[HN Gopher] Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
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Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
Author : alg0rith
Score : 708 points
Date : 2021-11-28 05:03 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yanmaani.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (yanmaani.github.io)
| mNovak wrote:
| Am I understanding this correctly; is the threat model that a
| block signer, some time later after liquidating their stake, can
| go and publish arbitrary versions of that older block?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Yes, but it is a little more than that: that future nodes will
| not be able to distinguish these two blocks without relying on
| some authoritative source for the canonical chain, thus
| introducing centralization to the game environment.
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| hashcash was not obscure even before bitcoin came out
| udbhavs wrote:
| What about delegated proof of stake?
| anonymoushn wrote:
| that's just worse, but not in ways that really interact with
| the thrust of the article
| vages wrote:
| > If a node can present a lottery ticket of rarity one-in-a-
| million, the network can conclude the node did about a million
| lottery tickets' worth of work, on average.
|
| This is not true. You will have scratched far fewer tickets on
| average than one million.
|
| If you have one million tickets, one of them guaranteed to be a
| winner, you will on average scratch exactly half of them (500
| 000) before finding the winning ticket. If you have an infinite
| supply of tickets, each with a 0.000,001 chance of winning, the
| number becomes higher, but the number of tickets scratched on
| average is still lower than one million.
|
| Finding an error regarding something I know makes me skeptical
| about the rest of the article.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| If there's a million tickets and you know one of them is a
| winner, then yes.
|
| If you have an effectively infinite stream of tickets and each
| have a 1 in X probability of winning, you will indeed go
| through X on average.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yeah, I think that's right. The hypothesis was that _on
| average_ , one in a million cards is a hit. That implies that
| if you scratch a million cards, you have a 50:50 chance of a
| hit.
|
| That the author got this basic thing wrong doesn't inspire
| much confidence in the rest of his reasoning.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Well, I guess in real life blockchains it's like the latter
| case. You have a block and look for a nonce. There is an
| effectively infinite stream of nonces ("lottery tickets").
| You have no guarantee that even one works, other than
| statistical hope. So then if probability of a match is 1 in
| X, you expect to have to do X attempts.
|
| I have other issues with the article but this bit seems ok.
| barbegal wrote:
| Proof 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, big nodes and developers.
| This is just like any other human organisation. That trust is
| only reinforced by proof of work, making it easier for new
| parties to become trusted.
| runeks wrote:
| > Proof 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.
|
| It's not a flaw if it's only theoretical. In practice, no miner
| with billions of dollars of capital bound in mining hardware
| would rent it out to someone who might do something that would
| significantly depreciate this capital (e.g. attack the Bitcoin
| network).
| celeduc wrote:
| 51% attacks have been performed on some smaller PoW chains,
| specifically Ethereum Classic. It's not that hard.
| https://www.crypto51.app/
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Instead it relies on trust between the main stakeholders:
| miners, big nodes and developers._
|
| In other words, it relies not on one central authority but on a
| small clique of central authorities.
| crazypython wrote:
| https://www.crypto51.app/
|
| To execute a double spend, you the one sending the transaction
| and the miner must coordinate.
|
| For large transactions, it is recommended to wait for six
| confirmations. (six blocks that agree with the transaction and
| have not been 51%ed.)
|
| The 1 hour 51% cost of Bitcoin is 1.9m$. However, you would
| need much more time than that to find six consecutive blocks
| alone, without the help of the network. So, while the network
| is 6 blocks ahead, you need to find 7 blocks. The network moves
| forward a block, you must move forward more than one block to
| catch up. This could take a long time, and longer the more
| confirmations required- each confirmation makes each previous
| transaction exponentially more secure. Simply controlling the
| mining power momentarily only puts recent transactions
| vulnerable.
|
| However, that much hardware is available for rent-see
| "Nicehashable."
| yuliyp wrote:
| I don't see how more confirmations makes it exponenrially
| harder to mount a 51% attack: you just need to be mining
| faster privately than the remaining community until you (a)
| have a lead, and (b) have maintained that lead for the
| confirmation window.
| bellajbadr wrote:
| That's called Selfish mminign but the prob is to be faster
| than the network!
| yanmaani wrote:
| There's luck involved too. In the limiting case, imagine
| you have 0.001% of the network hash rate and need a 1 block
| lead. This can happen every now and then, but getting a 2
| block lead is basically impossible.
|
| The exact formula is given in the Bitcoin whitepaper
| <https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>, see page 6 and on.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| 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...
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Renting out equipment for miners is dangerous, as an attack on
| the network can wipe out all their sunk costs. Bitcoin miner
| farms are very strongly incentivized to be aligned with the
| long term health of the system, so they try to play nice close
| to the ethos of Bitcoin (they learned enough from the blocksize
| wars that they can get burned if they go against Bitcoin)
| Eelongate wrote:
| An attack on bitcoin might have other motivations. For
| instance, a powerful government might attack bitcoin
| specifically to undermine bitcoin's credibility and utility.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I was talking about motivations for renting out, not
| attacking. A goverment would just take over the miners with
| violence probably if it wanted to attack the system.
| paulgb wrote:
| If a halving forces a bunch of miners off the market (because
| their expected revenue drops below operating cost), there
| could be a huge glut of hardware flooding the market that is
| not profitable for honest mining but allows a bad actor to
| temporarily accumulate hashrate.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Bitcoin's price goes up faster than the effect of the
| halving (16x vs 0.5x every 4 years), and with the current
| chip shortage and slowdown of improvements miners generally
| plan for 4 years, but old, inefficient miners with low
| utilization can become an attack vector.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| If your security model requires exponential increase in
| the value of crypto, it's a bad security model.
| dcow wrote:
| The author suggests proof of space as an interesting option but
| then deliberately avoids commenting on Chia's implementation of
| proof of space time. Can someone explain that to me? Is it the
| pre-mine that drives people away? If so there is already a fork
| (Flax) with a much smaller pre-mine that is surely worthy of
| assessment and scrutiny at an algorithmic/system level... Or is
| the author simply acknowledging they aren't ready or qualified to
| comment on PoST versions of Nakamoto consensus?
| jl6 wrote:
| If it's scam, the article could have presented a stronger case
| for it. The objection seems theoretical. If PoS is broken, I
| would expect to see a plausible attack spelled out.
| c0742e9366 wrote:
| As far as I am aware, these long-range forks can be hindered by
| using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) [1, p. 6]. Essentially,
| VDFs take a certain amount of steps to compute and cannot be
| parallelized. However, the correctness of their output can be
| verified efficiently.
|
| Now if a proof of stake includes a VDF that needs to be computed
| for every block, then a long-range attack needs to recompute the
| VDF outputs as well. This is infeasible as it will take a long
| time given the correct choice of VDF parameters.
|
| Notably, the Chia blockchain mentioned in the article would
| succumb to long-range attacks as well were it not for their usage
| of VDFs [2, p. 17].
|
| [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/601.pdf [2]
| https://www.chia.net/assets/ChiaGreenPaper.pdf
| evil-olive wrote:
| > Essentially, VDFs take a certain amount of steps to compute
| and cannot be parallelized. However, the correctness of their
| output can be verified efficiently.
|
| this...sounds exactly like proof of work?
| inter_netuser wrote:
| It is, just wrapped in enough layers of misdirection.
| c0742e9366 wrote:
| No, a VDF just proves that, given a certain input, you spent
| a certain amount of time to compute the unique (!) VDF
| output. As said, this computation must be carried out
| sequentially. Of course, it can still be sped up by creating
| an ASIC (the same technology used for Bitcoin miners
| nowadays). However, there is not point in running multiple
| ASICs (like a Bitcoin mining farm) because the computation
| cannot be parallelized and the output is unique. Thus,
| running one ASIC has exactly the same effect as running
| thousands ASICs and there is no energy waste.
| evil-olive wrote:
| > proves that, given a certain input, you spent a certain
| amount of time
|
| so, proof of work?
| c0742e9366 wrote:
| If you go by the usual, energy-wasting meaning of "proof
| of work" that is also the one relevant to the discussion
| (i.e., Bitcoin-style PoW which is described in the
| article), then no.
| floatboth wrote:
| so, it is proof of work, it's just not "a proof-of-work
| _lottery_ "
| c0742e9366 wrote:
| Yes, in the strict sense of the meaning. In general, the
| comparison of VDFs (a cryptographic building block) and
| Bitcoin-style PoW (a consensus mechanism) is not that
| useful. However, using a VDF as part of a consensus
| mechanism (see e.g., Chia) does not introduce an energy
| overhead.
|
| To demystify what a VDF is, consider the delay function
| (i.e., the majority of the work done to compute a VDF)
| used by the most prominent proposals:
|
| Let N = p*q be a product of two large primes (so an RSA
| modulus) and assume that the primes p and q have been
| immediately thrown away/forgotten after initialization.
| Then, computing
|
| f(x) = x^(2^T) mod N
|
| is believed (dating back to a paper by Rivest, Shamir and
| Wagner in 1996) to take T sequential steps provided that
| T is large enough. For a large T, the only feasible
| approach seems to be repeated squaring modulo N. That is,
| compute y = x^2 mod N, y' = y^2 mod N, ... for T times.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Only the chosen validators for a particular block do the
| calculation, and they only need one core to do it on.
|
| The _global_ CPU and power use for the VDF calculations
| doesn 't need to exceed what you could fit into a single
| server rack.
| williamtrask wrote:
| PoW came from a paper by Cynthia Dwork
| (https://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/pvp.pdf) not
| Hashcash
| optimalsolver wrote:
| It was independently discovered by Adam Back as Hashcash, and
| that was the proof-of-work algorithm Satoshi was familiar with.
| Magnusmaster wrote:
| I don't understand the "nothing at stake" problem. Can't it be
| solved by just not allowing people to withdraw the coins they
| have staked?
| rkagerer wrote:
| I've heard of proof of time, proof of space, proof of
| authority... What other oddball mechanisms are out there?
|
| eg. Anything like "proof of latency"?
| viraptor wrote:
| Packet for proof of bandwidth.
| wmf wrote:
| Helium has a pretty clever proof of geographical coverage
| system based on RF propagation.
| otiose_tortoise wrote:
| 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 when replayed tells you who owns what.
| There are well-known algorithms for distributed consensus, such
| as Paxos and Raft, that are used in real-world applications,
| e.g., the Chubby lockservice.
|
| Distributed consensus algorithms can be proven to reach consensus
| as long as at most a fixed percentage (e.g., 1/3) of the
| computers are behaving maliciously. This assumption is fine for
| applications like Chubby, where Google is running all 5 of the
| computers participating in the consensus, and no one can add
| additional computers. However, this assumption breaks down in the
| case of cryptocurrency, where anyone can spin up computers to
| participate. In fact, an adversary can effectively spin up an
| infinite number of computers. This form of attack is known as a
| sybil attack.
|
| Proof-of-work and proof-of-stake add sybil-resistance to
| distributed consensus algorithms by requiring the adversary to
| commit a scarce resource in order to participate in the consensus
| process. In the case of proof-of-work, the scarce resource is
| computing power. For proof-of-stake, the resource is the currency
| secured by the system itself. This may seem a bit circular, but
| it's fine. In order to attack the system, the adversary would
| have to purchase or borrow a bunch of the currency on the open
| market, which has an economic cost. Proof-of-work permits the
| same attack, where the adversary buys or rents computing power
| instead.
|
| From this perspective, the bitcoin consensus algorithm is in fact
| the odd one. Most distributed consensus algorithms (like Paxos
| and Raft) rely on some kind of voting system.
| dcow wrote:
| 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| You spend "safety of your stacked money while having stacked
| a lot of money" it's a scarce resource as if you over spend
| it you lose your money. And the more money you have stacked
| the less interest you have into braking the currency as it
| makes you lose that money.
| SilasX wrote:
| But it's not a scarce resource you spent. As the author
| says, you can sign multiple, contradictory stakings.
| dathinab wrote:
| Which can (likely will) make you lose all the stacked
| money.
| SilasX wrote:
| The article addresses that in the section starting:
|
| >>Therefore, once they have withdrawn their deposits,
| they are untouchable. This is the "nothing at stake"
| problem. There will inevitably come a point when a node
| is free to liquidate their entire stake and cash out.
|
| And later concludes that, In order to know which is the
| valid staking, you have to already have a decentralized
| mechanism for ordering transactions, which was the
| problem to begin with.
| dathinab wrote:
| But that's also true for PoW as you can use hardware
| which after an attack you can use for other things.
| SilasX wrote:
| But you have to do new work (and a lot of it, requiring
| energy and time), compared to the trivial cost of
| generating another signature as in PoS.
| josnyder wrote:
| PoW systems rely on the "phone a friend method" as well. When you
| download a Bitcoin client from a "friend", you are trusting them
| to honestly introduce you to the network. If you fall asleep for
| a period of years, you have to trust your friends to honestly
| inform you of all of the PoW forks and policy changes that have
| occurred over that interval. The only difference is that PoS
| blockchain clients must be bundled with a modestly-recent block
| hash along with the thousands of lines of code that you have no
| practical way to audit.
|
| The problem eventually reduces to Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust"
| [1] problem. There's no way to externally validate the honesty of
| any system (cryptocurrency, or otherwise).
|
| [1]
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
| anonporridge wrote:
| You really don't need to trust a "friend" while bootstrapping
| into the network with PoW, because the proof of work is
| irrevocably embedded within the blockchain, and the real world
| cost of creating those blocks can be pretty easily estimated.
|
| So long as you have a general idea of how much hash power is
| being used currently for the network, or even just how
| efficient ASIC computing is in general at your point in
| history, you can work out how great the hashing difficulty
| should be. You can trivially verify that the block hash with a
| large number of preceding zeros, e.g. 0000000000000000000b98dd8
| e7504793c0644cb0c27eb98f06aab9ea93c4ec2, is the hash of block
| it's attached to, and that a hash value that small would
| require a huge amount of energy to find. And every block
| beneath it also required a huge amount of energy, creating a
| huge real world economic cost to produce. You can't fake that
| chain without equivalent sacrifice of energy and compute
| resources.
|
| Anyone trying to deceive you with a false chain would have to
| expend approximately as much energy as the entire legitimate
| bitcoin network does, and then keep doing it for as long as
| they want to deceive you. Sure, that theoretically _could_
| happen, but the economic incentives to do it just aren 't
| there.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| If Bitcoin cash had more mining power than Bitcoin would it
| be called Bitcoin instead?
|
| What if Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash had the exact same amount of
| hashing? Which is the true Bitcoin and why?
| rocqua wrote:
| It seems that PoW does not need phone a friend to compare
| "which of these two chains is the true one", whilst PoS does
| need phone a friend for that.
|
| However, that presumes all forks are soft forks; that you are
| presented a correct chain; that you want the soft fork with
| consensus rules accepted by most miners. (If verifying with
| an old bitcoin client the BCH BCT split will be resolved for
| you without you having a say.
|
| In summary, PoW has less need for Phone a Friend than PoS.
| But it still has some problems.
| lottin wrote:
| Same thing applies to PoS.
| crazypython wrote:
| The difference in Proof of Stake is a lawsuit could force the
| distributor of the software to change the hash to one where
| coins weren't stolen. As most developers are not pseudonymous,
| this poses a threat to the honesty of the system.
|
| You mention "POW forks", but Bitcoin's POW has never been hard
| forked: you'd need to trust a Bitcoin expert to tell you if it
| was a good idea.
| everfree wrote:
| > The difference in Proof of Stake is a lawsuit could force
| the distributor of the software to change the hash to one
| where coins weren't stolen.
|
| In Proof of Work, a lawsuit could force the distributor of
| the software to hard-code a transaction that reverses the
| coin theft. But in both the PoS case and the PoW case, anyone
| using that client would be partitioned off from the honest
| network majority.
|
| > You mention "POW forks", but Bitcoin's POW has never been
| hard forked: you'd need to trust a Bitcoin expert to tell you
| if it was a good idea.
|
| Bitcoin's PoW forked in 2013, when a database upgrade to the
| software made it incompatible between two recent versions.
| The Bitcoin developers had to jump in and tell people which
| PoW fork to follow and which one to abandon.
| comex wrote:
| > The difference in Proof of Stake is a lawsuit could force
| the distributor of the software to change the hash to one
| where coins weren't stolen.
|
| And with proof of work a lawsuit could force the distributor
| to change the consensus rule so that a particular transaction
| is invalid - just as Ethereum did voluntarily with the
| original DAO.
|
| > You mention "POW forks", but Bitcoin's POW has never been
| hard forked
|
| Instead it's been soft forked, which turns the consensus
| rules into a popularity contest. If a soft fork produces two
| competing branches of the blockchain, old clients will go
| with whichever branch has more mining power. Which means you
| open yourself up to interesting attacks like convincing 51%
| to literally steal the funds of the other 49% (which is much
| worse than a mere double spend). Or, more realistically, in
| the case of a contentious soft fork that ends up roughly
| fifty-fifty, you could 'just' end up on a different side of
| the fork from the people you want to transact with. Either
| way, soft forks don't make the downsides of policy changes go
| away.
| ricardolopes wrote:
| Changing consensus rules requires coordinating a fork. This
| requires coordinating developers, miners and node
| operators. That may fly in pseudo decentralised chains
| where the community accepts whatever the leader says so,
| and even so, at high risk. In bitcoin, for instance, where
| there is no leader, this would never be a viable scenario.
|
| Soft forks don't force you to download and run new clients
| just to be able to use the network, which is an important
| difference. You can use your existing client, you just
| don't have the new features and don't run validations on
| them.
|
| The greatest risk on soft forks is that chain split you
| mention. That's why any reasonable soft fork deployment
| requires a long time window with a large majority of
| hashrate signaling support (like 95%).
| DennisP wrote:
| Changing a PoS checkpoint would also require coordinating
| a fork. Even if a dev team were forced to make the
| change, they couldn't make everyone go along with it.
| sktrdie wrote:
| 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, because
| literally no single entity could burn that much electricity.
|
| With PoS on the other hand you kind of need these checkpoints
| in the actual software and then you have to activate this
| entire new trust model where you have to trust the client code,
| and where it came from etc. I could literally come up with an
| entire fake chain on my computer and present it to you and
| without client-checkpoints there would be no way for you to not
| accept my chain compared to your current one.
|
| With PoW I don't have to trust anything. If the majority next
| year decides to change the rules, so be it. The majority has
| spoken.
| Djrhfbfnsks wrote:
| 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?
| sktrdie wrote:
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| I think the difference is which kind of hash you needed.
|
| For PoW, you'd have to know the hash of the _start of the
| chain_ (the "genesis block") in advance to verify you
| downloaded the correct chain. That's true, but this hash
| doesn't change during operation. You could get that hash from a
| history book if you will.
|
| For PoS, the hash is from the _end of the chain_ and therefore
| constantly changing. This means the challenge of finding out
| whether the hash is the right one is a lot more real than in
| the PoW case, because there is no "common knowledge" to go by
| which hash is right.
| DennisP wrote:
| Because of withdrawal delays, the PoS hash isn't from the end
| of the chain, but from a few months before. So it changes
| only about as often as client software updates.
| supermatt wrote:
| > For PoW, you'd have to know the hash of the start of the
| chain (the "genesis block") in advance to verify you
| downloaded the correct chain.
|
| Nope. You could fork the chain at a period of low difficulty
| and it would still stem from the genesis block. It would
| either be a short chain, or have clearly low difficulty
| though, so it wouldnt fool anyone knowledgeable. Im not sure
| how you would leverage that chain for fraud.
| rocqua wrote:
| A while ago bitcoin clients changed from facoring the
| 'longest' chain to favoring the chain with the most work
| done on it. (To prevent long chains with low difficulty)
| somebodythere wrote:
| So... the consensus rules of the network changed, you
| need to make sure you have the correct client, and
| bitcoin is weakly subjective after all?
| madacol wrote:
| Asking "what's the correct client?" will always be a
| subjective question
|
| Bitcoin doesn't decide what is called bitcoin, we as a
| community do
| neuroma wrote:
| Why fork at low difficulty?
| mlyle wrote:
| You need to fork at low difficulty if you want to
| significantly lengthen the chain from that point, because
| creating a high difficulty, long chain that is valid is
| hard.
|
| But-- there's nothing to preclude you making big steps up
| in difficulty at the end of the chain. It means that one
| evaluating the length of the chain for authenticity
| really needs to integrate the difficulty over the entire
| chain and not just look at the number of blocks.
| xg15 wrote:
| I was wondering about that bit actually.
|
| Suppose I'm a new node and want to verify the blockchain.
| How do I verify that each block was mined with the
| correct difficulty?
|
| I'd need some record about the actual real-world
| timestamps for each block. Then I could say something
| like "duration between block x and block x+1 was > 10
| min, so the down-adjustment in block x+5 is justified".
|
| But if those timestamps were stored on-chain, an attacker
| could simply lie about them and keep difficulty
| artificially low on its alternative chain.
|
| On the other hand, if we had some un-forgeable record of
| block timestamps, wouldn't this solve the double-spend
| problem all on its own? Would we even need PoW at this
| point?
|
| Edit:
|
| Ok, sibling comment seems to suggest bitcoin has solved
| this problem differently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29368166
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes, Bitcoin effectively integrates the difficulty over
| the entire chain.
| runeks wrote:
| > For PoW, you'd have to know the hash of the start of the
| chain (the "genesis block") in advance to verify you
| downloaded the correct chain.
|
| No. For Bitcoin you can accept a chain with an arbitrary
| starting point and you would still arrive at the same chain
| everyone else uses.
|
| Although you do need to have an idea of the earliest
| acceptable starting point-in-time -- e.g. verifying a low-
| difficulty chain starting the year 200,000 BC (with one block
| every 10 minutes) would take quite a while
| xorcist wrote:
| No, policy changes makes for a new blockchain. That's what
| usually referred to as a "hard fork", as opposed to a "soft
| fork" where consensus rules are only allowed to get stricter,
| exactly beacuse ownership of a coin should be guaranteed
| forever.
|
| You could follow the consensus rules set out from the beginning
| and you would still end up on today's majority chain.
|
| I believe there were a couple of early bug fixes along the way,
| which makes this not strictly true. As in the original first
| release of the software not actually capable of downloading all
| of the chain, which some people love to point to as a proof of
| it being a fallible system. This is probably true but doesn't
| really detract from the original point of guaranteed ownership
| by never relaxing the consensus rules.
| Laforet wrote:
| Is the threat of long range attacks in PoS any worse than PoW
| in practice?
|
| Bitcoin for example still relies on a list of hardcoded nodes
| for bootstrapping clients. Not to mention very few people
| actually bother to verify the full chain (360GB and counting)
| from genesis.
|
| As for auditing the the integrity of the code or binary, it is
| signed by GPG keys hosted on public key servers accessed using
| X509 certificates pinned by a a couple of trust anchors
| preloaded in your OS. So much for distributed consensus...
| ricardolopes wrote:
| The Bitcoin Core client includes a hardcoded list of DNS
| servers that point to thousands of nodes. These lists get
| updated frequently by different people. Other clients may use
| other lists. What is the threat model you're suggesting here,
| exactly? Do you know any other way to bootstrap a peer to
| peer network without centralised authorities?
|
| All network participants are forced to verify the full chain
| from genesis. Some might be OK with validating block header
| signatures only, and not the full transaction set. It's a
| tradeoff.
|
| You don't need to use those public key servers if you somehow
| distrust the CA certificates in your OS. Feel free to contact
| the repository maintainers or whatever else floats your boat.
|
| Anyway, bitcoin is an open source protocol, not a particular
| client implementation. If you distrust everything and
| everyone, no one can stop you from building your own client
| that works with the rest of the network.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > Do you know any other way to bootstrap a peer to peer
| network without centralised authorities?
|
| In IPv4 a client might have a chance at auto-discovering
| peers.
