensed to a few paragraphs perhaps, for those who already understand Proof of Work. I found myself getting stuck in the analogies (infinite lottery tickets) and not being able to make progress. But I'm interested in the pros/cons of PoW vs PoS if you have recommendations.
Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
81–90 of 822 posts
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have we already forgotten what happened to youtube-dl at the hands of GitHub? I know GitHub were only following the DMCA but it shows they have the capability to not only remove the project but also all of its forks.
I genuinely don't understand the fear generated by the youtube-dl storm in a teacup. It's a great example of the system working: someone thought they had a DMCA case so they filed a takedown, the takedown temporarily removed the content, then after a review the content was put back up. This is just evidence that this particular slope isn't as slippery as some thought.
> the content was put back up.
The repo is back up, but the project is dead. I suspect the developers got nasty letters from lawyers behind the scenes. I believe yt-dlp is the future of this project, but it's presently lesser known than youtube-dl so the lawyers got what they wanted in the end.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#83If POS is really as bad as claimed, then why is Ethereum 2.0 going to be using POS?
It's not bad. This piece is written by a bitcoin maxi.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#84Can't wait for the day all PoW mining activities are declared illegal. To be honest, I don't understand why it hasn't been banned already. Sweden has recently called for a EU wide ban because it identified PoW mining as a threat to transition their economy to renewable energy. https://www.fi.se/en/published/presentations/2021/crypto-ass...
Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?
I'm just imagining downloading a porn client which fetches 300 gigabytes of bullshit before it finally lets me watch a movie at a whopping five frames per second.
And best of all, someone complaining that this is clearly a wasteful scam and being told back, "how much energy did videocassettes and magazines consume, huh?"
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#85Why do unsophisticated, redundant, vitriolic takes like this get upvoted on HN so much? Is there some common ax to grind here? The strongest point here is the strawman presentation of the altered security model that PoS can be proven to form consensus under. Reading the source he cites is far more informative: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov... The majority of the article frames distribut…
"The majority of the article frames distributed consensus mechanisms in an extremely sophomoric understanding of asset value and the PoW security model" This is one of those sentences that reads like it is saying a lot but might actually be nonsensical. Care to elaborate on this? i.e how exactly does the article 'frames distributed consensus mechanisms in an understanding of asset value'. I read the article and I did…
I don't particularly care to rebut the author point by point, but "asset valuation" is an extremely common term that anybody discussing the properties of a novel currency should understand: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/assetvaluation.asp
In relation to that I was specifically referring to the misunderstandings present in "Nothing at stake".
You say:
"There are blockchain projects raising literally Billions of dollars on this false guarantee so it is valid to criticize them."
Are you not presupposing the correctness of the author's argument by calling it false? Have you already made up your mind?
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?
What is your source according to which Christmas lights and porn use more energy than bitcoin? I fear you may seriously underestimate the energy usage of bitcoin. Even clothes dryer seem to be using less energy than Bitcoin. If you run the dryer for an hour each week, you're at 12-15kWh per month, which is 1-2% of your average household energy usage in the US, Canada or the EU. Now households at most around a third o…
You're missing the point.
If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed?
Numbers I've seen suggest that global PC gaming alone (excluding consoles) currently uses about as much electricity as bitcoin. Should we ban that too since playing cards are readily available and use almost no energy? Maybe we can make a concession and only allow low powered handheld consoles?
If bitcoin mining actually becomes problematic, then by all means we can definitely ban it or add some sin taxes to it, and we probably will in a lot of jurisdictions. I'm actually kind of eager for that to happen, because it will force miners to actually become novel/stranded energy ventures. They'll be the capital drive that builds out energy sources that not enough humans live around to justify tapping and/or we can't economically justifying building without expensive transmission infrastructure. And once it's built out and paid off, it may be a lot easier to justify investing in building out long distance transmission infrastructure so the rest of civilization can also tap into these sources.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#87Can't wait for the day all PoW mining activities are declared illegal. To be honest, I don't understand why it hasn't been banned already. Sweden has recently called for a EU wide ban because it identified PoW mining as a threat to transition their economy to renewable energy. https://www.fi.se/en/published/presentations/2021/crypto-ass...
Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?
> Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcoin.
These discussions should talk about the ratio between a certain measure of productivity (e.g. GDP generated for the country) to the energy use; energy on its own does not mean much. I'm sure worldwide food production consumes more energy than Bitcoin.
Other than that, a problem with POW (at least as implemented in Bitcoin) is that technological advances won't result in less energy consumption as it's mostly a function of (price of Bitcoin, price of energy).
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#88Proof of work has always had an economic flaw that you could theoretically temporarily rent enough mining power to perform double spends of more value than the cost of renting those devices. But this attack has never been performed because the reality of all these cryptocurrencies is that the security depends only relatively weakly on proof of work. Instead it relies on trust between the main stakeholders: miners, bi…
This attack has happened, at least twice to ETC and many others.
Proof of work networks with the same hash algorithm are a threat to one another, particularly, if a network exists that is profitable enough to have exorbitant resources dedicated to mining, those resources are available to attack a much smaller network if that becomes more profitable for some period than just continuing to mine the bigger one.
Proof of work then only protects the largest projects using unique hash algorithms.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#89Can't wait for the day all PoW mining activities are declared illegal. To be honest, I don't understand why it hasn't been banned already. Sweden has recently called for a EU wide ban because it identified PoW mining as a threat to transition their economy to renewable energy. https://www.fi.se/en/published/presentations/2021/crypto-ass...
Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?
It’s actually rather straightforward.
If the amount of throughput and everything else remains constant while more and more computers are in a zero-sum arms race to waste electricity to solve a useless hash problem, then it is by definition not useful except for “securing the network”.
And if you can secure a network some other way, then it definitely becomes better by any arbitrary order of magnitude, assuming your utility function doesn’t place infinite value on securing 10 transactions a second with to over 99.9999% certainty and willing to waste all the world’s electricity to do it.
Literally even if you value all other uses of electricity put together as 1/100000 of securing Bitcoin then in a few years banning PoW becomes the right move.
But I imagine it will be like the war on drugs — impossible to totally eradicate, since mining rewards become more lucrative every year forever. Until bitcoin blackouts are frequent in the first world, msot people won’t care though.
Imagine if people asked how many emails (SMTP), conversations (VOIP) or websites (HTTP) the Internet can ever handle pet second and the answer was 10, no matter how many computers joined the network. Because every time you had to make progress, everything went through one bottleneck called a miner. Would this be the topology you want to reward with ever-more-valuable rewards?
Imagine if BitTorrent worked this way, and every computer would seed every file. And maximalists said that this was the ONLY AND BEST WAY.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#90Proof of work has always had an economic flaw that you could theoretically temporarily rent enough mining power to perform double spends of more value than the cost of renting those devices. But this attack has never been performed because the reality of all these cryptocurrencies is that the security depends only relatively weakly on proof of work. Instead it relies on trust between the main stakeholders: miners, bi…
My understanding was that this was demoed with some small coin by just hiring the 51% on niceHash for a few hundred usd.
Edit: I was lookimg for the artivle I was referring to and saw that Ethereoum Classic (ETC) has been attacked simce via just that method. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/08/29/ethereum-classic...