|
| It's also not necessary to rely on a single centralized
| authority. There are many things (DNS, Encyclopedias, Linux
| kernel mirrors, etc.) where the majority of existing
| centralized authorities agree with each other.
| comex wrote:
| > Do you know any other way to bootstrap a peer to peer
| network without centralised authorities?
|
| I'm not the parent, but - no, I don't. But that's exactly
| the point. The need to bootstrap from centralized
| authorities is what's supposedly so bad about weak
| subjectivity in proof-of-stake. Yet in practice, it's
| needed with proof-of-work as well.
| ricardolopes wrote:
| Maybe I didn't word it right, but I wasn't calling
| bitcoin's method reliant on centralised authorities, just
| asking if there were more methods out there that weren't
| as well.
|
| Bitcoin is an open source permissionless protocol, so you
| have multiple clients to chose from, each with their own
| list of bootstrapping nodes, many open source where you
| can submit a PR to add your node too. You can even build
| your own client and point to whatever you want. You can
| also just ignore them and just point directly to nodes in
| a list from a public forum, a private chat, whatever.
|
| Also, you're not just connected to those bootstrapping
| nodes: you use them to find the rest of the peers in the
| network.
| colordrops wrote:
| It seems that PoW is like recursion. You don't get it at
| all until you completely get it. It's a leap to
| understand it and somehow many very technical people
| don't understand a seemingly simple protocol even a
| decade after it became mainstream and is threatening
| national banks due to the very characteristics these
| people claim it doesn't have.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Indeed, a very strange phenomena. Willful ignorance?
| comex wrote:
| > Bitcoin is an open source permissionless protocol, so
| you have multiple clients to chose from, each with their
| own list of bootstrapping nodes, many open source where
| you can submit a PR to add your node too. You can even
| build your own client and point to whatever you want. You
| can also just ignore them and just point directly to
| nodes in a list from a public forum, a private chat,
| whatever.
|
| I characterized this as relying on centralized
| authorities (albeit several of them), but sure, it can
| also be considered decentralized to some extent.
|
| The point is that it's a mechanism outside of the proof-
| of-work network itself. Instead of relying on a machine
| to reach consensus via a formal protocol, you the human
| are probing for a social consensus by evaluating
| statements made by other humans (via GitHub, public
| forums, or private chats, or just talking to people in
| person).
|
| In both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, you need to
| find social consensus in order to initially obtain the
| software, after which point you can rely on the network's
| consensus.
|
| The difference with proof-of-stake is that you have to
| redo this if you disconnect from the network for months
| on end.
|
| In practice, for a variety of reasons, practically all
| users of cryptocurrencies download regular software
| updates, and thus continue to rely on social consensus,
| regardless of whether the currency is proof-of-work or
| proof-of-stake.
| yanmaani wrote:
| I want to take a moment to note what you're doing here.
| You're making a negative argument, in want of a better
| word. It goes something like this:
|
| 1. X is a problem?
|
| 2. But Y is also a problem, in my opinion.
|
| 3. X and Y are both the same, I think.
|
| 4. Therefore X is not a problem.
|
| We can - theoretically - verify the correctness of PoW
| software by downloading the source code, reading it over,
| etc. We can also refuse to update, reducing ourselves to
| SPV security. We can internally verify the checkpoints
| using 100% objective standards. There are other things as
| well. This is not the case for PoS, where our "signature
| A existed at time B" has to be taken as faith, or
| evidence of things unseen. There is no internal way to
| verify the veracity of such a statement.
|
| The fact that users aren't personally doing this, is not
| the same as saying it makes no difference whether they
| are able to or not. I'm not personally going to withdraw
| all the money in my bank account - that would be
| ridiculous - but if the bank informed me I was no longer
| able to withdraw the money in my account, that would not
| be suitable at all. The assurance that I can do it makes
| it so that I don't have to.
| Laforet wrote:
| Hi Nick, very well said and this is precisely my point as
| well.
|
| Satoshi tried to convince us that we could decentralise
| trust by doing honest work instead of relying on
| authority. It turns out that doing work is actually
| pretty hard, people are lazy, and security is still the
| nemesis of efficiency.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| > As for auditing the the integrity of the code or binary, it
| is signed by GPG keys > hosted on public key servers accessed
| using X509 certificates pinned by a a > couple of trust
| anchors preloaded in your OS. So much for distributed
| consensus...
|
| You can literally validate the entire chain with a simple
| python script. Millions of those on github.
|
| >Not to mention very few people actually bother to verify the
| full chain (360GB and counting) from genesis.
|
| Absolutely wrong. The chain is validated in its entirety upon
| first sync. 100% from genesis to tip.
|
| >Bitcoin for example still relies on a list of hardcoded
| nodes for bootstrapping clients.
|
| It doesn't. Longest _valid_ chain with _most_ work is the
| canonical chain. Hardcoded seed nodes exist to speed up the
| discovery.
| tromp wrote:
| > You can literally validate the entire chain with a simple
| python script.
|
| I challenge you to present a "simple python script" that
| implements the exact bitcoin consensus rules (as codified
| in bitcoin core). Bitcoin is not all that simple and
| there's a nontrivial amount of complexity in bitcoin script
| alone [1].
|
| > The chain is validated in its entirety upon first sync.
| 100% from genesis to tip.
|
| The default behavior is to skip signature verification for
| all signatures before some relatively recent block [2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/scri
| pt/in...
|
| [2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/9484
| Kranar wrote:
| You're misunderstanding the default behavior which is
| fine becaue it's commonly misunderstood and discussed. At
| any rate signature verification is not skipped by
| default, what assumevalid skips is script verification.
| Everything else including UXTO, proof of work, the
| transactions themselves, are validated.
| yanmaani wrote:
| > Bitcoin for example still relies on a list of hardcoded
| nodes for bootstrapping clients.
|
| It does, but it doesn't have to. You can use any mechanism
| you want to obtain one initial node and take it from there.
| _You will still be connected to the network just as well, and
| you will be guaranteed to obtain the same results._ This
| differs from Proof of Stake, where the quality of the results
| will be influenced by the quality of the bootstrap.
| madacol wrote:
| I verified the full chain a couple of weeks ago (But I admit
| I trusted umbrel to choose the "correct" bitcoin-core
| software to run), It took less than 3 days to sync on a Rpi4
| keymone wrote:
| not really, if you fall asleep for a period of years, you can
| still get a signal of how genuine any proposed fork is by
| observing the chain of blocks and their difficulties. that's
| the crucial bit of any PoW system - you can't fake the energy
| that was spent producing the chain. that's a way to externally
| validate the honesty of a system and a major scientific
| breakthrough that satoshi discovered.
|
| also, hi, long time! maksym here =)
| [deleted]
| thruway516 wrote:
| 'Policy changes' and hard forks have about as much to do with
| PoW as whether the Federal authorities should ban
| cryptocurrencies or not - they're outside the realm of
| consensus algorithms. In PoW there are no friends. If your
| blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your transactions
| on it are invalid and will be rejected by the rest of the
| network.
| derefr wrote:
| > If your blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your
| transactions on it are invalid
|
| If your chain tip is on the dead side of a hard fork (i.e. if
| the majority of the network will predictably soon finish
| switching away from software which considers your chain tip
| valid, to software which considers your chain tip invalid),
| then nobody cares if your chain tip is the longest in the
| interrim, or how long you still hold out running the software
| that considers your chain tip valid. Your side of the fork no
| longer holds any economic value as a platform for
| transactions, so nobody will participate in it. You'll just
| be out there mining blocks all alone, blocks that say you
| earn all the virtual tokens, but where those tokens are
| worthless on your side of the fork.
|
| It's a bit like how, in old pre *serv IRC networks, in cases
| of netsplits, you could end up on a partition of the network
| where you were the only one in a previously-moderated
| channel; and so you could effectively do whatever you wanted
| in that channel. But it didn't really matter, because nobody
| could hear you.
| larsrc wrote:
| "nobody cares if your chain tip is the longest in the
| interrim,"
|
| Except the people you bought something real-world from,
| once they figure out that their "tipcoin" is worthless. So
| now it's a question of convincing some people that your
| technobabble is valid enough. How hard is that?
| thruway516 wrote:
| Um, yes. I should have phrased that as 'your transactions
| based on it are invalid in the network'. You just described
| consensus working correctly, but like I said hard-forks and
| policy changes are outside the scope of PoW, so saying PoW
| does not handle hard-forks is not really a valid criticism
| of PoW.
| comex wrote:
| Indeed. And even if you posit a PoW currency which never has
| policy changes, unlike Bitcoin or any other major
| cryptocurrency...
|
| And you assume that attackers will never have enough computing
| resources to execute a 51% attack - which could happen because
| the currency's value falls enough that people stop mining it,
| because an extraordinarily well-funded entity decides to attack
| it, or because someone manages to hack the miners...
|
| Then you do gain the security guarantee that _if_ you see
| multiple competing branches of the blockchain, you'll know
| which branch is the correct one (namely, whichever is longest).
| However, you're still relying on phoning your "friends" (nodes
| you're aware of) to tell you what blocks exist! If they all
| keep the true longest branch a secret from you (or, say,
| someone blocks your Internet connection to the nodes that
| aren't willing to do so), then you will think the next longest
| branch is the correct one.
|
| To be fair, that isn't the most practical attack. But none of
| the risks being discussed here are remotely practical. In
| practice, nobody wants to connect an outdated client to a
| blockchain network because it risks (a) getting yourself
| exploited through known vulnerabilities in the client, (b) not
| working due to backwards incompatible protocol changes or bugs,
| or (c) missing a hard fork that might have happened over
| disagreements in policy changes (because there are always
| policy changes). So you update your client, and that means you
| have to rely on a "friend" to tell you which software you
| should be running.
| bhaak wrote:
| What you describe is indeed a viable threat in certain
| conditions.
|
| It's called "Eclipse Attack". But it's a threat for single
| nodes not for the network as a whole.
| comex wrote:
| > But it's a threat for single nodes not for the network as
| a whole.
|
| Indeed, but the same is true for attacks on "weak
| subjectivity" proof-of-stake. They're only a threat for
| nodes that have been disconnected for a long time (months)
| before they try to reconnect.
| yanmaani wrote:
| Except for the part where eclipse attacks can be resolved
| by simply feeding my node more data (it's not a problem
| if some of it is lies), while "weak subjectivity"
| requires recourse to an external authority.
| rocqua wrote:
| Note that for bitcoin, because of soft forks, you could take
| a really old client and still find the 'true' chain.
| jacklizhui wrote:
| Trusting trustlessness is the paper you want to consult with
|
| https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/cbit-4-2.pdf
| naveen99 wrote:
| Proof of work is good for jobs that require skill (science,
| technology, productivity, markets). It's ok to have proof of
| stake (corporation shareholders) or proof of vote (communities,
| unions, families) for things that don't require skill so much.
| miohtama wrote:
| Flagging this post, because most definitions of scam involve
| fraud and here is not fraud involved.
| ottomanbob wrote:
| Occam's razor points to PoW.
| deft wrote:
| Not really, its unfair but not a scam. Can we talk about the
| actual scam known as layer 2 rollup chains? Optimism is
| completely centralized and even Vatalik is shilling it like a
| good thing. At least the PoS shill makes sense, it artificially
| benefits early adopters.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Amazing clarity.
| darawk wrote:
| > Proof of stake is a scam. When I say that, I mean that proof of
| stake is (1) claimed to be a consensus system, and (2)
| constitutionally incapable of actually producing a consensus.
|
| Ok. Go break one of the many existing systems that operates using
| proof of stake then. If you've done this, you should be leading
| your article with it. If you haven't, you shouldn't be speaking.
|
| Proof of stake is not some theoretical thing being proposed in
| the abstract. Many systems operate on it as we speak.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| you didn't read the article to the end, did you?
|
| about 40% in:
|
| "Because of all the arguments above, we can safely conclude
| that this threat of an attacker building up a fork from
| arbitrarily long range is unfortunately fundamental, and in all
| non-degenerate implementations the issue is fatal to a proof of
| stake algorithm's success in the proof of work security model.
| However, we can get around this fundamental barrier with a
| slight, but nevertheless fundamental, change in the security
| model." --Vitalik Buterin, saying the quiet part out loud
|
| Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having
| masters, whatever floats your boat.
| darawk wrote:
| > you didn't read the article to the end, did you?
|
| I skimmed it. It made no serious arguments. If it had a
| serious argument, it would have exploited one of the many
| existing proof of stake systems.
|
| > Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having
| masters, whatever floats your boat.
|
| You mean...exactly like PoW mining?
| inter_netuser wrote:
| No, exactly the opposite of PoW mining.
|
| Miners do not set the rules, they are merely a service that
| provides immutability to a ledger, with a nuclear option
| that will bankrupt all the billions they have invested,
| should they misbehave.
|
| Large stakers can rent-seek and extract your wealth, PoS is
| the same system we have now, plus some code.
|
| You are quite literally being exploited right this minute,
| by the same methods outlined in the article.
| dathinab wrote:
| Miners decide what they mine.
|
| Their contribution is what makes the currency work.
|
| They are some of the main profiteers from the currency.
|
| You can't do a fork or rule change without enough miners
| going along (I mean you can but it would not have much
| value).
|
| So in practice have all the governing/decision making
| power (as a group not a single person).
|
| Sure they might not come up with changes, but they do
| decide weather any change do take effect in the end.
| darawk wrote:
| > Miners do not set the rules, they are merely a service
| that provides immutability to a ledger, with a nuclear
| option that will bankrupt all the billions they have
| invested, should they misbehave.
|
| Stakers do not set the rules any more than do large
| mining pools.
|
| > Large stakers can rent-seek and extract your wealth,
| PoS is the same system we have now, plus some code.
|
| You know MEV is a thing in PoW too, right?
| nootropicat wrote:
| Observing what everyone else is using isn't 'trusting the
| rich'.
| dathinab wrote:
| > Security model in PoS = trust the rich.
|
| Same for PoW.
|
| Crypto currency weather PoW or PoS boils down to "give the
| few rich all the power while giving the many less rich a
| illusion of security".
|
| In PoW it just slightly tweaks "richness of money" into
| "richness of computation resources (which you get through
| money)".
|
| This difference has complicated effects like:
|
| - benefits anyone with cheap electricity (i.e. either places
| with no environmental protection, government support in some
| way, or the few places with cheap clean power)
|
| - benefits anyone with good connections to chip factories
|
| - the investment needed for gaining power being less bound to
| the currency itself but computation power instead
| hopevillian wrote:
| Ethereum is literally broken, look it up
| darawk wrote:
| Sure, go steal all the money in curve. I'll wait.
| hopevillian wrote:
| yeah, save all that money in a monetary system that is
| controlled and literally changed on the whim of it's
| creators... sounds vary familiar to another monetary system
| we currently are on... oh, well here are some interesting
| links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8LXLoTUJ5g
| https://twitter.com/CryptoLanroc/status/1458144922867957761
| https://betterprogramming.pub/the-encyclopedia-of-smart-
| cont... https://twitter.com/SpillyGuy/status/14323700457584
| 47625?s=2...
| darawk wrote:
| So by "broken" you mean you can't actually break
| anything. Got it. MEV is well known, and the system
| operates just fine in its presence.
| light_cone wrote:
| It's incredible how people who read a few articles think
| they have found the smoking gun, against a technology on
| which a lot of crypto researchers devote years of their
| time to make and analyze. They must think themselves are
| geniuses, and researchers are fools. Oh well, nothing new
| under the sun.
| akrymski wrote:
| If you'd read the article till the end, perhaps you'd
| understand where the author is coming from: PoS systems aren't
| getting hacked today because they aren't truly decentralised.
| You can't have decentralisation and security with POS, you have
| to choose one of these. All the projects currently active have
| chosen security for obvious reasons - they control the majority
| of validators to make sure nobody steals, and are just fancy
| centralised mints.
| darawk wrote:
| Except that they are though...You can go run a validator on
| Eth or Cardano right now.
| brianolson wrote:
| (my day job is developer on Proof-of-Stake Algorand block chain,
| I'm a developer, this may not be polished official PR) Article's
| theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up. Let's say I
| start a new node and verify history since the beginning.
| Somewhere along the line I'm connected to a malicious node which
| hands me a fictionalized block. It would need to have been signed
| by not just one but about 30-45 accounts _which had stake at that
| time_. Proof-of-Stake attacks aren't about having 51% of the CPU
| that overwhelms a Proof-of-Work system, but about having 60-70%
| of the _value_ in the network. So, if Warren Buffet comes along
| and wants to spam our network, I guess he could, but that would
| destroy the network and destroy his value that he sunk into the
| network. _That_ is a guardrail for PoS systems as much as any
| crypto or consensus-protocol element (and the algorithms are
| right, original article misunderstands them).
| xorcist wrote:
| This explanation does not make sense to me, which is probably
| due to my lack of understanding, but perhaps you can expand on
| this:
|
| > about 30-45 accounts _which had stake at that time
|
| The this is stated makes it sound difficult. But if this is
| false history presented by a malicious node, surely they could
| make up anything, as it the data does not need to line up with
| any official history at any point. (Without a trusted party, no
| history line is really offical anyway, is't it?). Constructing
| a history with 30 accounts with stake at any given point in
| time isn't any harder or easier than constructing 3 or 3000.
| rictic wrote:
| With Ethereum at least, it's proof of work leading up to
| proof of stake, so you'd have to break proof of work to
| create a fake early history, so the initial stake has to be
| legal within the proof of work history of Ethereum.
|
| Unsure how pure PoS chains work, maybe they hard code an
| early block's hash? Like, it's not a legit xorcist-chain
| unless block #10 has hash #deadbeef
| comex wrote:
| The history still needs to be signed by former stakers to be
| valid. The "nothing at stake" problem is that a staker might
| break the rules by signing two mutually incompatible
| histories. During the staking period, they are strongly
| disincentivized from doing this because anyone can present
| proof that they've done so, causing the network to punish
| them by taking away all the funds they staked. But once that
| period expires, they can send those funds to someone else,
| and now they can't be punished. Someone who's sent away their
| funds is longer a staker moving forward, but they can still
| sign an alternate history for the time when they were a
| staker, potentially fooling clients who haven't connected to
| the network for a long time.
|
| In practice, among the people who once staked large amounts
| of a proof-of-stake currency, most of them will probably
| continue being invested in its ecosystem moving forward. Even
| if they can't be personally punished for lying about the
| past, a successful history split would likely reduce the
| community's confidence in the currency, and thus its market
| value. Most of those people are also emotionally invested in
| the ecosystem and would not want to dishonestly subvert it.
| There will be exceptions. But to create an alternate history
| you need to subvert not just one validator, but _most_
| validators (or rather, validators who together control most
| of the currency being staked).
| hedora wrote:
| This is the "nothing at stake problem" from the article.
|
| Warren Buffet buys up 70% of the network, induces a network
| partition, and then double spends it all, signing both
| transaction histories.
|
| By the time he's caught, he's converted 2x the value of the
| POS network to POW bitcoins.
|
| Replace "warren buffet" with "crypto exchanges selling
| bundled securities", and the above is not just plausible,
| it's inevitable.
|
| The same scam has been run over and over again with
| conventional banks (who are inevitably bailed out on top of
| getting to take the money and run), POS just changes the
| nature of the obscure underlying financial instruments.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| A trust assumption of PoS (Proof of Stake) is that >66%
| of the stake is honest. If you violate this trust
| assumption then yes PoS breaks. This is a similar trust
| assumption to requiring that 51% of the mining power in
| PoW (Proof of Work) is not malicious.
|
| This risk can be mitigated:
|
| 1. The network should halt if a fork is detected. A fork
| with more than 66% of the stake behaving maliciously
| means a fundamental trust assumption of the network has
| been violated. Stop everything! Let humans figure out
| what is going on. I'm not saying every PoS system WILL
| halt under these circumstances, but as a countermeasure
| they SHOULD be designed to halt and value safety over
| partition resilience. Thus, an attacker forking a PoS
| must never allow parties to see either side of the fork.
| If a party notices a fork occurs, they will halt and
| can't be double spent against.
|
| 2. Following from 1, how do you prevent parties from
| communicating and discovering that a fork is occurring?
| Are you a tier-1 ISP and can control all internet
| traffic? You can defend against such attacks by making it
| very hard to hide the presence of a fork via redundant
| communication mechanisms. For instance the Bitcoin
| blockchain is broadcasted via satellite, a PoS blockchain
| could do that as well.
|
| 3. Additionally you can require that stakers lock their
| stake for long periods of time e.g., 6 months. This means
| that if an attacker wants to perform this attack and
| truly have nothing at stake they must cause a fork in the
| chain before the 6-months ago mark. Parties who are up to
| date with the latest chain are not vulnerable since they
| have already accepted the consensus history of chain. New
| parties who are syncing for the first time would be
| vulnerable, however clients could be programmed to have
| hardcoded 6th month checkpoints or clients could check
| block explorers and halt if a fork is detected.
| yanmaani wrote:
| > This is a similar trust assumption to requiring that
| 51% of the mining power in PoW (Proof of Work) is not
| malicious.
|
| Yeah, but you're glossing over an important detail: It's
| not 66% of the stake that has to be good, it's 66% of
| _anyone who has ever staked_. In PoW, I only need to
| trust the miners of today to tell me the truth about what
| happened today. In PoS, I need that, plus the miners of
| yesterday, plus the miners of a year ago, plus ..., in
| perpetuity.
|
| > New parties who are syncing for the first time would be
| vulnerable, however clients could be programmed to have
| hardcoded 6th month checkpoints or clients could check
| block explorers and halt if a fork is detected.
|
| Right, maybe you can elaborate on this. Is checking block
| explorers a decentralized or trustless solution to, well,
| anything?
| prepend wrote:
| > if Warren Buffet comes along and wants to spam our network, I
| guess he could, but that would destroy the network and destroy
| his value that he sunk into the network
|
| Not if he's undetected and does it for years while extracting
| value at key points in time.
|
| There are numerous people who could put up $50B with the
| ability to get very high returns.
|
| It's not even worrying about Buffet. I worry about hedge funds
| and sovereign wealth funds that would definitely manipulate PoS
| if it earned enough for them.
| keymone wrote:
| I don't investigate every shitcoin out there, but all of them
| have the same flaws in general. Your particular shitcoin
| probably has something called voting quorum, where only a
| fraction of global supply is required to proceed in staking. By
| reducing that fraction you're making large stake holders more
| and more able to overpower all others the moment they decide to
| become malicious.
|
| In PoW all hashrate is always voting and security is paid for
| external expenditure, not something virtual within the system.
|
| PoS is a scam and you should stop supporting it.
| ivalm wrote:
| > but that would destroy the network and destroy his value that
| he sunk into the network
|
| Isn't the whole point that by that time he would have withdrawn
| from the network so he would sink it without losing anything
| himself.
| dawnbreez wrote:
| But...if you no longer have value on the network, doesn't
| that mean you no longer have enough stake to control the
| network?
| rocqua wrote:
| You can fork far in the past, before you cashed out. Any
| new entrants into the network will not be able to
| distinguish your fork from the real chain. You cannot be
| slashed for this in the real chain because you already
| cashed out your stake there.
|
| This 'long range attack' is different from a 50% attack
| because it doesn't affect nodes that were running before
| the attack happened. But a situation where new entrants
| into the network are uncertain of the 'true' fork is not
| tenable in the long term.
|
| This seems more viable for a value destruction attack than
| for a double spend. But value destruction can be lucrative
| for blackmail. It means a coalition of stakers could
| withdraw their stakes and state "increases the blocksize or
| suffer a long-range attack".
| bastiantower wrote:
| Wouldn't anyone then be able to provide proof of that
| participant having exited? The participant would have
| generated a signature the moment they exit.
| jaggirs wrote:
| But why would a new entrant get the chain from a node
| that already exited, and why would this affect anyone
| other than the entrant itself? I assume the new entrant
| is itself liable if it copies the wrong chain, because
| other nodes will vote against it once it starts
| operating, so it will make an effort to get the correct
| chain (maybe by buying it from current nodes and ensuring
| they all provide the best chain). So maybe you would have
| some kind of cartel of running nodes that may or may not
| allow new nodes to enter, but I don't see a critical
| network-destroyig issue here.
| dlubarov wrote:
| > But a situation where new entrants into the network are
| uncertain of the 'true' fork is not tenable in the long
| term.
|
| This is an important point to consider, but it can be
| mitigated with exit delays. E.g. with Eth2's current
| settings, if an attacker had 2/3 stake at one point, I
| believe it would take them 6-7 months to exit all those
| validators. So while it's true that new entrants must
| sync from a trusted checkpoint, the checkpoint can be
| quite old.
|
| Let's say my client has a hardcoded list of checkpoints,
| with a new one added once a month. The client would only
| accept forks containing all of those checkpoints in their
| history.
|
| It seems like there are two ways an attacker with commit
| access might try to corrupt this checkpoint list. First,
| they could try to add bad checkpoints over a period of
| 6-7 months, until they've fully exited and can safely
| perform a long-fork attack. This seems impractical, since
| the bad checkpoints would be noticed by existing node
| operators (who would get stuck after upgrading their
| clients), and 6-7 months seems like plenty of time to
| raise the alarm.
|
| Alternatively, an attacker could just delete 6+ good
| checkpoints, and replace them with 6+ bad ones, all at
| once. This would violate the convention of adding monthly
| checkpoints, so it should be easily recognized as a
| malicious change. One could argue that it might go
| unnoticed anyway, but sneaking in such a change seems
| roughly as hard as sneaking in any other clearly-
| malicious client change.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| a coalition of wealthy interests can trivially dictate the
| consensus rules with very little to no recourse on your
| part. Even if the chain splits, they can maintain their
| share on both chains, and even suppress the minority chain.
|
| In PoW miners risk going bankrupt overnight for egregious
| behaviour like that.
|
| I'd like to see how one defines "slashing" programmatically
| that is impartial, works algorithmically, and does not have
| edge cases that can lead to catastrophic failures without
| handwavy assumptions that every single PoS network has
| today.
| dawnbreez wrote:
| No, no, back up a second. The argument being made in the
| parent comment is that once there is one entity with
| enough stake in the network to dictate where it goes,
| they can just pull out before tanking the network.
|
| But my understanding was that you can only have enough
| stake in the network to make decisions...by having that
| stake _in the network_. If you un-stake your crypto and
| cash out, by definition, you no longer have any stake in
| the network. If you no longer have _any_ stake, how do
| you have a controlling stake?
| newaccount74 wrote:
| If you had a controlling stake in the past, couldn't you
| just rewrite history to make it seem like you still have
| stake?
| delaaxe wrote:
| You can look up how Ethereum's beacon chain implements
| slashing
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Yep, isn't it great to get slashed for being DDoSed?
|
| Amazing breakthrough, realy. Now ddos blackmail can be
| actually measured in money.
|
| At least you could point to avalanche or something else
| that's better constructed. Eth is a dinosaur at this
| point, albeit with the fattest treasury.
| DennisP wrote:
| If you go offline the penalties are very small. You can
| be offline a third of the time and break even. The real
| penalty happens if you send conflicting messages, and
| even that's not too severe unless a lot of other nodes do
| it at the same time.
| yanmaani wrote:
| > Article's theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up.
|
| I don't mean to be rude here, but none of what you have said
| refutes my point.
|
| The attack here is that you control keys that (1) once held 67%
| of the value, and (2) no longer do. Because they did hold value
| once, they are dangerous to consensus. Because they no longer
| hold value, nothing is sunk into the network, so the attacker
| bears no cost or risk.
|
| To apply your analogy: I don't have to be Warren Buffet, I just
| have to riffle through his trash.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| 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, every vote
| resembles a banana republic: "90% voted, 90% in favour". No
| matter what smaller stakeholders do/say, the early big
| investors and dev team always win. Why would they structure it
| otherwise? The same dynamics exist in PoS, just not as
| grotesque.
|
| Perhaps that's OK for a private company governance, but for a
| global currency?
|
| You want the multibillionaires to dictate the properties of the
| medium of exchange that serves the entire globe? Seems rather
| strange that so many have such a burning desire to be governed
| by someone much richer than them.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| PoS in Ethereum is not a plutocracy...There is no voting with
| the token or any other governance. The stakers do not control
| the network, by design. The whole system works only if
| _everybody_ (holders /users/stakere/devs) cooperate together.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Only some, it seems, are more equal than others.
|
| https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/76023288548380672
| 0
| bouncycastle wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are linking to. This looks like a
| tweet from 2016.
| SilasX wrote:
| 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.
| lottin wrote:
| PoW and PoS are exactly the same, 1 dollar gets you 1 vote.
| If you want 1 person, 1 vote you need 1) a census, and 2) a
| mechanism to prevent the sale and purchase of votes.
| naasking wrote:
| > 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.
|
| And that's where competition _between_ currencies provides
| checks and balances against such pathological behaviours.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
| rictic wrote:
| PoS validation does not have to include any more power than a
| bitcoin miner has.
| simonw wrote:
| > in DAOs, every vote resembles a banana republic: "90%
| voted, 90% in favour"
|
| I've been wondering about that recently - for all of the
| excitement about DAOs and Governance Tokens, are there any
| good examples of interesting decisions being made via their
| voting mechanisms?
|
| What are some places I can go to see recent votes and their
| outcomes?
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| That's absurd.
|
| People will opt out of currency regimes that are abusive.
| This is not like a terrestrial government where you are
| fucked for life because a bureaucracy controls the land you
| live on. You don't have to immigrate to escape a corrupt
| currency. And you don't have to all-in in one currency.
|
| If you own dozens of coins, you liquidate the shitcoin that
| is controlled by corrupt tycoons.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Why would they structure it otherwise?
|
| It gets a lot more complicated than that because setting up
| competing systems is cheap. It is like saying "nobody would
| write this piece of software for free". What we learned with
| open source is if the cost of distribution gets low enough
| then there needs to be just one person somewhere on earth
| willing to maintain it and it can work.
|
| If the cost of creating trustworthy local (or international)
| monetary systems is basically 0 then it isn't obvious that
| plutocrats have an advantage beyond the one they already have
| by virtue of being powerful. If they can force you to use
| their system they already control the government so didn't
| need any technical help.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| You can't fork gigawatt powerplants and silicon foundries
| by clicking a button on Github.
|
| You can't even fork a stablecoin. in case of a split in a
| PoS chain, the correct fork will be decided for you by USDC
| and Coinbase.
| cinquemb wrote:
| You can fork decentralized over (crypto) collateralized
| stablecoins even if you can't force a fork of a
| centralized stablecoin operated by incorporated entity to
| be recognized by them.
|
| Unless we're going to pretend that there is only one way
| on and off networks and only in one currency
| denomination...
| wmf wrote:
| _You can fork decentralized over (crypto) collateralized
| stablecoins_
|
| In practice the value of the forked collateral is likely
| to be low, leaving the stablecoins insolvent.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| how do I send a wire to DAI?
| yellowapple wrote:
| You don't. You send a wire to someone who's willing to
| send you some DAI in return.
| cinquemb wrote:
| Just because you may not be willing to swap
| cash/gold/anything a local counter party values in
| whatever jurisdiction you reside in for a random networks
| gas and/or tokens that trade on them, doesn't mean others
| cannot.
|
| If you want to use coinbase to buy crypto and tokens,
| that's on you.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| How is that different from PoW or our current political
| system?
| viro wrote:
| Because money can't literally buy votes. no matter how many
| ads you show me I would never vote for Trump.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| miners go bankrupt in PoW for misbehaving. Large stakers
| can be rewarded for misbehaving, at your expense.
| jack_pp wrote:
| They only go bankrupt if they don't hold the majority of
| the mining power, if they do they take over. How is this
| different from PoS?
|
| Actually in PoS if you try to attack and you don't have a
| majority you will lose all your coins. in PoW if you try
| to attack and somehow you miscalculated you will lose a
| couple of hours worth of electricity after which you can
| go back to mining normally so much lower stakes for an
| attack.
| eftychis wrote:
| 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...
| tromp wrote:
| PoW at least provides a decent and somewhat fair coin
| distribution mechanism.
|
| With PoS, the coin creators can assign themselves an
| arbitrary fraction of the coins, concentrating the wealth.
| Even if there is a public record of all the funds raised in
| a public sale and all expenditures made (which is rarely
| the case), it's possible for the creators to participate in
| the public sale and recover large parts of funds used to
| buy their own token by generous expenditures on software
| development and such.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I think this is organizational more than technological.
|
| There are plenty of PoW coins with unfair or absurd
| distributions, and plenty of PoS coins with somewhat
| equitable distributions.
| tromp wrote:
| Yes, PoW coin emission curves often leave something to be
| desired, tending to emit too much in the first few years,
| which leads to some wealth concentration as well.
|
| In my opinion a fixed block subsidy would be most
| equitable, but that's a very slow emission, taking 100
| years to reach a yearly supply inflation under 1%.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Do you believe PoW can be used as bootstrap mechanism,
| and then some combo of PoS/Pow in the maintenance mode?
|
| Who is the top researcher on this subject these days?
| ghughes wrote:
| It could be interesting to bootstrap a PoS network using
| the wallet keys for all existing public blockchains, by
| allowing users to initialize their PoS wallet with the
| fiat value of their PoW keys held at some agreed moment
| in time. I toyed with this idea for a while, but I don't
| know how you could keep the network secure until a
| significant proportion of the total value has been
| claimed.
|
| Anyway, I'd also be interested to know if there's
| existing or active research along these lines.
| leishman wrote:
| 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.
| everfree wrote:
| But like PoS, PoW returns all spent resources and more
| back to the miner - both are designed to be profitable
| and self-sustaining.
|
| I don't see much difference between a PoW mining setup
| that does $1000/day gross, $990/day expense, $10/day
| profit and a PoS staking setup that does $12/day gross,
| $2/day expense, $10/day profit. Both earn $10/day, both
| require maintenance, and both are run not at a net cost
| but at a net profit.
| leishman wrote:
| The main difference is that the top miners don't stay the
| top miners. There is constant churn. The top stakers
| remain the top stakers at virtually no cost, and they
| will almost always be custodians/financial institutions.
|
| Additionally mining isn't always profitable. There is
| financial risk and miners can go bust and take financial
| risk. Staking is basically always profitable if you don't
| misbehave.
| jude- wrote:
| You can't transmute Bitcoin back into electricity and
| ASICs. You have to generate more of both, which is
| extrinsic to the protocol and thus available to
| currently-non-participating actors. PoS does not have
| this property.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| This is a common misunderstanding.
|
| Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all.
|
| PoW is a service to the network, to create an immutable
| ledger. It comes with a very real nuclear option that will
| bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing
| algo change.
|
| It's just a boring industrial business, like smelting
| aluminum or iron.
| DennisP wrote:
| And stakers in PoS do exactly the same thing. They don't
| have any more "votes" than miners do.
| lottin wrote:
| > Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all.
|
| It only buys you the right to append a block of
| transactions to the ledger, which is the same thing as
| having 100% of the votes.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| You have it backwards.
|
| Nodes decide if they will append your block to their
| chain.
|
| A miner that decides to mine out of consensus blocks is
| just burning money, and will be on their own fork with
| their "100% votes" that nobody else uses.
|
| Give it a try, spend a few million on mining equipment
| and then try forcing something on the network.
|
| It's not a democratic system, never was.
| lottin wrote:
| Nodes have zero decision power, as far as I understand.
| They just go with the chain that is the most expensive to
| produce.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| That's incorrect.
|
| The proposed block must comply with the rules your node
| enforced, or it will not be accepted. It's not just work,
| but also the entire consensus-set they must abide by.
|
| Miners cannot force new rules, if there is no consensus.
| lottin wrote:
| No, you're misunderstanding everything. The consensus
| mechanism is about agreeing about the contents of the
| blockchain, not about the rules that make up the bitcoin
| protocol.
| keymone wrote:
| Nonsense. Mining gives you zero votes. Miners don't
| control the protocol. Governance is not determined by
| hashrate. This is just another major flaw that all PoS
| shitcoins have.
| lottin wrote:
| No one is talking about governance. The term "consensus"
| refers to the decision about which transactions to append
| to the ledger, and the decision is to go with whatever
| set of transactions the miner that has spent the most
| money has chosen. It has nothing to do with governance
| issues.
| keymone wrote:
| then if you're not talking about governance, you're still
| wrong. there's no voting, only if you insist on re-
| defining what words mean, at which point i won't be
| interested in continuing the discussion.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Of course there is voting. Who do you think decides which
| transactions go in the chain, and in what order? The
| miner who wins leader election during this round (in
| Bitcoin anyway) does, and the rest of the nodes decide
| whether to accept its vote. The other nodes can also
| choose to reject this vote for a while, as long as after
| seeing it they don't accept a chain with less hashpower,
| and still follow the protocol (more or less).
|
| The leader can even opt to put _no_ transactions in the
| current block, something that has actually happened on
| many occasions:
| https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/67928/bitcoin-miners-
| are.... Obviously, the leader was making a decision here,
| there were not actually zero transactions to process :)
| keymone wrote:
| You have zero clue how bitcoin works.
|
| No, there is no voting and there is no leader election.
| Miners construct blocks with transactions and if they
| manage to find a signature - that block is appended to
| the chain. If somebody does it faster - they append their
| block.
|
| Please at least get the basics before you start arguing
| with people.
| lottin wrote:
| > 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, you're wrong. There's a
| vote. And if you can't understand this obvious fact about
| bitcoin, you have no business discussing bitcoin.
| keymone wrote:
| 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, it's like arguing the
| earth is flat by proposing a very special metric of
| space. Feel free of course, I just don't accept it.
| lottin wrote:
| > do they get a choice of what block they append to the
| chain? No they don't.
|
| Of course, they have a choice. If didn't, miners would
| serve no purpose. We would just have one block and that
| would be the block that would be appended. The consensus
| would be achieved automatically, without any need of
| guessing secret numbers.
|
| > And if it was an election, wouldn't the result always
| be the same with largest miner always winning because
| they have most votes?
|
| No, because the miner is elected at random. The crucial
| point to understand is that their chances of getting
| elected are proportional to the money they spent. That
| doesn't mean the largest miner will get elected 100% of
| the time.
| keymone wrote:
| > Of course, they have a choice
|
| lol, no they don't.
|
| a certain hash wins, every ~10 minutes. that hash is
| calculated from sha(block, nonce), where nonce is the
| randomized part that miner mutates to get different
| hashes. once a hash that satisfies the protocol is found
| - that's it, you can't choose a different block to append
| to the chain.
|
| it is just laughable that i have to explain this level of
| basics.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Okay, and _who chooses the block_? (Hint: it 's the node
| that wins leader election).
|
| Maybe this article will help you understand just how
| nonessential the fact that the block is part of the SHA
| actually is: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conferen
| ce/nsdi16/nsdi16.... Please read the _whole_ article, and
| then come back so we can have a discussion on equal
| footing.
| keymone wrote:
| > Okay, and who chooses the block?
|
| well certainly not the winner of the "election", because
| by the time that "election" starts, the block is already
| constructed.
|
| and i'm not going to read any of your links until you
| actually start understanding the basics of bitcoin
| protocol. though your lack of understanding explains
| perfectly why you fall for scammy bells and whistles of
| competing bitcoin-wannabes. "bitcoin new generation".
| lol, give me a break.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| The peer-reviewed paper to which I linked, which I am not
| proposing as a replacement for Bitcoin, explains (to
| those who are willing to read it) why the block being
| chosen before or after the leader election does not
| matter when it comes to the security and consensus
| properties of Bitcoin. It is important for you to
| understand that this does not matter so you can
| understand why when the block is chosen does not change
| the fact that leader election is being performed.
|
| Again, I'll ask you, since you keep dodging the question:
| if the node elected as leader is (according to you) not
| choosing the block, _who is choosing the block?_ Why are
| you so obsessed with whether the value was chosen
| "before" or "after" the election, which is an irrelevant
| detail of the protocol? If you can't answer these things
| and won't read the paper, I don't really see any reason
| to keep talking to you, because all you've done is make
| the same irrelevant point over and over.
| lottin wrote:
| Where do you think the transactions included in the block
| come from? The miner picks them.
| keymone wrote:
| and now the weaseling starts. i asked a very specific
| question:
|
| 1. once the "leader" is "elected" 2. do they have a
| choice of what block to append?
|
| you said they do, which is fundamental lack of
| understanding of how bitcoin works.
| lottin wrote:
| The question that you asked was:
|
| > when the leader is elected every 10 minutes, do they
| get a choice of what block they append to the chain?
|
| and the answer is yes, the miner that gets elected
| chooses which transactions to append to the chain. Do
| they pick the transactions after getting elected? No,
| they pick them before getting elected. In fact, it
| doesn't matter whether they pick the transactions before
| or after getting elected, because their chances of
| getting elected are unaffected by which transactions they
| picked. Therefore, it makes absolutely no difference. The
| fact that you think it makes a difference tells me you're
| very confused about the role miners have in the bitcoin
| network.
| keymone wrote:
| The answer is no and you're clueless if you think
| otherwise. The "leader" has no choice in blocks or
| transactions after they "win" the "election".
| UncleEntity wrote:
| The "leader" has no choice _after_ they win the current
| round but they do have a choice as to what to include in
| the winning block before they start hashing.
|
| Maybe they act like all the other rational miners and
| optimize by mining fees.
|
| Maybe they include no transactions and only take the
| miner reward.
|
| Maybe they they don't like the Dutch so all their
| transactions are excluded.
|
| It really doesn't matter as all y'all have been arguing
| over is what to call the person who won the current
| round.
| keymone wrote:
| Everybody has that choice before they win the election,
| so are they all leaders?
|
| You really don't see how this terminology is completely
| incoherent for this scenario?
| lottin wrote:
| They become a "leader" when they get elected, so only one
| of them becomes the "leader". There's nothing incoherent
| about this terminology.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| I've been reading this thread. I have no idea why these
| people insist on using the word "leader" when it doesn't
| fit. Is there some ideological reason for this?
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| There is no "ideological" reason. I don't even own
| cryptocurrency. It's just a fact that the entire purpose
| of proof of work is to perform leader election. The
| defining characteristic of leader election is that only
| the leader commits new values, and there should only be
| one leader eventually chosen for a given round; the
| definition has nothing to do with using some sort of
| majority vote or anything like that. To see how it
| differs from "ordinary" consensus, I want you to tell me
| how a Bitcoin-like system could be used to decide on
| _any_ value other than either (i) one known in advance by
| all parties (which doesn 't require a consensus protocol
| at all), or (ii) one chosen by the node that wins the
| block lottery.
|
| This is expanded upon in the peer-reviewed Bitcoin-NG
| paper that both of you are refusing to read, which breaks
| down the Bitcoin protocol into distinct parts (which was
| why I linked it--not because I am proposing that it
| replace the Bitcoin protocol, but because I thought it
| would be useful for you to understand how Bitcoin
| performs leader election already). Specifically, it
| analyzes the effects of splitting up leader election and
| block commit parts of the protocol. As it turns out, it
| has essentially no effect on Bitcoin's security
| guarantees, which is not surprising--because the fact
| that block selection and leader election happen at the
| same time is an implementation detail that doesn't
| actually matter! Once you realize this detail that you
| are obsessing over (the block being decided at the same
| time the leader is) is not important for the protocol,
| you will also see that the leader election is in fact the
| critical part.
| losvedir wrote:
| I think you're missing the larger picture of accruing
| blocks over time, and deciding what is the "canonical"
| largest chain.
|
| A miner _can_ choose which block to build on. At any
| given moment Bitcoin can have several competing "in
| progress" forks. This is why most exchanges require... 7,
| I think?... blocks on top of yours to consider the
| transaction more or less confirmed.
|
| > _And if it was an election, wouldn't the result always
| be the same with largest miner always winning because
| they have most votes?_
|
| Yes, this is a 51% attack in Bitcoin. If you have a
| majority of votes, you can disregard the current chain,
| fork from behind, and catch up.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| > 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.
| keymone wrote:
| You're not paying attention. Does miner have a choice
| what transactions to include _after_ they win the
| "election"? Don't rush, take your time.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| What, exactly, do you think the purpose of computing a
| SHA prefix is? It's to perform distributed, decentralized
| leader election. The leader who wins has the privilege of
| proposing the next block. "If somebody does it faster" is
| the voting aspect--nodes vote on who they think did it
| faster, and it is quite possible that they disagree
| (which can only be resolved by another round of leader
| election, since the next leader can choose which block to
| continue from). In the event that there's a longest
| chain, of course, nodes will go with the longest chain as
| a tiebreaker scenario.
|
| I know _far_ more about Bitcoin than I ever wanted to,
| believe me. You really should not be making these kinds
| of ad hominem arguments when you don 't understand terms
| like "consensus" or "leader election."
| keymone wrote:
| > The leader who wins has the privilege of proposing the
| next block.
|
| No, the hash that you win with, deterministically points
| to the only possible block that you can "propose". Your
| understanding is completely backwards. You seriously
| don't know how bitcoin works.
| [deleted]
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Whether leader election happens at the same time as the
| block is proposed or not is completely irrelevant to the
| nature of the problem from a distributed systems
| perspective. The point is that in each round, the leader
| both wins the election, and proposes the next block.
| There are other variants of proof of work in which the
| leader is allowed to continue generating new blocks for a
| period of time and (AFAIK) these inherit all of Bitcoin's
| security properties.
|
| Here is my question to you: if the node that wins the
| election (and the ones that accept its mined block, of
| course) is not the one voting on which transactions get
| to go into the chain, rather than be stuck in the mempool
| somewhere, who is? Do you genuinely think there is no
| decision being made there?
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| You are really stretching, man. The term "leader" does
| not really apply in this mechanism.
| keymone wrote:
| There is no leader election. You trying to insist on this
| terminology is like trying to explain that the earth is
| really flat by proposing some very special space metric.
|
| All miners "vote" by hashing and one of them wins. They
| don't win because somebody voted for them, they win
| because they happened to find a satisfactory hash. The
| chance to win that hash faster than other miners is
| proportional to hashrate. The hash is determined by the
| block of transactions entirely, so once you win the race,
| you don't get to propose anything other than that one
| predetermined block.
|
| Which transactions go into a block is decided _before_
| any mining for that transaction happens.
|
| Just read, please.
| cloakandswagger wrote:
| You're confusing the discussion by trying to force the
| "leader" terminology. That term does not appear in the
| BTC whitepaper and the protocol's approach to consensus
| is different than a traditional leader elected system.
|
| There is no "voting" and no "leader" except in the most
| abstract sense and I'm not sure why you're so determined
| to use those terms.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| > It comes with a very real nuclear option that will
| bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing
| algo change.
|
| Changing the hashing algo isn't a realistic punishment
| for targeting misbehaving miners.
|
| You end up with two choices:
|
| 1. Change to an algorithm that uses gpu/cpu instead of
| ASICs (and is ASIC-resistant), but then your algo runs on
| general-purpose computing and you can't fork miners off
| ever again.
|
| 2. Move to another algo that benefits from ASICs. This
| has the extra overhead that you need to spin up
| manufacturing and distribution of these ASCIs to honest
| miners, which takes quite a long time to do and while
| you're waiting, your network is being attacked.
|
| In either case, you aren't just punishing a misbehaving
| miner, you're punishing *all* miners who now all need to
| get funding to buy and rack new hardware. You're making a
| big assumption that the misbehaving miner won't be able
| to get financing or sufficient capital while the honest
| ones will. If the dishonest miner's attack was profitable
| while waiting for the fork, they get to keep all of that
| money and can spend it on new hardware.
|
| In PoS, the attacker will lose their stake, meaning they
| lose the money they had before, and earned as a result
| of, the attack. It may be much more difficult for that
| validator to get access to capital and lenders will be
| hesitant to lend to an entity that now has a history of
| burning capital.
| mission_failed wrote:
| Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of
| work just burns electricity for the random chance of
| winning a lottery
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Simply because something is intangible and invisible,
| like atoms, does not make it any less valuable.
|
| It's a system with an immutable monetary policy.
| Literally unprecedented in human history.
| meribold wrote:
| > It's a system with an immutable monetary policy.
|
| Is it though? It seems minor protocol tweaks aren't
| uncommon and hard forks managing to eclipse the original
| protocol in popularity are also conceivable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks
| javert wrote:
| Every time there is a fork, the market decides how much
| to value each of the forks.
|
| Personally, I think people will value bitcoin as good
| money if fiat money fails. And because they are seeking
| good money, will value the fork(s) that preserve
| bitcoin's prior monetary policy.
|
| A fork that changes the monetary policy drastically
| (particularly, changing the 21M cap) would obviously make
| for bad money in practical terms.
| notahacker wrote:
| > 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...
| rufusroflpunch wrote:
| 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 original network continues as
| the reigning champion.
| meribold wrote:
| 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.
| rufusroflpunch wrote:
| I wouldn't worry about it. Bitcoin incentivizes energy
| development. As the world moves to a Bitcoin standard, we
| will unlock new types of energy that were previously
| unproductive. It's likely that energy will more cheap and
| plentiful under a Bitcoin standard, leading to downward
| pressure on transaction prices as mining is more
| economical. Also, more transactions are likely to move
| off chain to Lightning Network and sidechains.
|
| Still plenty of scaling left in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
| javert wrote:
| I agree with this. Just want to add, bitcoin mining can
| happen in remote locations with available power (hydro,
| geothermal) which are too far from cities to be
| transported by power wires. There is a limit to how far
| you can transmit electricity through wires. So, there are
| tons of untapped natural energy sources.
| javert wrote:
| The natural scenario is that as the mining reward goes
| down, hash rate will dwindle until mining is profitable
| again.
|
| The only real problem with that is that with a small hash
| rate, bitcoin can be attacked more easily.
|
| If bitcoin is the monetary backbone for many nations,
| they will subsidize miners to maintain the balance of
| power. That is the actual scenario that I'm
| optimistically predicting.
|
| If bitcoin isn't the monetary backbone for many nations,
| by then, then it's probably a failure, and should
| probably be allowed to die.
|
| It's also very possible that transactions fees alone
| actually will be sufficient to support a high enough
| amount of hash power to secure the network.
| lottin wrote:
| > Literally unprecedented in human history.
|
| Hardly unprecedented, considering that until very
| recently nations did not have a monetary policy.
| javert wrote:
| Monetary policy goes at least as far back as the Roman
| Empire, which adulterated their money supply over time.
| lottin wrote:
| I don't think this what economists understand by monetary
| policy.
| smolder wrote:
| Everything is mutable with the possibilty of physical
| destruction and long time scales. Even the existence of
| humanity is mutable when we play stupid games in MAD
| geopolitics, have foolish energy policy, and lack an
| ability to cooperate to mitigate tragedy-of-the-commons
| problems like, for example, what Proof of Work is
| causing.
|
| If we do not bound the growth of PoW energy usage, I
| think it could easily destroy itself in a roundabout way:
| by destroying the fragile global order that keeps
| humanity going.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| PoW produces something intangible. You're probably basing
| on an assumption that tangible products are more worthy
| or justifiable of resources consumed than intangibles.
|
| If you work with software development - which you
| probably do - I'd suggest checking what you do for a
| living, how much energy it consumes and how much physical
| product it generates.
| DarylZero wrote:
| It produces just what the person said. A lottery win.
| DemocracyFTW wrote:
| That argument could even be somehow valid if it were only
| possible to demonstrate that these intangibles improve
| life for people, like contributing to food, housing,
| education or even only entertainment. They do not. We do
| not have to care for those who are affluent enough to
| burn electricity just in order to gamble. Those people
| have the resources to gamble in less harmful ways without
| raising electricity prices and polluting the air the way
| they do. Those people could even do something helpful and
| productive if they chose to. Cryptomining is wasting
| energy for the sake of wasting energy. You may argue we
| (the 99.999% who do not cryptomine) are too stupid to see
| the value of your imaginary intangibles but that's not
| true. We are the ones who want no part in a pyramid
| scheme, who do not want to succumb to gambling, and whose
| time and money are too scarce and too precious to be put
| on the line. Sure, all activity has its price, its waste,
| and sure, there are other occupations whose overall
| usefulness is doubtful and askew with the accompanying
| resource consumption. Doesn't mean you have too excuse
| bad behavior just because there are other guys doing no
| good.
|
| Just as an aside, when you move a newspaper or a magazine
| from print to only existing as a web page, you certainly
| have 'dematerialized' it to a degree. However you still
| need hardware to keep and display the data and energy to
| move it around and light up the screens. In so far it
| does not stop being physical. The 'intangible' is
| somewhat of a red herring. Yes, it is less haptic, but
| it's still physics, physical all the way down. Other than
| that, currencies, freedom, equality, education,
| entertainment--we've been having intangibles all the
| time, at least from the dawn of human culture onward.
| Cryptomining does not bring anything genuinely new to the
| table in this respect. It's not even new in being a
| fraudulent, volatile scheme that betrays traits of a
| cult, one that benefits a few and hurts the many.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps we should insert humans in the loop, to verify
| whether useful work was performed.
|
| Or some AI because humans are prone to bribery to some
| extent.
|
| Or we could make it democratic. "Jeff Bezos asserts that
| he provided useful work for society and that he therefore
| deserves $1B this year. Please cast your votes".
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| PoB: Proof of Bullshit
| lukifer wrote:
| 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]
| amelius wrote:
| ... or people going to the gym.
|
| The problems start, of course, when you take a concept to
| its logical extreme.
| lukifer wrote:
| I'm less concerned with wasting resources (which is
| highly subjective), than with ecological and systemic
| harms. I don't care whether a terawatt is "wasted" on
| pointless SHA256 hashes, or calculating triangles for Yet
| Another Marvel Movie, so long as the externality is being
| paid for [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
| yellowapple wrote:
| Exactly. And by forcing the internalization of that
| externality, that forces the market to consider things
| which lack that externality.
|
| The trick is to enforce it in such a way that it can't be
| easily dodged via e.g. offshoring.
| marcus_cemes wrote:
| 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 returns from.
|
| You get compensated for your service, it may seem like a
| lottery, but if you do it for a long enough time, you'll
| get fairly steady returns as in theory it should be
| random and proportional to your hashrate.
|
| I don't mine, and I think it's definitely overhyped at
| the moment, but maybe it will settle in the future and
| actually provide a useful service to us folk. It doesn't
| seem to be going away for now, and it is really easy to
| send money to friends and family, whether they're
| nextdoor or in another country.
| Magnusmaster wrote:
| The service is worthless if you can trust a central
| authority like a government that 99.99% of people do.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| There are many countries where people cannot trust a
| central authority like a government to keep their savings
| remotely safe and stable in value.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| 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.
|
| The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy
| (70%+), because it is actually cheaper.
|
| Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy
| globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite
| enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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 sustainable
| energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper.
|
| What kind of sustainable?
|
| When miners locate next to hydro, and buy it up, that
| doesn't help anything. That hydro could have been sold as
| somewhat less cheap power elsewhere, after going over
| long wires, and then it would have reduced the load on
| coal plants.
|
| Miners that eat up excess solar can theoretically do a
| lot to encourage the installation of solar, but they need
| to be happy letting their machines be turned off a large
| fraction of the time. If it's still profitable to run 20
| hours a day, then they're still encouraging fossil power
| plants.
|
| > Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more
| energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite
| enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them.
|
| Dishwashers are better than hand-washing, aren't they?
| _Having plates_ is a lot more important than running
| cryptocurrencies in a particular way.
|
| If heated swimming pools use that much, then sure let's
| go after that and use some kind of billing or taxes so
| they pay extra and encourage sustainable power sources.
| keymone wrote:
| There is zero waste in PoW. It's all useful service,
| therefore waste term doesn't apply.
| somebodythere wrote:
| If you use 100 watts incandescent light bulb to light
| your room with 1 watt LED would do, that is waste.
| keymone wrote:
| usefulness is subjective.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > but they need to be happy letting their machines be
| turned off a large fraction of the time
|
| Or they need batteries. Or some other means of energy
| storage, for that matter; at the scale of a large mining
| farm, thermal (e.g. heating water) or kinetic (e.g.
| spinning a flywheel) might be practical.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| 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 are 180-220k a year for someone
| with years of experience. I'd imagine monetary networks
| use a lot of physical security, some central banks are
| literally located in bunkers under mountains, with a
| backup site in a similar setup on a different geological
| plate.
|
| I have not seen any PoS schemes so far that provide
| anything other than plutocracy as a service. There is a
| reason why ETH with a 100mil R&D budget is still on PoW,
| Vitalik is not a dummy.
|
| as for the cheap sources of sustainable energy, those are
| usually stranded hydro and wind that's too remote to be
| economic, and stranded natgas (for natgas "green" might
| be a better term, i've used sustainable in the sense that
| CH4 is far more damaging that CO2. I've been told by
| regulators it is actually better to burn off CH4 from
| stranded wells)
|
| Balancing of the grid also does happen, but I believe
| primarily with wind and hydro.
|
| I, of course, agree that we should not pollute the Earth
| we live on. High energy usage in itself is not bad, only
| if it's a harmful polluter. I've only pointed out
| dishwashers and pools (don't have the stats handy, but
| they do indeed use a lot more, like a magnitude more), as
| a common hypocrisy.
|
| We must rapidly scale up non-polluting energy sources, as
| it seems unlikely humanity can become a spacefaring
| species on a self-imposed tight energy budget, and this
| self-imposed handicap coupled with an unexpected asteroid
| impact can end us.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| 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.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > standing armies that are "doing nothing"
|
| Armies have to practice. Smart generals don't let their
| armies do nothing; to be any good at warfighting, they
| have to fight wars. Effective standing armies have to
| constantly be finding new wars to fight.
| keymone wrote:
| 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.
| codyb wrote:
| 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 entirely hot version obviously
| would have been far more calamitous.
|
| I suggest reading Herodotus' Histories, or you can read
| up on Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Alexander, the
| Crusades, or the myriad other conquerors and conflicts
| that have occurred.
| keymone wrote:
| But when conflict is resolved by energy expenditure, it
| involves even less suffering.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable
| energy (70%+)
|
| Do you have an source for this? I remember the same
| number being flaunted before but it turned out not to be
| true. What was true was that 70%+ of miners use any
| amount of renewables in their energy mix.
| keymone wrote:
| You're right. The correct number is somewhere around 50%,
| probably over the line already, which is significantly
| better than any other big industry.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > The correct number is somewhere around 50%
|
| Do you have some source for this? I see random numbers
| being thrown around a lot, would be nice to have a
| citation for yours.
| jakupovic wrote:
| When I write code for my work does it not exist? I'm in
| essence minting new programs using my time as proof of
| work.
| newswasboring wrote:
| No, I'm quite sure the proof of work is a program which
| works.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all_
|
| Within protocol, no. But when weighing a fork, those with
| the gold choose the rules.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| forkwars have shown in practise this isn't the case.
|
| Status quo will be incredibly difficult to overcome for
| attackrs, even with a large chunk of industry, exchanges,
| miners and whales against the status quo, it prevailed.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The fork-wars of old will never happen again, IMO, on any
| chain of significance. These days, fork winners will be
| decided by the stablecoin operations they host. If ETH
| forks, for instance, hash power will follow whichever
| chain Jeremy Allaire deems the winner.
| Avshalom wrote:
| So literally one guy has control of Ethereum?
| inter_netuser wrote:
| and every other PoS chain that relies on USDC and major
| exchanges.
|
| So probably more than 1 guy. maybe 5-10.
| oblio wrote:
| And how is that better than a government?
| rufusroflpunch wrote:
| It's not. There is a huge gulf between Bitcoin and the
| rest of the crypto space. Bitcoin is certifiably
| decentralized hard money with an ossified monetary
| policy. I believe it is reasonable to conclude that
| something like Bitcoin can only happen once. The rest of
| crypto space isn't really trying to be money, or is only
| pretending to be.
| lgvld wrote:
| & what about Monero?
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Regardless of Monero's technicals, new upcoming updates
| to BTC will infuse with privacy, therefore making Monero
| et al redundant.
|
| BTC is also getting smart contracts soon, which makes ETH
| redudant as well, but it will take a while before it
| catches up in terms of possible complexity of the
| contracts.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Do you consider nuclear energy sustainable?
|
| It's probably not renewable (well, neither is the Sun on
| large enough timescale), but do you believe nuclear,
| either fission or fusion, will play a large role in the
| future?
| arcticbull wrote:
| You make it sound like I need a new hobby - which I might
| haha.
|
| > Do you consider nuclear energy sustainable?
|
| Low-carbon, yes. Sustainable, yes. Renewable, not until
| we productionize extraction of uranium from seawater. [1]
|
| > ... but do you believe nuclear, either fission or
| fusion, will play a large role in the future?
|
| Fusion if we can crack it, totally. Seems like a clear
| winner. Fission probably will if there's some political
| will behind it, but not unless there's a change in
| sentiment.
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/24/is-
| nuclea...
| tomp wrote:
| This article is complete FUD.
|
| _> of which the following sources are considered to be
| renewable_
|
| in other words, it attempts to define the world
| "renewable" along favoured political ideologies.
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| _> Advances in breeder reactor technology could allow
| the current reserves of uranium to provide power for
| humanity for billions of years, thus making nuclear power
| a sustainable energy_
|
| TL;DR: nuclear is just as renewable as solar (beyond any
| likely duration of the human civilisation).
| tromp wrote:
| > hashing algo
|
| You mean Proof of Work algorithm. Which is not quite the
| same as hashing function [1].
|
| [1] https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-
| theres-min...
| inter_netuser wrote:
| hi tromp! good to see you are on here too.
|
| ...just re-using the terms for continuity and simplicity
| sake.
|
| yes, a PoW algo is probably better generic term, although
| I am not confident complex algos would be accepted as
| first-line replacements by the wider community.
|
| am I wrong in that assessment?
| tromp wrote:
| Some of the hashing functions used with hashcash are
| exceedingly complex, such as RandomX used in a popular
| coin. Even scrypt, an extremely popular choice of hash
| function, is relatively complex, long after its 128KB
| memory footprint briefly served its purpose of resisting
| ASICs.
|
| You're right that Bitcoin will never accept a change of
| PoW. At least not until SHA256 shows signs of being
| broken.
| arcticbull wrote:
| At the limit, proof of work and proof of stake converge -
| they are the same thing, except for the Kazakh coal that
| is burned in the former along the way.
|
| PoS staking is simply committing a portion of your
| capital to the task of validating transactions. You
| benefit by receiving a reward in the form of additional
| tokens.
|
| In a PoW system, the same exact thing can be accomplished
| by using your tokens to purchase a stake in a mining
| pool. You will similarly be unable to access your
| capital, be rewarded with additional tokens, and at the
| end of a period of your choice, you can liquidate your
| position in the mining pool to reclaim your tokens.
|
| [edit] PoW in this context is a bit worse because PoW
| miners can rent out their hash power maliciously without
| being slashed.
|
| In this world, the "nothing at stake" problem also
| manifests in proof of work, where I believe ownership in
| the mining pool makes you agnostic to the outcome of any
| chain splits - although I'm still working this bit
| through in my head. Opinions welcome!
| ogogmad wrote:
| > PoW in this context is a bit worse because PoW miners
| can rent out their hash power maliciously without being
| slashed.
|
| Sounds wrong. Slashing is a means to prevent people from
| staking on multiple chains. In PoW, computing power is
| scarce, so if you allocate some compute time to one chain
| then you have less of it on another chain. You
| automatically get slashed. The difficulty in designing a
| PoS chain is in artificially re-creating this slashing
| and thereby solving the "nothing at stake" problem.
| lottin wrote:
| Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their
| tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of
| merely depositing them somewhere?
| ogogmad wrote:
| In a blockchain, the chain keeps splitting. Your tokens
| live on multiple competing chains simultaneously. In PoW,
| you are forced to pick one of those chains to mine on. In
| PoS, you can stake on all of them simultaneously.
|
| The splitting is unavoidable and happens constantly.
| Multiple competing future states are constantly being
| created, and the network has to eventually arrive at a
| consensus about which possible future is the true one.
|
| > Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their
| tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of
| merely depositing them somewhere?
|
| Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable
| is the whole point of PoW/PoS. Your question reads to me
| like "In trying to solve problem x, why don't you assume
| that you've already solved problem x, and use that to
| solve problem x."
| lottin wrote:
| > Figuring out how to make spending your tokens
| irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS.
|
| Maybe I'm missing something... if miners are required to
| send the tokens to an invalid address, are these tokens
| not lost irrevocably?
| ogogmad wrote:
| No. Did you not read the comment you were responding to?
| lottin wrote:
| Yes, I read it. As far as I can see, it talks about
| 'staking', so it doesn't address what happens when the
| tokens and 'expended' as opposed to 'staked'.
| ogogmad wrote:
| You have two competing chains: Chain 1 and chain 2. On
| chain 1, you spend a token on a good. On chain 2, you
| spend no token. You wait for chain 1 to win the race. You
| then stake on chain 2 to get your money back. If chain 2
| then overtakes chain 1, you've executed a double-spend
| attack.
|
| An equivalent attack wouldn't work on a PoW chain. If you
| do the equivalent of "staking" on chain 2, then you're
| computing hashes, which is costing real-life resources.
| In the PoS case, without slashing, staking on chain 2 is
| free. In fact, this is the rational move to make every
| time you spend a token; stake on competing chains to get
| your token back.
| seoaeu wrote:
| What stops miners from sending their tokens somewhere,
| then hard forking from a previous block where they didn't
| send them?
|
| This has a clear answer in PoW, but not in your scheme
| lottin wrote:
| Easy, you put the transaction in the previous block. So
| the miner can only mine a block if they have already made
| the expenditure.
| seoaeu wrote:
| What stops me from doing a hard fork to roll back both
| blocks?
| lottin wrote:
| If you spend more tokens than the tokens that were spent
| mining the last two blocks you can erase the transactions
| in those blocks, but isn't that also the case with PoW?
| seoaeu wrote:
| You aren't following. The hard fork _lets me double spend
| the tokens from those blocks._
| lottin wrote:
| Indeed, I'm not following your argument.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Stop asking people to do your homework.
| [deleted]
| ogogmad wrote:
| What if I create a whole new chain? Will the transactions
| at the very beginning of that chain have to be added to
| the big, old chain? How far back do the common ancestors
| of two chains have to be for your auto-merging to happen?
| What happens if two histories conflict? Then in Version
| Control parlance, we have a "merge conflict".
| brightball wrote:
| That's going to be the effect with every currency as the
| people starting it are going to have the most.
|
| Just how it works.
| mattalex wrote:
| >> consensus will be set by the few whales, who will maximize
| their rent extraction at the expense of numerous small
| players
|
| Aren't you just describing capitalism here? The people that
| created the system and own the biggest share of it have
| gigantic influence on it. Matter of fact, isn't that exactly
| what happened in ethereums PoW network, too? The developers
| decided to switch to PoS regardless of what the current
| participants want.
|
| In general, isn't the idea of using PoS that if you aren't
| happy with the current system, you can easily fork into a
| competitor? If enough people think the current system is
| unjust, then you can switch to the new one, where you will be
| part of the development. At the beginning of the fork you
| also wouldn't need that much compute, as PoS is more
| efficient and you aren't going to have many
| users/transactions in the first place.
|
| Since it's easy to switch currency (at least easier than
| privately setting up a Dollar 2.0), members of the original
| currency have to behave fairly, else people are going to
| switch. Note: The thing people are switching to doesn't even
| have to be better in any way than the original currency. It
| just has to have different controllers to influence the
| members of the original system.
|
| The way I see it, is that there's no meaningful way in which
| PoS based currencies are worse than the current monetary
| system: large stakeholders in current global currencies also
| have gigantic leverage (think of money printing during the
| pandemic or bailouts after the 2008 financial crisis). The
| real advantage I see with PoS systems is not the system
| itself, but the tooling that comes with it and allows for the
| development of competitor currencies that check the power of
| each other. With current global currencies there's no checks-
| and-balances system inside the monetary decision making
| process, while a fleet of independent PoS has the chance for
| checks and balances to be induced through competitive
| pressure.
| adventured wrote:
| > Aren't you just describing capitalism here?
|
| It fairly describes every political system and economic
| system that has ever existed or will ever exist. What's
| being described is how humans always organize systems in
| regards to political and economic power.
|
| See: Socialism, Communism, Fascism. It applies just the
| same to those. Except in those systems they'll murder you
| and your entire family, then burn your village/town to the
| ground, if you attempt to compete with the rulers or party
| (Chavez, Castro, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Pol
| Pot, Kim, Putin, Erdogan, Lukashenko, etc.).
|
| Whereas I can freely compete with Coca Cola, Tesla,
| Salesforce, Splunk, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Starbucks, 3M
| and most other companies if I'm able to. Nobody is stopping
| me from inventing a new coffee drink and going after
| Starbucks with it, or setting up a better coffee chain on
| the corner. Nobody is stopping me from inventing a better
| soda-competing drink (see: Monster or Red Bull or 5hour
| Energy; those people weren't assassinated by the soda
| cartel). Nobody is preventing me from starting the next
| great convenience store (ask 7-11 how they feel about
| upcoming Sheetz; or ask KFC how they feel about Chic-
| fil-A).
| zionic wrote:
| > You want the multibillionaires to dictate the properties of
| the medium of exchange that serves the entire globe?
|
| Somebody tell him about the r-family.
| sidiropo wrote:
| The Algorand PoS consensus protocol assumes that honest nodes
| use so-called "ephemeral keys" (see Section 5.2 of the white
| paper). This implies they are supposed to "forget" part of
| their past state. A malicious node could choose not to forget
| their past state, thus making double-spend a possibility
| (assuming an adversary with majority of stake).
|
| Therefore, the formal proof of security provided in the
| Algorand white paper does _not_ resolve the nothing-at-stake
| problem, which is inherent to all PoS systems.
| locallost wrote:
| Charlie Munger is on record saying he hates crypto. I doubt
| Buffet is far off. How many billions would they need to sink
| into destroying something they hate?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Do you work on HEX for Richard Heart?
|
| As a POS developer, what do you think of HEX and Richard Heart
| (whose real name is Richard J Schueler)?
|
| If you don't work on HEX, how is your POS get rich quick
| pyramid scheme any better or more trustworthy than HEX?
|
| If you do work on HEX, then please ask Richard to drop by, join
| the discussion, and answer the questions below (to which he
| replied "Dodge Dodge"), and any other questions the HN
| community wants to ask him:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367412
| cs702 wrote:
| I would add that the silly argument that a super-wealthy
| individual or a government could _in theory_ degrade or destroy
| a transaction platform is applicable, not just to Algorand and
| other block chains, but also, more generally, to _ANY
| transaction platform_.
|
| I mean, if Doctor Evil suddenly decided to spend tens of
| billions of dollars to destroy the three main credit card
| networks, he could probably do it. In fact, it might be easier
| and cheaper than attempting to degrade or bring down a
| distributed block chain network. The credit card networks are
| built upon many layers of ancient, pre-Internet technology,
| full of discoverable vulnerabilities and critical points-of-
| failure.
|
| But we all know that it wouldn't happen. Doctor Evil would
| never want to do so, because even him, the most evil person in
| the world, would still want to be able to use his credit cards
| to eat out, go to the movies, and order stuff online. Also, he
| would never want to do something that would make him enemy #1
| of every other person in the planet, including every other
| super-criminal!
|
| What Doctor Evil actually wants to be able to do is figure out
| ways to steal or get balances from participants in the network
| _without destroying the network_ : steal poorly protected
| wallets, hack into poorly secured exchanges, find ways to get
| blackmail payments on the network (e.g., by launching DoS
| attacks on the web), etc. The network itself is too useful to
| everyone for anyone to want to destroy it.
|
| --
|
| PS. For the record: I have no economic connection to Algorand
| the block chain nor to Algorand the company, but I'm
| (superficially) familiar with some of Silvio Micali's past work
| and also, I know one of the company's top executives. In my
| judgement, the Algorand block chain has great technology, and
| Algorand the company has really great people. Their main
| challenge, as I see it, is overcoming the powerful network
| effects already accruing to other block chains.
| teawrecks wrote:
| IMO people listing things that discourage an attack (people
| will hate him, his credit cards won't work, etc) are just
| people trying to comfort themselves. It's like saying, "No
| one would break into my home because they might hurt
| themselves breaking in, or I might hurt them up, or they
| might get caught by the police and go to jail. It's just too
| risky."
|
| At the end of the day, Dr. Evil will gladly spend 10s of
| billions to destroy the network if doing so nets him 100s of
| billions. Stop listing reasons people won't attack the
| network and start listing reasons they would.
| cs702 wrote:
| That's _not_ what I said. Please don 't attack a straw man.
| My main point was, and is, that the same attack-logic
| applies to ANY transaction network. The example with Doctor
| Evil was about _other_ transaction networks.
|
| Why would Doctor Evil attack a block chain network when he
| could attack global/national/regional credit card/wire
| transfer/ACH networks, many of which are built upon ancient
| pre-Internet technology, are full of discoverable
| vulnerabilities and critical points-of-failure, and are
| operated by cash-rish financial institutions with liquid,
| easy-to-short stocks?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| he would in case of war
| akrymski wrote:
| By this argument the only real consensus mechanism we need is
| FAITH. In PoS we trust.
|
| As long as a sufficient number of people believe some currency
| has value - it has value. If they don't believe, it doesn't
| have value, and the stakes are worthless too.
| evergrande wrote:
| What if Buffett just wants to see the world burn and doesn't
| care about getting the money back out?
|
| Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an
| existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing
| business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy
| trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.
| manbart wrote:
| They wouldn't need to spend money to 'destroy the
| blockchain', just legislate against it. For example, what
| would happen to the value of crypto-currencies if the US
| government simply banned them outright for entities within
| its jurisdiction, and also made it so if any foreign entity
| touches cryptos they get cut off from the US financial system
| (similar to how 'sanctions' work today). I imagine the
| destruction would be near total.
| injidup wrote:
| If you have 30 billion, and the motivation, then there are
| more entertaining ways of making the world burn than hacking
| somebody else's Ponzi scheme.
| irq-1 wrote:
| Everyone gets paid!
|
| > Proof-of-Stake attacks aren't about having 51% of the CPU
| that overwhelms a Proof-of-Work system, but about having
| 60-70% of the _value_ in the network.
|
| If a nation buys 2/3 of the coin and destroys the network,
| investors (as a whole) take a 1/3 loss. Then they can
| (re)start another PoS coin.
|
| Ironically the nation would be up against the old saying that
| the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain
| solvent.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Hell, they might not even take a loss at all. A nation-
| state-level actor trying to buy a majority of the monetary
| supply would represent a substantial increase in demand and
| therefore price.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| ...or gradually alters consensus to pad their pockets at
| the expense of smaller stakeholders.
|
| congrats, you've reinvented central banking and plutocracy.
| ertian wrote:
| It's a temporary state, until the PoS coin market cap gets
| too large to be attackable. Bitcoin's market cap is in the 1T
| range now, Ethereum is close to half that. Buffet couldn't do
| a thing against a PoS coin that large, and it would be a
| serious commitment and risk even for a nation state. Buffet
| could take down some random smaller coin, maybe, at the cost
| of most of his personal fortune, but if he did so the world
| would not burn.
|
| It's _possible_ that a government might choose to attack a
| random small coin just to discredit the notion of PoS
| cryptocurrencies, but it's hard to picture a government
| gaining consensus to do it, and it would be obvious to
| knowledgeable onlookers that larger coins are immune (or
| anyway, much better protected), so the resulting disruption
| would probably be temporary.
| bitcurious wrote:
| PoS encourages centralized exchange-held staking, which
| means that there are only a handful of failure/pressure
| points. In other words, a government doesn't have to buy
| 66% of the stake - merely compel the exchanges.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > PoS encourages centralized exchange-held staking
|
| Not when the protocol actively encourages
| decentralization by cutting off staking rewards to larger
| pools, like what Cardano does (as one example). Sure, the
| exchanges can (and probably do) run multiple pools, but
| so can anyone else, and for far less expense than is
| required for mining.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| > Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an
| existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing
| business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy
| trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.
|
| While you are correct that burning $30 billion dollars to
| destroy trust in PoS blockchains isn't that much money, I
| disagree that such an action would actually destroy trust in
| PoS blockchains. We have seen serious attacks on a number of
| blockchains, Ethereum for instance had enormous amounts of
| money stolen or destroyed via weaknesses in the blockchain.
| Yet Ethereum is still going strong. Bitcoin suffered 51%
| attacks that were used to perform double spends and Bitcoin
| is more valuable than ever.
|
| It might be cheap to burn $30B to destroy a blockchain, but
| what if you burn $30B and the blockchain recovers 12 hours
| later.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Why destroy it, when you can co-opt and control?
|
| Spend $X billion, then just bleed everyone without power.
| Sort of like what we do now.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| > Ethereum for instance had enormous amounts of money
| stolen or destroyed via weaknesses in the blockchain.
|
| These weaknesses weren't due to consensus failures or
| protocol failures, but bugs in applications running on
| Ethereum. If Ethereum's protocol allowed arbitrary funds to
| be stolen, that could certainly cause a loss of trust.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You overestimate the amount that people "investing" in
| crypto actually _care_ about what it is. If my friends
| are anything to go by, anyway.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Most investors don't care at all and blow off things like
| "the blockchain you're using requires this fully
| centralized component", but many players in the ecosystem
| that enable the speculation we see now, do care about
| protocol safety. If the Ethereum protocol was shown to be
| unsafe, they'd publicly promote safer alternatives and
| push their users to move.
| Zamicol wrote:
| Importantly, if "Warren Buffet comes along and wants to spam
| our network" his bad actions would be tied to addresses that
| can be blacklisted.
|
| You can't do that with PoW without "additional" consensus
| rules, which is that slippery slope to PoS!
| SilasX wrote:
| I just read most of the article. As I understand it, the
| failure mode isn't that one attacker could hand you a malicious
| node, it's that the network doesn't actually reach unambiguous
| consensus -- all/most "stakers" could simultaneously be signing
| a different transaction history the whole time, at virtually no
| cost, which is just as valid as "the" one you believe in;
| there's no (cryptographic) way to distinguish them. And so it's
| possible for, one day, the whole network to get pulled out from
| under you. "Nope, this other one is the real deal."
|
| Is this a problem in practice? As the article says, no ... but
| only because there is a sort of vaguely specified "proof of
| authority" that backs the current chain, which actually just
| reintroduces centralization. The author cites the Bitcoin Cash
| and DAO/ETH Classic forks as cases where that proof of
| authority gets tested and shows the actual centralization.
|
| It's my understanding that Algorand has something on top of
| pure PoS that ensures the consensus (which the article says is
| necessary) so I'm not sure the same criticism is applicable
| there, but can't comment further until I get more familiar.
| cryptica wrote:
| This article is complete BS. Proof of Stake is more secure than
| Proof of Work for a simple reason. The cost of doing a 51% attack
| (to stop the blockchain or to start censoring specific
| transactions) on a PoS blockchain is exponential, whereas the
| cost of doing such an attack on a PoW network is linear. This is
| because as an attacker acquires more tokens, the price of
| remaining tokens increases exponentially as the attacker
| approaches the 50% mark. If the network is well decentralized in
| terms of token ownership, it may not ever be possible for the
| attacker to acquire 50% of tokens; also, their incentive to
| continue with the attack decreases as their stake in the
| blockchain increases. Unlike with PoS which requires the attacker
| to keep buying more (limited-supply) tokens, with PoW, ASIC
| miners don't become more expensive as the attacker gets closer to
| having 51% of the hash power; this is because the market will
| produce more ASIC miners to compensate for any increase in
| demand. The global supply of ASIC miners has no upper bound.
|
| The article is also misleading in inferring that there is a very
| narrow range of ways to implement PoS; in reality, there are many
| ways and all of the 'drawbacks' mentioned only apply to certain
| (poorly designed) implementations which no modern PoS blockchain
| would ever use.
|
| > What happens if you're presented with two identical blocks, and
| have to decide which one to pick?
|
| Easy, you can just have a vote on one of the block and choose the
| one with the majority votes; it can be chosen on the basis of any
| attribute of the block (E.g. commonly you can look at block IDs).
| This is what PoS blockchains like COSMOS do with the Tendermint
| protocol. Other blockchains like Lisk have a delayed voting so
| that consensus is reached after a certain number of blocks.
|
| > The entire point of the consensus mechanism was to allow us to
| tell which transaction was first, without personally having seen
| it take place.
|
| Anyone who understands distributed systems knows that the exact
| order of transactions (down to a few hundreds of millisecond)
| cannot be physically determined due to latency between the nodes
| and the unpredictable geography of participants. This is as true
| for PoW as it is for PoS. The most important thing (for certain
| use cases such as DeFi) is that transactions cannot be
| predictably front-run; using block ID ordering with voting as the
| basis for selecting between two valid blocks guarantees this. If
| the forger tried to cheat the system by producing multiple
| blocks, the network may not be able to reach consensus on the
| block vote and the forger would not receive any block rewards.
| joshuajbouw wrote:
| Developing PoS systems for 8 years, the research is completely
| dated on both old Bitcoin-like PoS and modern PoS.
|
| That, and the author has a wrong understanding of the Nothing at
| Stake problem. At the time, the argument was there was nothing
| stopping someone from staking on multiple forks to hedge their
| bet on the dominate chain, giving them nothing at stake on the
| forked branches since the get equal ownership on each chain.
|
| Mind you, Nakamoto consensus is pretty awful and completely
| ignored these days. Why do you believe that nodes flagged for
| support of protocols and miners with dominate hashrate LOST the
| big block debate? Because of the nodes, and community consensus.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| After reading this whole article, I find it really scary that
| something like this can get so much attention.
|
| It looks like the author read about PoS circa 2014 and hasn't
| read anything written or done since then. It's true that the
| "nothing at stake" problem exists, but there are tons of
| practical solutions and mitigations that work, many of which are
| already deployed and protecting >$100M. Soon ETH will be securing
| trillions with such mitigations.
|
| To address the specific points the author makes:
| 1. If a node signs another version of the same block within a
| reasonably short time period, "slash" their deposits (e.g. punish
| them inside of the system)
|
| You don't have to know which came first, just like in BTC. You
| just need a longest chain rule with the property that the longest
| chain is final after a certain point (subject to certain
| assumptions about the % of stake that is honest). This is how
| nearly every blockchain works and it's not special in proof of
| stake. 2. If a node signs another version of
| the same block, like, a year later, just ignore it.
|
| Yes, that's fine. Lots of chains do this. It's called a "finality
| mechanism". Even ETC has one called MESS while still using proof
| of work (although MESS is probably broken). Bitcoin could add one
| too. This is orthogonal to PoS vs PoW.
| hartator wrote:
| Why the change in HN title? "Proof of stake is a scam and the
| people promoting it are scammers" is clickbait for sure but it's
| the author own title and it is the subject of the article.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| The author takes issue with the Phone-a-friend-consensus (PFC)
| for establishing base consensus. I disagree with his objection
| for two reasons:
|
| 1. For all consensus systems, at least a vast majority will rely
| on PFC for base consensus since they will not personally audit
| the client software they download, and thus will rely on PFC to
| determine which software distribution channel to trust to
| download the client software from. In other words, there is in
| practice no pure PFC-free consensus protocol, to be taking such a
| hard stance on Proof of Stake for its reliance on it.
|
| 2. The Schelling Point PFC in Proof of Stake will always be the
| real order of transactions, and therefore PFC will be highly
| reliable. Cases like Bitcoin's block size hard limit dispute, and
| Ethereum's DAO hack rollback dispute, dealt with something other
| than order of transactions, and in both cases, the dispute was
| severe enough to lead to a hard fork - which jettisonning PFC
| can't protect against - regardless.
| dgan wrote:
| I thought I understood what author says. After reading comments,
| I am lost again. I will continue my journey clueless, without
| ever touching this burning pile of trash with scammers on top.
| yholio wrote:
| While the discussion about consensus algorithms is interesting
| and each side has good points, it should not be confused with the
| much more pertinent decision about simbolic currency
| (conceptually similar to fiat) versus proof of burned resources
| money (conceptually similar to gold).
|
| We should not confuse the two topics. It's entirely possible to
| have a chain where the consensus is established by PoW, yet the
| monetary base is created by decree without any wasted resources,
| for example gifted to some charities or dropped by helicopter to
| anyone who has a Twitter account.
|
| While the security PoW chains create is proportional to the
| amount of resources spent, there is absolutely no reason to think
| the current level of burn in Bitcoin is optimal - and strong
| reason to think that there is massive waste, that is, Bitcoin
| protects against double spend to a degree orders of magnitude
| harder than what a credible attacker might be willing to spend.
| What results is wasted energy that brings no tangible security to
| the users of the currency.
| wcoenen wrote:
| 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 already approaching 1% of global
| electricity consumption, if it hasn't passed that point already.
| If the price were to go up tenfold, then so would electricity
| usage (roughly). That's not sustainable, both technically for
| grids and economically because electricity prices go up.
|
| Because of that, I foresee two possible futures for PoW
| cryptocurrencies:
|
| 1. The resource usage overshoots and PoW collapses because it
| gets banned everywhere. (This seems to be playing out now with
| China having banned crypto mining, Kazakhstan running into grid
| issues because of the miner influx, and Sweden arguing for a ban
| in the EU.)
|
| 2. The popularity of these currencies stops growing and only some
| niche applications remain. Speculators leave because there's no
| more money to be made. Prices go down.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I don't think the author was arguing that PoW is perfect, only
| that PoS doesn't even solve some of the problems PoW does and
| is therefore even less viable as a currency.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| It is not about spent electricity bills, it is about spent
| time. This is the problem that needs to be solved, how can you
| make the work more time consuming without beeing able to go
| around this with computing here: electric power.
| pabl0rg wrote:
| That's the idea in Proof of time and space used by chia.net
|
| You probably haven't heard of this coin/network (invented by
| the inventor of bittorrent) b/c it doesn't aim to be a
| speculative asset, but it does have a very sane programming
| model (in lisp)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It is impossible, because time, unlike electricity, is free.
| twic wrote:
| The supply of time is absolutely fixed, and therefore the
| marginal cost of time is infinite.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| So, you would take a job paying a cent per day, because
| your time is free?
| rajamaka wrote:
| Time is free. My usage of that time is not.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| We are talking about computer time here. It's cheap to
| spin up 1000 tiny aws instances.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Waiting for PoWaaS.
| mym1990 wrote:
| This is silly, computer time certainly isn't free and
| almost anything scaled up on a cloud service can become
| very expensive within _minutes_. Just go look at the poor
| developers that make 1 mistake in their Lambda code and
| get charged $80,000.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| As long as they're somebody else's instances, and you're
| a criminal who broke into their account.
|
| And that still destroys the environment and enriches Jeff
| Bezos.
|
| Forget stealing data -- these hackers hijacked Amazon
| cloud accounts to mine bitcoin:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-broke-into-
| amazon-cl...
|
| >A report from the security intelligence group RedLock
| found at least two companies which had their AWS cloud
| services compromised by hackers who wanted nothing more
| than to use the computer power to mine the cryptocurrency
| bitcoin. The hackers ultimately got access to Amazon's
| cloud servers after discovering that their administration
| consoles weren't password protected.
| bitcurious wrote:
| Chia uses "Proof of Space Time" which leans in the direction
| you're describing.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >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.
|
| Are Google and Facebook eating the world? They are processing
| petabytes of data on daily basis and every year there is more
| data and information being shared on the internet. Moore's law
| is our friend because as long we have better chips more data
| can be processed and analyzed.
|
| Bitcoin's PoW is based on economy and game theory meaning if
| people do not find Bitcoin useful they will stop processing
| transactions or in reality they will stop investing and
| spending computation power and electricity.
| fuy wrote:
| What you're saying is tautological in a sense that for for it
| to be true, you need to postulate that every human activity
| is also based on economy and game theory (otherwise, why
| would people behave as you say they would behave) . So your
| argument essentially is that governments banning bitcoin is
| also based on economy and game theory. Which is fine by me.
| mrkramer wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| If people behaved like game theory says they should then
| lottery, addictions and casinos wouldn't exist.
| mrkramer wrote:
| 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.
| mbar84 wrote:
| It's important to remember that the direction of the causal
| link is from the value of each satoshi to the cost of
| electricity use by miners, not the other way around. People
| value sats, for whatever their reasons. Because they value
| sats, the mining costs can be financed. If people had no reason
| to value sats, there would be no mining. The best way to
| undermine Bitcoin energy use, would be to talk to your local
| central bank.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The mining is a kind of ratchet. Not _really_ , but
| psychologically, which is enough. As speculation goes up,
| people add more mining equipment, which "props up" the price.
| kneel wrote:
| >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.
| pkulak wrote:
| > 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.
| kneel wrote:
| Would be interesting to watch someone try to amass ~0.5% of
| the world's energy/miners to perform a 51% attack on
| Bitcoin.
| keymone wrote:
| It's a system with feedback loops, it'll eventually level out
| at some equilibrium. You didn't provide an actual argument for
| why it should definitely collapse.
| naasking wrote:
| > It's a system with feedback loops, it'll eventually level
| out at some equilibrium.
|
| An equilibrium doesn't entail that it's a sustainable point,
| or that it's actually providing value when you properly
| account for all externalities.
| ced wrote:
| Is there any forecast of where the equilibrium happen? Say,
| if you're in a 1000-people closed society where
| cryptocurrency is the only thing used to buy stuff, what's
| the economic calculation for the long-term energy
| consumption? Seems like there should be papers about that...
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Seems like he's insinuating a global ban will occur.
| lukifer wrote:
| Interestingly enough, as the ledgers are all public by
| nature, there would be nothing stopping states from forking
| blockchains into centralized solutions, outcompeting miners
| by reducing transaction costs to zero. Crypto-anarchists
| would lose their minds, but most consumers would probably
| pick whatever's cheapest and which "just works".
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love the politics of
| decentralization. But it's worth remembering that
| decentralization tends to be a cost-center, not a profit-
| center, from the standpoint of efficiency and performance;
| and decentralized tech is no guarantee of decentralized
| results (see Amazon/Facebook/Google, who have quasi-
| monopolies in their niches, despite being delivered over
| open and federated web protocols).
| somebodythere wrote:
| The existence of feedback loops very much doesn't imply a
| stable equilibrium. Actually, any system that is not
| overdamped will necessarily not reach an equilibrium.
|
| Or maybe the equilibrium is that no country bans it, and PoW
| currencies don't die on their own due to lack of financial
| rewards, and PoW artificially inflates the demand and
| therefore price of energy, leading first to widespread
| economic issues, then widespread ecological issues, until
| there is no one left buy pizza from with your BTC. Very
| compelling equilibrium.
| keymone wrote:
| point is that it's not a closed system that just blows up
| at some point. as long as there are people interested in
| keeping bitcoin running - it will keep running. for now
| economic incentives are enough, and it'll probably be
| enough forever, worst case - ideological incentives will do
| it.
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| All of this makes sense if you assume people won't build new
| power plants for bitcoin. But they already are. They are
| renewable plants because these are now much cheaper. Bitcoin
| acts as a subsidy for the construction of new green power
| plants.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Nonsense.
|
| However, people _are_ starting up coal plants that have been
| previously shut down in order to mine bitcoin.
|
| Bitcoin is causing _massive_ harm.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| The real question is how much longer the USD will remain the
| reserve currency and what will replace it.
|
| Europe is a museum. China would have to open its capital
| account, and that's not going to happen.
|
| The answer is obvious by now.
| syspec wrote:
| What's the answer?
| tiahura wrote:
| Indefinitely, because there is no viable alternative at
| this time.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's actually the opposite since the block reward goes down
| over time
| akhosravian wrote:
| > It's actually the opposite since the block reward goes down
| over time
|
| It is true that 10 years ago block rewards were almost 10x
| what they are today in terms of BTC, but by USD value new
| rewards are worth several orders of magnitude more today.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| The block reward approaches zero so no matter what the
| price is in the future it will amount to zero at the end.
| earthtolazlo wrote:
| By 2140.
| WA wrote:
| If the price goes up, you can spend more resources to mine a
| block. But the cost will approach the reward.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > It's actually the opposite since the block reward goes down
| over time
|
| See history of block reward in dollars[1]. This the miner's
| collective budget to find blocks.
|
| It's about 350K USD per 10 minutes now, or 2.1M USD/hour.
| Pick an industrial electricity price, say 0.05 USD/kWh. That
| budget will then buy 42 GWh/hour, or 42 gigawatt of power
| continuously (roughly 2% of global power consumption). Of
| course, miners have other costs, and their growth is lagging
| this ceiling. But it gives you an idea.
|
| That's why I think we're heading for overshoot, and future
| block reward halvings will come too late.
|
| [1] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/chain-block-reward
| littlestymaar wrote:
| There's also an alternative:
|
| 3. cryptocurrencies stop the Austrian economics fetishism and
| index the coin reward to the mining difficulty. That means
| getting rid of the fixed coin supply.
|
| That would stabilize the price of the token a lot (since price
| going up would increase the mining appeal, thus expanding the
| money supply, driving the price down) and also make it much
| more usable as a mean of payment (the number of token in
| circulation would grow in parallel with the growth in users).
|
| Obviously it's not gonna happen, because those people have
| spent a decade convincing themselves that deflation is good and
| fixed money supply is the righteous way to manage a currency.
| thinkloop wrote:
| The difficulty is where the security comes from. Bitcoin's
| goal is to have the highest possible prices and difficulty so
| that nation-states and alien civilizations can't hack it.
| It's very easy to have a cheap low-difficulty coin. Equally
| worthless too. You need to understand that proof-of-work is
| actually proof-of-waste - the waste, the difficulty, the
| cost, _is_ the security.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| You've misunderstood my point: I'm not talking about
| reducing the difficulty, I'm talking about (sub-linearly)
| increasing the mining reward as the difficulty grow.
|
| Also the difficulty scaling is important even if you don't
| take security into account: if you don't raise it, then the
| block mining frequency rise progressively, and then you end
| up with more and more orphaned blocks, until you end up
| with parallel chains that don't really converge to a single
| coherent one.
| thinkloop wrote:
| I see what you mean now. Interesting thought to peg
| inflation to difficulty. I think the main issue is that
| Bitcoin is not, and will not be, a means of payment. So
| price stability doesn't matter much. The nature of the
| system favors few, large transactions. The small-block
| size crystalized that. Bitcoin is truly suited as a
| clearing layer. Eventually it will process just the
| largest most expensive transactions in the world. Which
| is good since that's the only way miners will get paid
| and the high transaction costs will ensure continued
| security.
| lukifer wrote:
| The focus on fixed money supply seems a little absurd to me
| anyway, given the triviality of creating new crypto-
| currencies, and the relatively low transaction costs of
| trading between them.
|
| Imagine making a case for returning to the gold standard,
| when thousands of other choices for new precious metals, all
| with the same performance characteristics, were literally
| just lying around, and a network of drones would let you swap
| perfectly and instantly between those metals for pennies!
|
| In that light, one can certainly understand the fervent
| contempt that Bitcoin maximalists hold for "shitcoins"; but a
| free-banking market cuts both ways. Barring a state blessing
| one chain and outlawing the rest, creating new cryptos and
| swapping between them won't go away. The proper way to
| measure the emergent "monetary policy" of crypto-currency is
| of the sum of _all_ chains, not of Bitcoin itself.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Indeed. And I personally love to remind the fans of
| bitcoin's limited supply that with the different forks the
| bitcoin faced during its life, the bitcoin money supply
| grew a lot more than it was supposed to, without causing
| any price collapse.
| drclau wrote:
| > 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 for
| transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. And,
| unfortunately, with the side effect of consuming vast amounts
| of energy.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| Did you mean to say "I cannot take any cryptocurrencies
| conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of
| climate change"?
| tzs wrote:
| > 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
| give up on electricity. In fact, switching more things _to_
| electricity, such as transportation and heating, is a large
| part of what we will have to do to address climate change.
|
| * Therefore to address climate change we are going to have to
| switch to sources of electricity that are climate neutral,
| which cleans up Bitcoin (and all the other uses of
| electricity) from a climate standpoint.
|
| EDIT: to clarify, of course Bitcoin's electricity use _now_
| has a climate impact. My point is that this will eventually
| be taken care of by the necessary switch to clean electricity
| for all our electricity production.
|
| Until that happens we of course should be trying to clean up
| current electricity uses, but there are currently bigger fish
| to fry on that end than Bitcoin. To dismiss taking climate
| change plans seriously because most conversation is about
| things with bigger impact is not sensible.
|
| If we take too long on the supply side and Bitcoin continues
| to grow it may move up the list to where it is one of those
| uses that we will need to address before we clean up the
| electricity supply.
| DennisP wrote:
| That would be a fine argument if we weren't in a race to
| switch to new sources of electricity before triggering
| catastrophic damage, and losing.
| paulgb wrote:
| Yes we need to clean up electricity production, but drawing
| on more electricity doesn't make that better, it makes it
| worse. Case in point, there are coal and natural gas plants
| in Montana and the Finger Lakes that would have been shut
| down or downsized, but haven't been due to bitcoin mining.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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 sources which would
| otherwise be taken offline.
|
| 2) Even if the BTC energy is entirely derived from some
| power source that could not be used by others, perhaps all
| geothermal generation on a remote volcanic island, it will
| still add net heat to the atmospheric system. and, of
| course, we still have the energy use and CO2 spewage of
| fabricating and moving the mining equipment into location.
|
| So, no, this problem is NOT taking care of itself.
| dcow wrote:
| 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| Not at all
|
| Even if 99% of the rest of the world is also running on
| renewables, Crypto is still diverting energy generation
| that could be decarbonized.
|
| Once the world energy generation is fully de-carbonized,
| then it is a non-issue.
| politician wrote:
| 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| "folks" is not me, that is certainly not the point I was
| making, and your "predictability" indicates that your
| comment is no less based on fact-free as those you
| criticize.
|
| Obviously, if the mining is done off-earth anywhere, it
| will not contribute to the CO2 problem, =ASSUMING= that
| it does not require on-earth energy resources to put the
| power generation there.
|
| Crypto mining also stops being a problem when 100% of on-
| Earth power generation is de-carbonized -- in that
| situation, it is no longer diverting energy generation
| that could be used to displace/reduce remaining
| CO2-spewing energy generation.
|
| The problem is: While CO2 power generation is still
| active, and especially when it dominates, every kW of
| electricity used for crypto mining either directly
| generates CO2, or it uses clean generation that could
| otherwise (but now does NOT) displace a kW of CO2-based
| generation capacity.
| politician wrote:
| OK, "Crypto is bad until the entire grid is decarbonized"
| is a reasonable position. It's not airtight: there are a
| number of grids and they aren't all interconnected, but
| at least it's on the right track.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, I agree, and was thinking something like that after
| I wrote - the range is not actually global, but basically
| grid-scale.
|
| For example, if the Texas grid became ~100% wind and
| other clean-source-powered, then BTC mining in that grid
| would not in any practical sense consume clean power that
| could otherwise displace dirty power. The 100kW you use
| to feed your miners could in theory be used to reduce
| production from a nearby coal plan in Oklahoma, but in
| practice, since the grids are not connected, they aren't,
| so that is probably the right scale.
|
| That said, if it gets big and the miners are consuming
| enough production of solar panels and wind turbines to
| slow clean energy buildout on other grids, that's the
| second order of the same problem.
|
| So, maybe everyone with crypto should, instead of
| convening to buy the constitution or a basketball team,
| go fund the takeover and conversion of an entire grid to
| clean energy, and build all the miners there.
| gefhfff wrote:
| You are making (wrong) assumptions:
|
| - electricity is the only part where Bitcoin produces
| emissions (emissions of mining hardware)
|
| - wasting climate neutral energy does not matter (it does:
| it's harder, takes more time and resources to switch to
| climate neutral sources; iirc studies estimate Germany
| needs to cut 50% of energy consumption to achieve 1.5deg
| conformity)
|
| - Bitcoin miners don't bypass widely adopted regulations
| somehow
| seoaeu wrote:
| 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
| dcow wrote:
| 99.9% has nothing to do with crypto.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to a different comment or
| something? Not sure where the 99.9% number is coming from
| snet0 wrote:
| You can't take a discussion of climate change seriously
| unless it specifically addresses a single-percentage problem?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A rapidly-growing 1% problem, one that has the potential to
| nullify other costly gains. Such problems need to die
| young, before they grow into 5/10/50% problems.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| No, like others have stated, the climate challenge is
| switching our entire energy production (plus other
| fossile fuel end-uses) to net-zero or net-negative
| emissions.
|
| If Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, it would give a small
| reduction in energy use, but at best it buys you 6 months
| extra to decarbonize electricity production.
| pibechorro wrote:
| Not to mention pow mining is not location or resource
| specific. It encourages cheap and efficient use of
| energy. Miners preffer low cost, surplus energy and will
| relocate wherever that may be. Pow can use nuclear,
| thermal, wind, solar and alsoo dirty fuels, just like a
| Tesla. If you have an issue with the use of dirty fuels,
| then campaign against that specifically, throwing pow
| under the bus entirely is short sighted.
|
| Also what does btc and crypto replace? The carbon
| footprint of traditional finance, banking and the
| military actions to preserve it are massive polluters.
| Even at its infancy, pow crypto is already a good
| direction to improve sustainability.
| lukifer wrote:
| While I think it's fair to properly account for the
| carbon footprint of traditional banking and state
| military infrastructure, it is an utter fantasy that
| crypto is in direct competition with them. Crypto has
| been steadily integrating with existing banking
| institutions and regulations over the last five years;
| and barring some kind of new free-market, secrets-based
| "killer drones as a service", no distributed hash table
| can supplant raw military hegemony (aka, the $5 wrench
| attack [0]).
|
| I think crypto has a lot of socially useful potential,
| beyond mere speculative gambling and Austrian-school
| value storage, but that's in _addition_ to the centuries
| of momentum in our real-world political economy; crypto-
| currencies are unlikely to replace that entirely, anymore
| than the internet replaced the New York Times.
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/538/
| gefhfff wrote:
| "small"
|
| 6 months can be a tipping point happening or not.
|
| Additionally, each produced ton of green house gases is
| contributing to climate change right now
|
| The more electricity to decarbonize the more difficult.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| _edit: deleting the comment because I misunderstood the
| context_
| kitkat_new wrote:
| which scientific sources contradict the existence of
| tipping points?
| CyanBird wrote:
| But that won't be the case, bitcoin and Crypto growing to
| 25% of the energy production is just nonsensical let
| alone 50%
|
| As OP mentioned this issue is already getting addressed
| and in process to become more debated
|
| If anything, solving existing real problems ought be
| priority rather than such a niche thing
| xwolfi wrote:
| He probably speculates, like the degenerate speculators,
| that it won't end up there.
|
| Why push around everyone to consume differently while
| distributing vast amount of tax money that immediately go
| into more wasteful crypto ? It will not stay at 1% and I
| agree with the OP that it's going to be difficulty to
| reduce electricity wastage on one end while ignore the
| elephant baby in the crib taking over the room.
|
| I'm a random internet person in Hong Kong. I have a friend
| mining half his rent in a hotel room who decided that he
| doesn't need to pay rent the "normal way" anymore, he can
| just sleep next to a cluster of mining machines in a hotel
| room. Is he the stupid one, or am I, paying 3000 USD of my
| own money monthly ? I have another friend who lost half his
| saving in shitcoin speculation, I have colleagues who made
| a 10x profit this year, I mean it's all fucking around me
| and it's very hard to say it's just a 1% part of an
| important problem.
|
| I feel sometimes it's going to become the main problem. I
| can't wait for a mega crash to calm down all this excess. I
| can't accept I'm the idiot working the traditional way to
| make traditional money paying for traditional things while
| the futuristic gamblers mine their hotel room fees on a bet
| I'm going to eventually be forced into using their tokens
| at whatever cost when it becomes legal tender, locking the
| future price into making them billionaires.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| >I'm going to eventually be forced into using their
| tokens at whatever cost when it becomes legal tender,
|
| I'm assuming the large nation states would attack these
| tokens before allowing this to happen and I don't think
| any token ecosystem could withstand a strong nation state
| attack
| Applejinx wrote:
| We have a test of that unfolding, with China. If bitcoin
| is more powerful than China's state power I'm prepared to
| believe it is more powerful than any nation-state. Don't
| know if it's going to work out quite that way though.
| Applejinx wrote:
| You're not the idiot. You're really, really not.
|
| Reality matters :)
| dnautics wrote:
| > I can't accept that...
|
| For your own sanity I suggest you stop taking the process
| of getting rich so seriously. It doesn't make sense, nor
| is the fact that it doesn't make sense a singularity in
| the grand scheme of time, it has been known since ancient
| days (I'm not religious, this is just evidence of it's
| timelessness): "I returned, and saw under the sun, that
| the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
| strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to
| men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but
| time and chance happeneth to them all"
| zivkovicp wrote:
| This is 100% correct. Chance is such a significant factor
| in the outcomes we observe in our lives, yet the majority
| of us have been fooled into believing otherwise.
| Sometimes you just have to do what you feel is right _for
| you_, and hope for the best.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Air travel is about 2.5% of total carbon emissions and is
| _incessantly_ discussed by climate activists.
| simondotau wrote:
| A single percentage problem today. In order to become a
| mainstream everyday currency, use of Bitcoin will have to
| increase by three, four, possibly five orders of magnitude.
| leishman wrote:
| Bitcoin's energy consumption is completely unrelated to
| how many transactions it can process.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Do you think most proposed measures would have a bigger
| effect?
| Applejinx wrote:
| Yes. Bitcoin is a mechanism for arbitraging the conversion
| of energy production directly into black-market money. As
| such, there is no other possible use for energy so well
| adapted to exploiting the most horrible, polluting,
| illegally-in-operation energy production facilities as they
| get phased out.
|
| What you do is buy up the dirtiest plants, run them until
| they break, bribe or evade any authorities (if they even
| exist) who would stop you, and if the plant is being shut
| down because it's failing to comply with pollution
| regulation (again, if such even exists) that just puts it
| in a weaker negotiating position. As such they HAVE to deal
| with you at whatever price you're willing to pay because
| they can't go anywhere else because they have to run
| illegally. But they're powering bitcoin, so it stops
| mattering if they're running illegally, because bitcoin is
| the currency in which it doesn't matter if you're being
| paid for crimes, only that the coin exists.
|
| I consider that powerful motivation to arbitrage the energy
| system and exploit cases where energy suppliers are running
| out of options because they are too dirty. And this can be
| happening anywhere. Climate's global. If all the dirtiest
| coal burners are huddled together on a secret island for
| warmth and to eke out the last pennies (of real money) they
| can earn, they'll do that for bitcoin if they can't operate
| any other way.
|
| And it'll still matter. It'll just be happening in secret,
| because bitcoin don't care.
| efdee wrote:
| Not taking climate change conversations seriously because a
| topic that is barely 1%-2% of the total consumption is
| neglected? That sounds like a poor excuse.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| A positive side effect of your (1.) scenario is that it results
| in a surplus of renewable energy (mining needs the cheapest
| energy and renewable energy is generally the cheapest). Having
| a surplus of cheap green energy is probably good for the
| economy, though a lot more than 1% would probably be needed to
| see significant benefits.
| righttoolforjob wrote:
| > mining needs the cheapest energy and renewable energy is
| generally the cheapest
|
| The cheapest energy is the cheapest. It has nothing directly
| to do with it being renewable.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Right. The point is that you get renewable energy which is
| desirable rather than non-renewable energy. If the latter
| were cheaper the situation would be less appealing.
| righttoolforjob wrote:
| If it was cheaper there would be no need for bitcoin as a
| driver (and then also to completely waste it, in the
| broken window fallacy sense).
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I feel like we're talking past each other. I'm not saying
| we should want bitcoin wasting a bunch of power. I'm
| saying there could be positive outcomes to that power
| suddenly becoming available.
| d0gbread wrote:
| 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?
| righttoolforjob wrote:
| 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 regardless of
| its renewability.
|
| Furthermore I claim that renewable is not the cheapest.
| Various subsidies aside, renewable is often many times
| more expensive to deliver where and when required. The
| total system cost is many times higher.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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?
| oblio wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
|
| Or we could just have a surplus of green energy for
| everything else we need. And how can we even have a surplus
| of green energy when we're probably at a 90% of world energy
| production deficit?
| paulgb wrote:
| How does adding demand for something create a surplus of it?
| I think you have that backwards.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Scenario 1 involves a crash where mining is no longer being
| done. So there is a drop in demand.
| notahacker wrote:
| Scenario 1 involves POWcoiners wasting a lot of energy
| for several years generating tokens which end up being
| worthless, keeping coal plants which could otherwise have
| been decommissioned open for longer to service the
| resulting higher energy demand, and then when the mining
| stops and the coal plants can finally be shut down,
| telling the rest of the world it's only thanks to their
| energy usage over the last few years that we've been
| investing in renewables for the last few decades
|
| It's like claiming that if I steal a percentage of your
| paycheck for a few years and until the government stops
| me, leaving you with more disposable income than when I
| was stealing it, I've actually _helped you_ by
| encouraging you to work really hard.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| A positive side effect of hitting your hand with a hammer is
| a surplus of morphine your doctor prescribes to make you stop
| feeling it, and a surplus of lithium your psychiatrist
| prescribes to make you stop doing it.
|
| And no, renewable energy isn't generally the cheapest, coal
| is. (Until you factor in the health care and funeral service
| costs.)
|
| Bitcoin is just China's way of exporting coal through the
| atmosphere.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Illegal coal is. Because if your plant has been shut down
| for being too dirty, you have no other option but to
| continue to operate illegally or just straight up die, and
| bitcoin is by FAR the best option for consuming that
| illegal-dirty-plant energy.
|
| The reason it's the cheapest is that you're negotiating
| with somebody who is desperate and has no options left.
| They have to sell the energy to you for bitcoin production
| because there's literally nowhere else they can turn.
|
| The more green energy proliferates and climate change
| action expands, the more of these plants will be reduced to
| this desperation. The worst energy production is the
| cheapest, so long as it's been outlawed and the plant has
| no other options.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sour
| c...
|
| It may be the case that coal is cheaper if you ignore the
| capital cost of the plant (e.g. running an old plant beyond
| its design life) but including capital costs amortised over
| the lifetime of the plant coal is not even cheaper than
| natural gas.
|
| My understanding is that a major source of electricity used
| for bitcoin mining in China was hydro power during the wet
| season (when there is a natural power surplus because the
| level in the dam must be reduced)
| Geee wrote:
| PoW generates heat, which is not waste, if it is utilized. The
| endgame of Bitcoin mining is that every bit of heat is
| utilized, because that's the only way mining will be
| profitable. Running these miners is profitable even without
| block rewards (heat alone is sold at a profit).
|
| You didn't take into account, that: - Bitcoin
| price growth won't continue forever; it'll find a stable price
| - Mining rewards halve every 4 years
|
| Therefore, it seems that the heat demand of humans can run the
| Bitcoin network securely, even without block rewards. It won't
| "eat the world", but find a beautiful balance.
| mym1990 wrote:
| If the rewards halve every 4 years but the price keeps going
| up, wouldn't miners just increase infrastructure to mine the
| same amount of rewards?
| freeflight wrote:
| Yes, that's what's been happening for the longest time. But
| it doesn't scale endlessly because of real world practical
| scarcities like affordable electricity and enough
| affordable silicon to mine on.
|
| Which then results in situations like miners buying up the
| majority of new GPU releases, leading to shortages for any
| other users, and still not having enough to keep up with
| the difficulty increases.
| DennisP wrote:
| You would think then that large bitcoin miners would already
| be doing this. Maybe installing their miners in large office
| buildings in cold climates. In theory they could eliminate
| their cost of electricity and outcompete other miners. Why
| isn't this happening?
| mastax wrote:
| There was a startup on here a year or so ago with this
| idea. They built self-contained cabinets and put them in
| people's houses as heaters. Wonder how they're doing.
| Sounds like an ops nightmare.
| Geee wrote:
| It doesn't make sense yet, because it's currently too
| profitable to warrant such optimizations. Cheap energy is
| enough to be competitive.
| analog31 wrote:
| If they could generate electricity with the heat from the
| miners, they could use it to power the miners.
|
| ... Oh.
| arbuge wrote:
| > 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 farm installations to where it would actually be
| useful without incurring massive losses.
| Geee wrote:
| 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.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > There's also the need to heat water, and that requires
| resistive heaters.
|
| In terms of a kettle or cooking you're right, but you
| also can't cook/boil using mining hardware as they're
| heat limited to ~100C. For hot water heat pumps work
| great.
|
| > Also, heat pumps don't really work in colder climates
| as the only heat source.
|
| Ground source heat pumps work just fine in cold climates
| and have been rapidly getting cheaper.
| pkulak wrote:
| Heat pumps can run at greater than 100% efficiency at
| nearly any temperature possible outside. And they can
| heat water just fine.
| zarzavat wrote:
| You haven't explained how mining hashrate _causes_ popularity
| of the underlying cryptocurrency.
|
| The cause and effect is the other way around. Popularity of the
| cryptocurrency causes popularity of mining (the price goes up
| so mining is more profitable and more mining can happen).
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 3. Speculators move to yet another doge coin where the cost is
| still lower than the rewards.
|
| Hasn't that happened already a number of times? If everyone was
| still aboard the Bitcoin bandwagon, it would have stopped being
| profitable long ago; however you have plenty of other
| bandwagons to jump into. They are all technically practically
| interchangeable.
|
| I assume this is also the reason PoS will never work. People
| will just stay with PoW until really forced to, and if forced
| it's highly likely they will just jump into another PoW
| bandwagon. Guess this is part of the resistance seen with
| Ethereum. The alternative is to find a PoS schema which is even
| more lucrative for speculators (possible what the article is
| describing), and then everyone will jump into that bandwagon
| en-masse, but it will not have fixed anything.
| timbit42 wrote:
| 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.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| 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.
| pkulak wrote:
| It absolutely does, since mining rewards are mostly from
| transaction fees.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| 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.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| The assumption that a 10x increase in price results in a 10x
| increase in electricity usage is incorrect. There is some
| correlation but it is definitely not 1:1 as insinuated.
| dcow wrote:
| 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.
| poontang1 wrote:
| 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. Flared gas in
| texas, for instance, could provide more power than the network
| currently uses. There is no reason bitcoin mining has to take
| power from anyone, and it will trend this way over time because
| the economics are in favor of finding the cheapest power
| source.
| waltbosz wrote:
| > ... 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.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > Bitcoin uses about .1% of the worlds power currently. 10x
| less than you have suggested
|
| Your source says 0.2% on page 18, not 0.1%.
|
| The New York Times says 0.5%. https://www.nytimes.com/interac
| tive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...
|
| Add to that the rapid growth we've seen in the past, and I
| believe it is reasonable to say that we're rapidly
| approaching 1%.
| vanusa wrote:
| _Your source says 0.2% on page 18, not 0.1%._
|
| The raw figure it uses for gross power consumption (62 Twh)
| is also unsourced.
|
| Meanwhile, the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance
| puts the figure at around twice that - 110 Twh.
|
| Not that we had any reason to grant credence to what a
| bitcoin "investment" company says about the matter, anyway.
| boublepop wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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 well operators to either
| build a small secondary pipeline for flare gas alongside oil
| pipelines or place a small power generator to contribute to
| the electric grid, but unfortunately "regulation" of any kind
| is seen as a bad thing in wide parts of the US.
| mastax wrote:
| If you put the miners in a shack next to the well, you
| don't need a pipeline. Still need a generator and other
| infrastructure though.
| JoshTko wrote:
| Carbon tax would solve this waste.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Yeah, but this exposes the issue with "bitcoin takes X
| percent of the energy production, therefore it's evil".
|
| If you want you can build a generator near those wells.
| It's just cheaper to get the energy from somewhere else,
| because energy is fungible. A watt is not good or evil,
| it's the same as any other watt. Which means crypto energy
| consumption can be offset just like anything else, and is
| exactly as evil as any other convenience - driers, for
| instance, or flood lights, or inefficient heating, or
| anything else.
|
| Focusing on crypto in particular says more about the author
| than anything else.
| gruez wrote:
| >because energy is fungible
|
| no it's not. A watt that's in the middle of south dakota,
| with no power lines in sight, is worth much less than a
| watt in southern california and is connected to the power
| grid.
| gruez wrote:
| >[...] 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 well operators to [....]
|
| Maybe it's too costly for a reason? Building power lines or
| pipelines to the middle of nowhere has economic and
| environmental costs as well, so top down legislation
| forcing every single well to do it might result in worse
| overall outcomes. For instance, the resources it takes to
| construct a pipeline/power line to the nearest town might
| be _more_ than the electricity /methane that can be
| generated from the well.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > For instance, the resources it takes to construct a
| pipeline/power line to the nearest town might be more
| than the electricity/methane that can be generated from
| the well.
|
| Well, there already is a pipeline for the oil product (so
| the additional overhead for a small gas pipe isn't that
| huge) and an electric grid hookup for the pump. That can
| be used even for a small-scale electrical generator.
| gruez wrote:
| >Well, there already is a pipeline for the oil product
|
| not every oil well is hooked up to a pipeline. Some
| (many? most? not sure) are only serviced by trucks,
| presumably because they're too remote to profitably
| operate a pipeline for.
| Aunche wrote:
| >Lastly, bitcoin mining to could sustained solely by using
| stranded energy, which would otherwise be unused.
|
| You can make that argument about any sort of waste of
| electricity, like blasting your A/C with the windows open.
| The problem is you can't guarantee that people are only using
| wasted energy. People don't mine Bitcoin to generously find a
| use for surplus energy. They do so for a profit. Also, people
| will require mining for Bitcoin transactions regardless of
| whether there happens to be surplus energy.
| rufi wrote:
| 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 transaction
| fees..
| codyb wrote:
| 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.
| kneel wrote:
| 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.
| aljarry wrote:
| I generally like to think about this from opposite direction:
| miners and bitcoin investors are incentivised for bitcoin to be
| used and for the price to go up.
|
| Why miners? Because their main source of income is not the
| transaction fee, but basecoin, the guaranteed bitcoin payout
| for each mined block.
|
| Due to Bitcoin being such a huge amount of money, unethical
| players do anything to lure people in, including MLM-style
| marketing, artificially inflating volume traded, and
| overplaying coin stats (like market cap). Then there's also
| media / influencers who, without second thought, introduce
| inexperienced people to investing in high-volatility assets.
| Applejinx wrote:
| It's interesting how this mechanism, purportedly for grown-
| ass adults, is a loot box mechanic.
|
| Pump more energy in! Because you haven't hit a coin yet. And
| it is getting forever more unlikely that you will... but at
| the same time, the payoff is even greater than it was last
| week! Maybe you won't even hit a coin. Your operation is not
| big enough. But if you do...! So, MOAR...
|
| Loot box mechanic. Turns out it is not just for manipulating
| children.
| politician wrote:
| PoW is the optimal strategy for searching physics for the most
| effective means of transforming energy to electricity. There's
| zero waste in this search -- it directly converts electricity
| into money driving pure demand for more electricity which
| motivates the search for more efficient generation. It's more
| efficient than Aluminum production in this regard-- the economy
| can only absorb a certain amount of Aluminum.
|
| A carbon tax would effectively and immediately steer this
| search away from using fossil fuels for generation.
|
| People who clutch their pearls over PoW are unwitting
| Malthusians lacking an appreciation for E=mc^2.
| butMyside wrote:
| Using the same environmental concern logic, the carbon
| footprint of traditional banking, which still hauls around,
| protects, and produces real currency, plastic cards, and
| financing for every other destructive activity... rather dwarfs
| Bitcoin.
|
| Where are all your posts pointedly taking apart the system you
| are surely heavily invested in?
|
| You're part of the problem by being part of human society.
| Collective economic inaction must be part of the solution.
|
| Producing less superfluous junk at scale must be part of the
| solution. That means our individual narratives around value
| stores must change; traditional banking scales even worse than
| Bitcoin.
| neycoda wrote:
| Proof-of-stake is the closest thing to centralization there is in
| cryptocurrency.
| EGreg wrote:
| This is like two homeless people arguing who is richer.
|
| Yes both PoW, PoS solve the double-spend problem, but in a brute-
| force way. And they never really get rid of the ambiguity of
| which chain is the one to go by. They just aggregate all the
| little ambiguities into one or another consistent version of
| history (a chain) and let them duke it out by massive electricity
| or stake or whatever. But at any moment, someone could have been
| mining a chain in "secret" and will emerge to thwart the rest of
| the network for a while.
|
| There is a better way. Blockchains are actually quite centralized
| since to make any progress every N seconds you need to send all
| transactions in the entire world to one miner, and the block is
| limited in size. Actually it's worse than that in Proof of Work
| -- because you don't know who will solve the silly problem, you
| have to gossip every transaction to every miner!
|
| Oh yeah, and if you store UTXOs then you have to store the
| history of everything. And even if you didn't, you have to store
| the current state of everything. Oh how nice and decentralized!
| LMAO
| betwixthewires wrote:
| > LMAO
|
| I don't get your criticism. Why does requiring gossip to every
| node cause centralization? Why does everyone having the current
| state of everything cause centralization?
| EGreg wrote:
| To make progress, every few seconds or minutes, all
| transactions in the world must be gathered in ONE place, and
| placed in ONE block, as the network and adoption grows this
| becomes more and more expensive for everyone.
|
| There are various aspects of centralization. This is one
| major aspect: a _bottleneck_. Just like when all Web 2.0
| conversations in the world would have to go through a
| centralized server. Even if it was a different server each
| time, it's still an _extremely centralized topology_ for that
| state transition.
|
| It means that there can only be one transaction at a time for
| the whole world, no matter how many computers join the
| network. No concurrency -- it is also why you can have flash
| loans. This is why Ethereum is called "the world computer"
| and why Bitcoin failed at being a peer to peer cash system
| and became a store of value.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>Even if it was a different server each time, it's still
| an extremely centralized topology for that state
| transition.
|
| That doesn't make the network centralized, since the server
| that acts as the centralized state transitioner will be
| randomly selected from a very large pool of servers with
| equal authority.
|
| Innovations that Rollups and Sharding further extend the
| scalability that is achievable with Ethereum's Proof of
| Stake consensus protocol, mostly by debundling tasks to
| create modular components, so that the consensus layer has
| to handle far less load per transaction.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I think you have some fundamental misunderstandings of the
| term "centralization". And also of the way bitcoin works.
|
| All transactions are not gathered in one place, ever. All
| nodes receive all transactions independently. All nodes are
| capable of providing a copy of the ledger for verification.
|
| Transactions don't go through a server. Historical record
| gets finalized by any one participating node. These two
| things are not the same thing. The transactions that will
| be mined are publicly known by all nodes before they are
| mined. Mining only ensures that nobody can change them
| after the fact.
|
| There is no concurrency, this is true. The systems we have
| currently are single threaded systems, and from a classical
| standpoint, hugely inefficient single threaded systems. But
| this is not the same thing as centralization.
| EGreg wrote:
| I hate to argue from authority but here is @vbuterin
| saying the same thing about centralization:
|
| https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-
| decentrali...
|
| " _Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one
| controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no
| infrastructural central point of failure) but they are
| logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state
| and the system behaves like a single computeR_ "
|
| I think you're mistaken that I don't know how Bitcoin
| works. Not only do I know, but I have spoken to many
| teams doing work in the last 10 years in various
| alternative systems, and I have even designed
| alternatives myself.
|
| I used the word server in my analogies. The transactions
| are, however, all going through one COMPUTER which
| receives them, puts them in a envelope, and finds the
| right PoW input to "seal" the envelope, and sends it out
| to everyone. Whoever does that first, gets the rewards on
| that chain. If the transactions do not make it into the
| block, they don't count on-chain.
|
| Therefore, every 10 minutes, ALL TRANSACTIONS IN THE
| WORLD must be gathered by one computer, the one that will
| happen to mint the next block. This is a bottleneck, and
| it is the cause of the skyrocketing fees whenever the
| system sees any on-chain adoption.
|
| But it's actually worse than centralized -- because we
| don't know who will mint the next block so we have to
| send everything to on everyone. Imagine if all BitTorrent
| nodes seeded every file in the world. Bitcoin failed as a
| peer to peer cash system because of this topology and
| people on the group were telling Satoshi this back in the
| day.
| patrickaljord wrote:
| Has anyone ever not been accused of being a scammer in this
| space?
| rich_sasha wrote:
| My general observation is that blockchains are, at best, secure
| in the same way https is secure. Yes I have padlock icon on the
| browser address bar, and my connection is secure, there's a
| security certificate, but the whole thing can still be a scam.
|
| Who personally verifies every contract they use? Wallet
| implementation? Cold wallets are closed-source, trust-me devices,
| maybe with a security certificate from a centralised, government-
| linked security org.
|
| The strongest link in any security chain is not irrelevant, but
| the whole system is really not perfectly trustless anyway.
| yellowapple wrote:
| The author's objection to proof-of-stake seems to be based
| entirely on some ostensibly-inherent vulnerability to the
| nothing-at-stake problem, but at least one consensus protocol1
| has had explicit mitigations against that vulnerability (and
| numerous others) for almost half a decade now, and I'd be very
| surprised if other protocols haven't adopted any mitigations at
| all.
|
| 1: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/889.pdf
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Speaking of POS scammers, what ever happened to Richard "Dodge
| Dodge" Heart, winner of the "Golden Pump Award" for "Best New
| Scam" for his POS get-rich-quick pyramid scheme called "HEX", who
| falsely claims that proof of stake is a proven successful
| replacement for proof of work, and who shills HEX and tries to
| recruit unsuspecting developers and victims here on HN and many
| other places, by making illegal false claims of providing CDs
| (certificates of deposit)?
|
| To be fair, I'd love to hear him chime in on this discussion, and
| tell his side of the story, relate his exploits and prosecution
| as a viagra spammer, and finally answer all those unanswered
| questions people have asked him, to which he replied "Dodge
| Dodge".
|
| Not that he's unique or special: POS shills like him are a dime a
| dozen. But he hangs out here and shills on HN, and has won awards
| for his deceptive scams (and also lost court cases too), and
| claims to "help people" on his web site, so I hope to hear from
| him again.
|
| https://richardheart.com/
|
| His real name is actually Richard J Schueler, under which he is
| famously known as the "Spam King", for being one of the first
| people in the world to be successfully sued for online spam,
| specifically the Viagra spam scheme that he ran from Panama
| (which he lost).
|
| Richard Hart (aka "Spam King" Richard J Schueler) wins the
| "Golden Pump Award" for "Best New Scam" for his POS shitcoin
| Ponzi scheme "HEX":
|
| https://twitter.com/JuanSGalt/status/1233242355995750400
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=857&v=tf-lJu5iDh...
|
| Peacefire.org beats spammers in court.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/peacefire-org-beats-spammers-i...
|
| >Free-speech group Peacefire.org wins a legal round in its fight
| against unsolicited e-mail, invoking Washington state's anti-spam
| law.
|
| >The King County District Court in Bellevue, Wash., on Monday
| granted Peacefire $1,000 in damages in each of three complaints
| filed by Peacefire Webmaster Bennett Haselton. The small-claims
| suit alleged that Red Moss Media, Paulann Allison and Richard
| Schueler [who now operates under the pseudonum "Richard Hart"]
| sent unsolicited commercial messages to Haselton that bore
| deceptive information such as a forged return e-mail address or
| misleading subject line.
|
| Confronting Richard Heart of HEX - SPAM KING and Crypto Scammer
|
| https://www.cointelligence.com/content/confronting-richard-h...
|
| >During ANON Summit 2020, I participated in a "fireside chat"
| with Richard Heart, founder of HEX. HEX is one of the most
| sophisticated, if not THE most sophisticated scams I have ever
| seen.
|
| >Why was I so aggressive with Richard? I have a lot of experience
| fighting with scammers, at events, and in online discussions. I'm
| familiar with their bullshit techniques. Richard is the sort of
| "master debater" who will answer a question without actually
| answering the content of the question. I watched more than 6
| hours of his previous talks and learned how to tell when he was
| trying to avoid a real answer.
|
| >If you don't want to sit through hours of interviews yourself,
| this 4 minute video not only sheds light on Heart's motivation
| for establishing HEX, but also shows just how abrasive and crude
| he can be. This video was not created or edited by
| Cointelligence.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MIdlXHedlU
|
| >I want to draw your attention to the quote in the video above:
| "What am I going to make more money doing? Promoting my token,
| that I own a whole ton of? Or promoting bitcoin, where I own one-
| one zillionth of the available supply?" He's clearly in this to
| make money for himself in any way possible. [...]
|
| >When asked why HEX was not categorized as a security, at around
| the 21 minute mark, Richard offered an explanation that has no
| legal grounding. On the website, HEX claims that it is "The first
| high interest blockchain certificate of deposit." However, HEX
| has no legal authority to issue CDs. Richard is illegally
| claiming to provide CDs when in fact the instruments are nothing
| but glorified savings accounts.
|
| More quotes: "What's up now, f _ggot? What are you going to do
| now, you little b_ tch? Get the fuck out of here! That's the
| dumbest piece of shit I've ever seen in my fucking life. [...]
| Let me give you some more bullshit, ok?" -Richard Heart aka
| Richard J Schueler
|
| Richard Heart - Spam, ICOs, and Death Threats
|
| https://imnotdead.co.uk/blog/richard-heart
|
| Richard James Schueler - Friggin Spam King
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190416235350/http://www.panama...
|
| Why HEX is a Ponzi and not a solid investment (Part 2): Richard
| Heart
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kwhjxa/why_...
|
| >During the interview at ANON, Richard confirmed that he was one
| of the first people in the world to be sued for online spam, back
| in 2002. This shows us Richard has experience abusing unregulated
| markets, as he is doing with crypto these days.
|
| Richard: this an accurate quote of your own words?
|
| >When I pressed the matter and asked for a simple "yes" or "no"
| as to whether he, as the FOUNDER of HEX, knows who benefits from
| the funds sent to the "Origin Address" he flat-out said "I'm
| dodging your question." Dodging the question! He proceeds to
| repeat "Dodge, dodge."
|
| Richard, your tag-line "Do you want to develop my new
| cryptocurrency?" is the new "Do you want to develop an app?"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVy0JWX5XEY&ab_channel=Adult...
|
| "Dodge, dodge." -Richard Heart aka Richard J Schueler
| mouzogu wrote:
| PoS is a flawed system that enriches the project founders
| primarily. Just look at Charles Hoskinson or Gavin Wood.
|
| PoW is apparently bad for the environment. So it leaves us in an
| interesting situation.
|
| The Ethereum project has shown that the concept of
| decentralization only applies when it's on their terms. It's not
| a true principle.
| justusw wrote:
| How were Charles Hoskinson and Gavin Wood enriched? Is this
| about Cardano and Polkadot?
| [deleted]
| flarex wrote:
| PoW equally rewards early participants because they take the
| lions share of the initial blocks. Satoshi is a multi-
| billionaire. There are very few blockchains that don't heavily
| favour early adopters and for good reason: it acts as a
| bootstrapping mechanism for the community. Why would anyone
| participate in a chain they would get heavily diluted rewards
| when there are many others that reward early loyalty?
| pmorici wrote:
| "Decentralization" has been the argument ideologues have fallen
| back on time and again in crypto. It's never well defined and
| typically used to oppose policies that would promote low
| transaction fees or increased transaction throughput. It's why
| things like Solana which is focused on massive scale and low
| fees have found a foothold. Ethereum is repeating the mistakes
| of Bitcoin
| rank0 wrote:
| It's because if you're not decentralized, then you don't need
| a blockchain.
| duped wrote:
| The gold standard was decentralized. Over a century of
| monetary policy has shown that decentralization isn't
| aligned with political or economic goals.
| hopevillian wrote:
| it's "decentralized" in the sense that most anyone can
| confirm that the bar of gold they are holding is real.
| Gold being taken out of the ground is literally Proof of
| the work that was put into it. Exactly why bitcoin takes
| work
| janeroe wrote:
| > Over a century of monetary policy has shown that
| decentralization isn't aligned with political or economic
| goals.
|
| Or rather it has shown that decentralization isn't
| aligned with the political or economic goals of those who
| conceive the monetary policy.
| duped wrote:
| Which often aligns with the people that elect them.
| Central banking fixes serious flaws in money systems, and
| provides levers to mitigate disasters caused by external
| forces.
|
| Compare it to a boat. Central banking gives you the
| ability to steer, sure someone might be bad at it and
| lead you into dangerous waters. But decentralized
| currency is like shooting the helmsman and ripping out
| the rudder because someone did a bad job of it once.
| TheFlyingFish wrote:
| Gold, silver and other metal coins were usually produced
| by a central (and government-controlled) mint, no? And
| counterfeit was harshly punished?
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I am a retired PoW miner and whereas on one hand I think proof of
| work is a revolutionary, life altering idea, on the other hand it
| is a self fulfilling apocalyptic premise with no endgame.
| cmogni1 wrote:
| Are there known issues/vulnerabilities with using something like
| Proof of History?
| knorker wrote:
| Everything else about cryptocurrency in a scam, and people
| promoting it are scammers, so this is not exactly a surprise if
| true.
| perlgeek wrote:
| I'm trying to understand the central technical argument being
| made here. Please tell me if I got this right.
|
| ---
|
| Somebody has a stake in a PoS crypto currency. They can now do
| two things: 1) sell their stake 2) sign something fraudulent
| (like a double spend).
|
| Since there is no decentralized timestamp service, a node
| validating those two actions doesn't know how to order them, so
| different validating nodes come to different conclusions, and no
| global consensus is reached.
|
| ---
|
| Is that what the article is trying to say?
|
| And if yes, isn't the solution fairly easy? Within the same
| "chain link" of the block chain, require each action singed by
| the same private key to have a strictly monotonic sequence
| number, and if two actions appear with the same sequence number,
| discard both these two and all actions signed by that private
| key.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| > have a strictly monotonic sequence number
|
| Then you lose decentralized property.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Note that I meant a strictly monotonic sequence number PER
| PRIVATE KEY.
|
| This only means that each holder of a private key must have
| some sort of synchronization mechanism (if they use several
| agents/clients), but it doesn't centralize the whole network.
| meribold wrote:
| I think another top-level comment (by csomar) answers your
| question:
|
| > you can sign a transaction later and have a lower timestamp,
| there is nothing that prevents you from that.
| DennisP wrote:
| PoS does produce a reliable monotonic sequence, it's just that
| it doesn't go back to genesis. Every few months you need a
| checkpoint hash. The idea here is that this is rare enough so
| it's easy to find the accepted checkpoint out of band, like we
| pretty much do for client software already.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| When you see articles like this, buy more Ethereum not less. It
| means they are scared of it.
| LittlePeter wrote:
| 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?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| "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.
| qnsi wrote:
| you have money invested in Ethereum. Obviously you are
| biased
| a-dub wrote:
| regarding the private mining attack:
|
| proof of work proves that not just one miner had sufficient hash
| power, but that the entire network had a certain aggregate hash
| power that was required to mine the block.
|
| can't this be emulated by requiring all major stakers to sign the
| block? (so rather than one miner staking being enough, all the
| aggregate staked was required to mine the block)
| a-dub wrote:
| in any event i think the op is wrong in terms of the hard part
| of proof of stake, private mining attacks are solvable.
|
| the stickier issues are around maintaining the decentralized
| nature of pow mining and the random and decentralized election
| of who mines the next block. under pow, everybody does their
| own thing and when someone finds a block they are able to
| publish it without direct collaboration with other miners. the
| fact that the miner is chosen at random gives rise to all sorts
| of anti-censorship and anti-collusional properties.
|
| proof of stake will have to emulate this, and possibly make a
| few targeted and carefully chosen compromises in order to
| emulate the decentralized nature of pow mining. it's not
| obvious how this will play out, but i don't think it's
| impossible and efforts to do so certainly aren't a "scam."
| ulzeraj wrote:
| My opinion on PoS is that because no other community that I know
| of outside of bitcoin has a culture of running nodes normal
| people will just stake through exchanges. Now you have these
| exchanges acting not only as the in and out ramps but also as the
| biggest network validators meaning that they can direct
| transactions. Congratulations. You've just went full circle and
| invented central banks.
|
| Am I wrong? Would gladly read counter arguments.
| wmf wrote:
| In practice PoS chains have hundreds of nodes or more. In
| Bitcoin, nodes can't stop a 51% attack and I don't know if the
| software would even alert you when a 51% attack is likely going
| on.
| mattdesl wrote:
| In a chain like Tezos, the validator software is relatively
| easy to run if you have a Raspberry Pi and some terminal chops,
| and a lot of hobbyists do stake this way.
|
| But it's easier for most people to delegate to another party.
| This is where decentralized staking pools for ETH2[1] built
| around smart contract interactions could be a good alternative
| for many users, and may compete with centralized staking
| platforms.
|
| The mere fact that these peer-to-peer and decentralized
| alternatives exist, and that some portion of users will prefer
| to use them, is what makes this technology distinct.
|
| [1] - https://rocketpool.net/
| joshuajbouw wrote:
| No, you are right. In the old school PoS days when we did
| Blackcoin we were vehemently against staking from pools.
| kajaktum wrote:
| What is preventing someone from DDOS a cryptocurrency network by
| spamming it with inane transaction between 2 people?
| anonporridge wrote:
| Transaction costs.
|
| It's actually suspected that happened during the blocksize wars
| when proponents of forks like Bitcoin Cash may have been
| spamming Bitcoin with transactions to feed their narrative that
| it is too expensive to use.
|
| You'll eventually go bankrupt if you do this long enough.
|
| This is actually another reason unlimited blocksizes that can
| allow for very low to no cost transactions are risky, and DDOS
| protection is likely why Satoshi added the 1MB limit in bitcoin
| to begin with.
| ikt wrote:
| cost, this is an issue polygon had
|
| https://beincrypto.com/polygon-raise-network-fees-spam-trans...
| eximius wrote:
| transaction fees
|
| you either dont pay enough and are ignored or you pay enough
| and... great?
| rhincodon wrote:
| If POS is really as bad as claimed, then why is Ethereum 2.0
| going to be using POS?
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's not bad. This piece is written by a bitcoin maxi.
|
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
| sp332 wrote:
| Well, how many times has it been delayed? Clearly it's not all
| sunshine and rainbows.
| suikadayo wrote:
| What's delayed? Beacon chain has been running on mainnet
| since last December-ish. http://beaconcha.in
| seoaeu wrote:
| They've been saying Etherium will switch to proof of stake
| "soon" since like 2017!
| sp332 wrote:
| 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...
| xur17 wrote:
| > 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.
| suikadayo wrote:
| The merge was expedited over miner concerns, prioritizing
| it over sharding as originally planned, so it's actually
| the opposite of what you are saying.
| hanniabu wrote:
| But-but-but! _frustrated by facts_
| [deleted]
| 8note wrote:
| The naive assumption is that the people making that choice
| stand to become much richer from the change
| nootropicat wrote:
| An intentionally dishonest article.
|
| The actual truth is that PoS is infinitely safer than PoW in the
| short to medium term, while theoretically weaker in the long
| term. A long-term attack would require first buying obsolete
| signing keys, which would stop nodes that sync starting from the
| pre-fork point from syncing - ie. a denial of service attack.
| Which is in a very weak threat, as online nodes wouldn't even
| notice it. A short to medium term attack would stop finalization
| for a while at an enormous cost of slashing. It's a denial of
| service attack because nodes would be able to see contradictory
| signing from the same keys - so while without out of band data
| they won't be able to decide which one is the commonly accepted
| chain, it's enough information to recognize than an attack is
| happening.
|
| PoW is very weak in the short term to medium term because runtime
| cost of attack is equal to mining rewards + epsilon, which is
| negligible, meaning it's just a question of hardware. Contrary to
| PoS, mining hardware is an external resource - it's always
| possible to get enough of it, given enough money (single digit
| billions for bitcoin). Getting 2/3 stake of a long-running PoS
| system is impossible - it's a scarce internal resource and there
| isn't enough for sale.
|
| Reverting years of blocks is indeed infeasible - but
| interestingly in practice it would also amount to a DoS attack,
| as everyone would notice it and pause all payments. Contrary to
| PoS, where it would only work on newly syncing nodes, it would
| stop everyone. However, while theoretically more expensive, it's
| still only a matter of money - while a long-run DoS attack
| against newly syncing nodes in PoS would require buying obsolete
| keys, which is very likely to be impossible in practice.
|
| Is this even an advantage? I don't think so, but it's arguable.
| However, for this singular arguable point PoW pays with a 4
| orders of magnitude higher cost and a much, much weaker short and
| medium term security.
|
| Empirically, lower security of PoW is confirmed: multiple 51%
| attacks happened (most famously ETC), while even a much weaker
| DPoS coins never had a successful double spend attempt.
|
| In terms of public trust, not many people are able or even
| interested in technical arguments - they just observe if
| something works. In reality, consensus-level attacks are very
| rare as it's currently very hard to profit from them regardless
| of the consensus method, and the biggest danger is from software
| bugs in nodes, most likely unrelated to consensus.
|
| If any PoW blockchain became a foundation of global commerce,
| attacking it would become very profitable, or even a military
| target - but that's never going to happen. So I don't expect
| bitcoin to get 51% attacked in any near future - at best years in
| the future when value of block rewards is so low one person with
| lots of old mining hardware can attack it just for fun.
| ggambetta wrote:
| Proof of Steak is obviously better: https://meatver.se
| JimWestergren wrote:
| Thanks for the laugh ;)
| echopurity wrote:
| >If the same people own all the tokens, control all of the
| staking pools, the project governance, and run all the full
| nodes, an attack isn't even possible. It's so centralized, it
| produces the impression of decentralization from a distance.
|
| Yeah, crypto has never been truly decentralized.
|
| But that doesn't make people scammers, especially when this
| article is largely just quoting Vitalik.
| CraftingLinks wrote:
| Can'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...
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Energy consumption of anything is irrelevant. The carbon
| footprint is the interesting marker of a technology and this
| will depend on the source of energy used.
| [deleted]
| adnzzzzZ wrote:
| Doesn't seem like everyone in Sweden agrees with that opinion,
| especially not the people actually running energy companies:
| https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1457114531314995206
| yunohn wrote:
| > not the people actually running energy companies
|
| I'm not sure if the people making the most money from crypto-
| mining's energy usage, are to be believed?
| RNCTX wrote:
| Utility companies operate at the pleasure of the state. The
| state implements right of ways that contain the equipment.
|
| Right of ways are real, tweets are not.
| yrral wrote:
| You never mentioned why you think mining should be illegal.
| Probably because of the outrage published by the media based on
| intuitive assumptions that end up not being true. That bitcoin
| mining long term is bad for the environment. However, this is
| not true even though it intuitively seems that way. (Similar to
| how making highways wider actually ends up making traffic
| worse, not better).
|
| We can actually start with 1 question: If electricity demand
| from PoW mining spurs new renewable plants to be built, is that
| bad for the environment?
|
| I (and many electricity companies) actually think PoW mining is
| good for the grid/renewable adoption in the long term. Let me
| explain why:
|
| Some indisputable facts to get us started:
|
| 1. Most renewable electricity has unpredictable supply
|
| 2. Introducing marginal capacity of the same type gives
| diminishing returns. Eg: you're producing more during high
| supply times where electricity rate is low. During lower
| production periods all of the same type of renewable will be
| producing less so you can't even take advantage of the higher
| rates.
|
| 3. Rational bitcoin miners will turn off their machines when
| cost of power is greater than marginal return.
|
| As a result, PoW mining will help the economics of building new
| wind/solar plants. Eg, currently it may not be profitable to
| build a new wind plant because base load is too low that the
| excess power generated would need to be sold off at 0 or even
| negative prices. However if bitcoin mining could be turned on
| during these times and off during periods of high demand, there
| will need to be fewer peaker plants in operation and it would
| positively affect the economics of opening a new wind plant.
|
| Bitcoin mining only cares about the cost of electricity at a
| given time, it is not like most other electricity demands that
| are very time based. With the large variance of electricity
| generation by renewables, I think bitcoin can in the future
| help smooth demand according to the real supply/demand curve.
|
| It's kind of like a different implementation of the Tesla
| utility grid batteries. Instead of deploying batteries, you
| force the grid to build more renewable capacity (that the
| miners are paying for) that miners use except in peak periods,
| where you turn off and effectively provide the grid with more
| power.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > If electricity demand from PoW mining spurs new renewable
| plants to be built, is that bad for the environment?
|
| Yes, obviously.
|
| Even if every single miner pool built its own solar/wind
| plant to power 100% of its energy needs, that would still be
| horrible for the environment: building the power plant itself
| produces harm to the environment; and the space and work and
| money used to create the Bitcoin miner's power plant could
| have gone into replacing (closing down) a non-renewable power
| plant.
|
| Silly arguments about pricing volatile electricity only work
| if we assume maximizing profit is the ultimate good or that
| PoW is the only way to use that excess power. In reality, if
| we want to avoid the worse catastrophes that our current
| economy is pushing the world towards, we have to stop looking
| at profit, and choose less profitable but more useful ways of
| handling volatility - batteries, long-distance transmission,
| etc.
| jankeymeulen wrote:
| Or, instead of creating Bitcoin with excess energy, one could
| produce e.g. hydrogen. Which, compared to Bitcoin, has a lot
| more uses.
| boyadjian wrote:
| I think it is a matter of months, before crypto mining is
| banned in Europe and the US. Just because cryptomining is a
| bottomless well : The more crypto miners earn money, the more
| they invest on graphic cards and the more they consume
| electricity. Inevitably, there will be supply problems
| thesausageking wrote:
| 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?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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 of the electricity in cold countries with
| a decent amount of electric heating for which dryers are much
| less, but let's run with it. That still sets the upper bound
| to 0.6%, which incidentally is the same as bitcoin.
| anonporridge wrote:
| 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.
| mathnmusic wrote:
| > 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?
|
| We already legislate different pricing for different
| applications. Household electricity has a different price
| than industrial usage. A 1000x price of electricity for
| certain applications is just a small extension of what we
| currently have.
| neuroma wrote:
| In the UK electricity costs are essentially the same for
| all users with discounts applied for volume and time/
| demand. Is this not the case elsewhere?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That is very much not the case here, no, nor in most of
| the world.
| luckydata wrote:
| "who gets to decide"
|
| it's called "we the people" or democracy if you will. We
| as a society decide that cryptocurrency aren't worth
| destroying the world over, and that's about it.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It's funny "we the people" always decide this when it's
| about something that would actually empower us.
| Meanwhile, "we" didn't only not ban cars, "we" destroyed
| public transport in the US and lobbied the government to
| massively subsidize roads and cars. Just as an example.
|
| It's curious how much agitation there is concerning the
| energy consumption of PoW. I don't see nearly as many
| articles calling for restricting AWS & co. Coincidentally
| Bitcoin is the base layer of a decentralized finance
| world completely out of the control of traditional elites
| and banks.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Bitcoin is the base layer of a decentralized finance
| world completely out of the control of the traditional
| elites and banks, yes.
|
| It's also a new finance world completely under the
| control of an even smaller elite of devs and mining pool
| owners (see the hard fork of Ethereum that happened a
| long time ago, and the upcoming fork of Ethereum that
| will move it to PoS; sure, Ethereum isn't Bitcoin, but
| there is nothing fundamentally different to prevent
| Bitcoin taking a similar step whenever the devs and
| miners decide).
|
| What Bitcoin definitely is _not_ is a new currency where
| the people have any kind of control. It is actively
| opposed to that goal, and takes away even the slight
| chance of a benevolent leader that exists with central
| bank controlled currencies.
| floatboth wrote:
| > elite of devs and mining pool owners
|
| You forgot a (perhaps even more) crucial part: the
| exchanges/stablecoins!
|
| They're the whole reason this clown show is considered
| "finance" rather than funbux.
|
| And they're all extremely suspicious. And by suspicious I
| mean obviously fraudulent. The value of Bitcoin (!) is
| propped up by Tether printing fake dollars backed by
| nothing.
| justusw wrote:
| But we the people is usually restricted to one country.
| How do you get multiple countries to cooperate and ban
| cryptocurrency mining?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| By convincing the people in all of those country to vote
| the same way - ideally through pure argument,
| realistically through various carrot and stick
| negotiation techniques. This is really not rocket
| science.
| yrral wrote:
| If bitcoin mining uses renewable power (and pays for it),
| is that destroying the world or is that encouraging
| renewable adoption?
|
| If bitcoin mining uses co2 producing power (because the
| economics supports it), is that the fault of bitcoin or
| the government for not sufficiently taxing the negative
| externalities of that means of production?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The point isn't to increase the proportion of renewable
| power, but to decrease the total amount of non-renewable
| power. 10% renewables is the same as 90% renewables if
| the remaining consumption is the same total amount.
|
| There is no market in the world where you are going to
| decrease consumption by increasing the demand. That's
| just not how economics works.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Using power is never a net good, regardless of the type
| of power. If we don't need more power for something
| specific, the ideal is to just not build more power -
| consumption is not some noble goal.
|
| Unless we believe that Bitcoin has some use, its power
| consumption would be problematic even if it weren't so
| monstrously large. And vanishingly few people believe
| Bitcoin has any value beyond a get rich quick scheme.
| TheDong wrote:
| There is a difference between each of those uses of
| electricity and PoW.
|
| PoW is throwing away electricity for the sake of it, and
| resists getting more efficient. If the goal is for the
| bitcoin network to cost $1M to do a single double spend, then
| PoW has to use $1M worth of electricity every 10 minutes.
|
| Let's say we live in a future where we suddenly have 10x as
| much electricity. Due to supply and demand, electricity now
| costs 10% of what it did before.
|
| Dryers etc all keep using the same amount of electricity with
| no issue, but bitcoin has a problem: it's now really cheap to
| double spend unless bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity. So
| of course, it does.
|
| There's a similar proper with making things more efficient.
| If we make a christmas light more efficient (make it use an
| LED instead of an incandescent bulb or whatever), christmas
| lights will use less electricity.
|
| If we make ASICs or GPUs more efficient, then people will
| just have to run more of them, or else bitcoin will be less
| secure.
|
| I think this is a real and notable difference, and I think
| that's enough of a justification to consider a ban.
| hopevillian wrote:
| bitcoin incentivizes the search for cheaper energy, and
| allows for the instant monetization of once wasted energy.
| That's a LOT. this whole argument of energy use... i bet
| most of these people would have fallen for the same energy
| propaganda when the internet was just getting started...
| "what's email?? why would you waste electricity to send an
| electronic mail??"
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| There's a trend now of Bitcoin mining businesses buying
| fossil fuel power plants in the US, in many cases plants
| that had already been shut down due to being
| unprofitable.
|
| https://futurism.com/bitcoin-mining-company-buys-entire-
| coal... https://grist.org/technology/bitcoin-greenidge-
| seneca-lake-c... https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2021/09/old-coal-plant-i...
| brabel wrote:
| You haven't addressed the parent commenter's point
| though: that PoW will cause increase of energy
| consumption every time you make any progress in making
| energy cheaper, hence cancelling out any improvements
| energy production efficiency.
|
| It would only be benefitial if after a certain level of
| efficiency were achieved, PoW got banned and all that
| efficiency increase could actually benefit consumers of
| energy that did not have to keep increasing spend to keep
| up (though even that's not sure, because if energy
| becomes 10x cheaper, it's just a matter of time for
| people to invent new creative ways to use all that cheap
| energy that's prohebitevely expensive right now).
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There's rarely such a thing as 'wasted energy' outside
| crypto. Energy can be exported (even if at low
| efficiency) or stored in various forms (pumping water up
| a mountain, hydrolisis of water to fuel hydrogen plants,
| etc). Unfortunately, Bitcoin, Ethereum et al are actively
| making these productive uses of energy un-economical, as
| they have worse return on investment than simply burning
| that energy on crypto.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >There's rarely such a thing as 'wasted energy' outside
| crypto.
|
| There is a lot of resources getting wasted in the real
| life. For example I'm from East Europe and we do not have
| good water pipes' infrastructure and lots of water gets
| leaked every month.
|
| Speaking of wasting and leaking electricity I did a quick
| Google search and this is what I found:
|
| "Are your appliances leaking electricity? Some of you
| might not be familiar with what this means. Not only do
| we have more small- and medium-sized appliances than ever
| before, but many of these never really stop using
| electricity. For example, if the television has a remote,
| then part of the TV is always on, waiting for a signal
| from the remote. If there is a clock on the microwave
| then the microwave is always using some electricity.
| Experts call this usage "standby consumption" or "leaking
| electricity" because people are often not aware that the
| appliance is using electricity.
|
| A single appliance usually leaks only a small amount of
| electricity each hour (see Leaking Watts Chart below).
| Since these appliances leak electricity whenevery they
| are not turned on, and since people have a lot of these
| appliances, the amount of leaking electricity is
| significant. The average household spends about $40 a
| year on leaking electricity. The federal government works
| with appliance manufacturers to reduce the amount of
| electricity that leaks out of new appliances[1]."
|
| Also here is another good resource on electricity leak
| which is related to the first web document I linked[2].
|
| And then how much food is getting wasted every month
| globally? Probably billions of dollars of food is getting
| thrown away every month.
|
| [1] https://www.uwsp.edu/cnr-
| ap/KEEP/nres633/Pages/Unit3/Section...
|
| [2] https://www.teachengineering.org/content/cla_/activit
| ies/cla...
| jq-r wrote:
| > bitcoin incentivizes the search for cheaper energy, and
| allows for the instant monetization of once wasted
| energy.
|
| This is just like saying: let's burn as much coal and oil
| as fast as we can, so we can accelerate the need to
| develop alternative fuel sources.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Other merit's aside, Bitcoin's incentivizing cheaper
| energy provides nothing new of value.
|
| All uses of energy incentivize the search for cheaper
| energy.
|
| Not all energy uses are optimized to increase usage over
| time, to cancel efficiencies. Proof of work, whatever
| it's merits, is anti-efficiency with respect to itself.
|
| This is a significant difference.
| hopevillian wrote:
| nothing new of value? I know this sounds cliche but maybe
| consider you dont know enough about it?
| Nevermark wrote:
| I made a strong statement, so maybe I need to be more
| precise with my point.
|
| Bitcoin has merits. So proof of work, being a part that
| is currently necessary for it to work has merits.
|
| But the argument that proof-of-work has the merit of
| incentivizing cheaper energy sources does not stand up.
|
| 1. All uses of energy already incentivize the search for
| cheaper energy. This isn't a novel incentive that proof-
| of-work provides.
|
| 2. But proof-of-work does have a relatively novel
| disadvantage. It won't just incentivize greater energy
| uses as prices come down, as in normal supply-demand
| curves, but must keep up the original and even grow the
| amount spent on energy.
|
| This would not be a problem in a market without negative
| externalities, but energy is famously a huge industry
| that will be struggling with negative externalities for
| quite some time and at great cost.
| thesausageking wrote:
| Videogames share that property. The Atari 2600 was ~5
| watts. That's about what the Playstation 5 consumes during
| rest mode; when you're playing it, it takes 150-200 watts.
|
| It really sounds like you're rationalizing banning Bitcoin
| because you don't see any value in it. That's a dangerous
| way to decide who gets to use electricity.
| nawitus wrote:
| It's better to tax the harm created from electricity
| generation, which I suppose is mainly CO2 emissions. Then
| the market will decide how much PoW mining should be done
| compared to Christmas lights etc.
| tylerhou wrote:
| Nit: when you say better you mean "more economically
| efficient in terms of $s produced." That's not
| necessarily equivalent to a policy that would be the best
| for society.
| 127 wrote:
| Why do people keep propagating this claim that PoW is
| burning electricity for nothing? It directly provides
| security for the blockchain. I don't disagree with your
| arguments general direction, just with this piece of
| incorrect misinformation.
|
| LED was a technological innovation. Nothing says Bitcoin
| can't have those. If you want more light, you need more
| lamps and you need to spend more energy. I don't really see
| the difference here.
|
| About every 4 years the reward for mining a block will be
| halved. I don't see LED lights getting two times more
| efficient every 4 years.
| floatboth wrote:
| Because "security of the blockchain" doesn't necessarily
| mean "good for society". Cryptocurrencies are most widely
| used for speculation, and then fraud, ransomware, all
| those very fun and pleasant things.
| 127 wrote:
| I thought there was enough historical data to draw the
| conclusion that command economy doesn't work. I also
| would appreciate if you could back up your claims on how
| Bitcoin is used.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I think Bitcoin is possible without PoW; decentralized peer
| to peer network in which nodes verify transactions and make
| agreements on which transaction came first and then draw
| consensus. But then someone needs to figure out how new
| coins would be distributed or in another words what
| incentive would be to verify transactions.
|
| Btw Satoshi introduced blockchain checkpoint so no attacker
| can fork the existing Bitcoin chain and make a competing
| one.
| jancsika wrote:
| 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?"
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Fortunately, we have a consensus system called 'voting' that
| can be used to decide such things in a way that hurts the
| least amount of people.
| hiq wrote:
| > 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).
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >Christmas lights
|
| Well, let's see
|
| >Bright lights strung on American trees, rooftops and lawns
| account for 6.63 billion kilowatt hours of electricity
| consumption every year [1]
|
| >Bitcoin mining consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of
| electricity annually. [2]
|
| Huh. That's at least the same order of magnitude, at any
| rate.
|
| [1] https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-
| countr... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-
| electricity-u...
| plokiju wrote:
| And that's only looking at US Christmas lights, not world-
| wide
| knorker wrote:
| Even extremely generously scaling it up by population
| that still means Bitcoin uses three orders of magnitude
| more.
| NhanH wrote:
| Billion kilo is already the same magnitude as tera (it's
| kilo-> mega-> giga -> tera: 1000^3).
|
| Did I miss something or is your comment factually
| incorrect?
| knorker wrote:
| No that was me. Gah, megakilowatthours. :-(
| jollybean wrote:
| "who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?"
|
| Our legislators and regulators, because that's their job.
|
| Just like we ban heroin, regulate over the counter drugs, and
| tax alcohol.
|
| Mining BTC is a waste of everyone's time.
|
| Electricity production is partly socialized - and - we're
| literally facing a kind of global crisis.
|
| Ban it, and let the Cryto Warriers figure out other, better
| ways (of which there are numerous) for allocating magic
| numbers.
| dagmx wrote:
| But won't each of those take up significantly more energy
| once they use Bitcoin than today? I.e the costs will be
| additive , and crypto aims to replace fiat. So crypto would
| need to be more efficient at the same scale as fiat to make
| sense.
|
| Also aren't each of those used by significantly more people
| than Bitcoin? So the per capita use is less and they scale
| better?
|
| Also how are you estimating cost of porn? Viewing cost?
| Generation cost?
| chrischattin wrote:
| No. Bitcoin network power usage isn't related to the number
| of transactions.
| dagmx wrote:
| You're only talking about at any given moment in tjme,
| but Bitcoin hashing difficulty adjusts in an almost
| correlated way to number of transactions being performed
| (or more directly related to popularity at a given time)
|
| https://m.btc.com/stats/diff
|
| So your statement ends up being incorrect over a period
| of time.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| Such an idiotic proposal. How should we enforce this, do we
| need a government backdoor on every single turing complete
| hardware to verify they are not running """bad"" code (hashing
| data)? Or are just ASICs the problem, mining with CPUs is OK?
|
| Or maybe you could just let people do what they like with the
| electricity they paid for
| larsrc wrote:
| If electricity was an unlimited non-polluting resource, sure.
| But when my neighborhood mining rig coal power plant gives me
| cancer, it's not just a simple marketplace thing.
| door103 wrote:
| Bitcoin is not predominantly mined by a ton of individuals
| running an ASIC or 2. It is mined in huge warehouses, which
| have to go through state/federal bureaucracy for business
| licenses, etc etc. It would be hard to enforce a complete ban
| on anyone mining any Bitcoin, but the vast, vast majority of
| mining could be easily shut down in the US, as it was in
| China.
| Findecanor wrote:
| A couple Swedish _public_ _servants_ have called for a EU-wide
| ban. _Sweden_ does not have an official stance on PoW mining.
| yunohn wrote:
| > a couple Swedish public servants
|
| - Director General at the Swedish Financial Supervisory
| Authority
|
| - Director General at the Swedish Environmental Protection
| Agency
|
| I'm not sure who you think is more qualified to have a stance
| that represents Sweden?
| creddit wrote:
| I'm blown away by how quickly this rose on HN and how
| unconvincing it is.
| [deleted]
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's a fud piece by a bitcoin maxi and HN is anti-crypto so it
| resonates with them and gives the echo chamber some good
| confirmation bias kool aid.
| yanmaani wrote:
| Am I a Bitcoin maximalist?
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I wouldn't say that HN is staunchly anti-crypto, more crypto
| skeptical. Many of us were in the scene from the beginning,
| and have made good money on the hype.
|
| But one thing that's extremely apparent, is that for the past
| 10 years, the crypto community has been 95% greed, 5%
| innovation. With the innovation part having picked up speed
| only the past few years.
|
| At first, it was the an-cap dream. Decentralized, trustless,
| govt free internet money. No longer were you a prisoner to
| slow bank-transfers, expensive middle-men (PayPal, etc.), and
| could purchase whatever you wanted.
|
| Then the price shot up, and everyone wanted to become rich.
| So people "agreed" that BTC is no longer a coin made for
| spending, but rather a storage of value. Like gold. Use
| altcoins if you actually want to spend your crypto. But who
| wants to spend any, with the rising prices?
|
| Meanwhile, centralized banks, 3rd party businesses, etc. have
| solved all the personal finance issues that plagued us 10
| years ago. In most countries today, you can transfer money
| pretty much instantaneously, without getting anxiety every
| time you press "send".
|
| I'll give DeFi, Dapps, etc. credit - they've finally managed
| to roll out usable things, but it's still way, way too hard
| for regular users. And most regular people do not give two
| shits whether something is decentralized and trustless.
|
| I can think of multiple legit uses for the blockchain
| technology - but I'm gonna be honest, I'm having a harder and
| harder time seeing how cryptocurrencies will replace any
| national currency. As of right now, it's almost purely
| speculation and get-rich-quick schemes.
|
| We're still in the wild west, but it's not gonna stay that
| for long. With regulations looming around, it's just a mater
| of time.
|
| But I digress
| make_it_sure wrote:
| It's the same for the other side.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The most important part of this post doesn't even have anything
| to do with cryptocurrency:
|
| > If the broad masses of people disagree with the platform
| landlord, their opinion will be altered to conform with the
| rules, or else they will no longer have a voice.
|
| We really need to fix that problem.
| poetically wrote:
| Something about means of production and who owns it. This is
| most obvious on social media. The people participating on the
| platform do not get to decide the rules for how it operates.
| Which is a little ironic given that most people on social media
| are ostensibly in favor of democracy.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| It's already fixed to some extent. On Reddit, you make a new
| subreddit of your own. On GitHub, you fork. The problem is that
| some projects are too big to effectively fork (or forking would
| over leverage the community) or people are lazy and don't want
| to do the forking themselves despite accurately identifying the
| presence of a problem.
| josephcsible wrote:
| What about when it's the Reddit or GitHub admins who judge
| you to be guilty of thoughtcrime?
| cube00 wrote:
| ...or the Reddit CEO who goes into the backend to invisibly
| edit your posts.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170720143148/https://www.redd
| i...
| Sevii wrote:
| Or more realistically, you get banned from Reddit and Github.
| cube00 wrote:
| 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.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| 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.
| Eelongate wrote:
| > _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.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's a problem with our laws.
|
| Copyright should just be a contract between seller and
| buyer. You promise not to redistribute this. If you
| didn't buy something, you have no contract with the
| seller and you can be free to download whatever you want
| or build whatever software or service you want.
|
| The onus of finding who is the buyer breaking the
| contract and dragging them to court is on the seller.
|
| We shouldn't have things like DMCA which allow you to
| censor anything tangentially related or being able to
| scare people off, but that's what you get when you have a
| corrupted government that does the bidding of Big
| Business.
|
| Similarly, patents shouldn't be a thing.
|
| You came up with something, you already have first mover
| advantage. If someone comes along and does the same thing
| better, too bad, they were better than you. If you have a
| manufacturing secret, protect it with contracts and sue
| for damage if they get broken.
| satyrnein wrote:
| This is effectively saying we just shouldn't have
| copyright.
|
| Person A buys a movie and agrees to not distribute it,
| but goes ahead and does it anyway to Person B. Person B
| hosts it for everyone, and Persons C through Z get it and
| also host it. You're suggesting Person A is liable, but
| the cat's out of the bag and Persons B through Z can
| continue redistributing it forever because they never
| agreed to anything.
|
| If this is the desired goal, you don't need copyright at
| all, you can already get Person A on violating Terms of
| Service or whatever.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough
| subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting
| freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base
| measured in millions.
|
| Reminds me a bit of the "free speech zones". It's a poor
| facsimile of true freedom of speech.
|
| Seeing as the new public squares are, by and large, digital
| spaces controlled by megacorps, we need to expand the first
| amendment to apply to private enterprise.
| Eelongate wrote:
| > _So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough
| subscribers that you can count them on your fingers,
| posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a
| subscriber base measured in millions._
|
| And if by some chance your subreddit manages to become
| popular, the admins and power mods will conspire to take it
| from you. Reddit sucks.
| Covzire wrote:
| There's something akin to a law of nature at work on
| Reddit that goes something like this: Any sub-reddit (or
| it's topic-at-hand) that garners any national attention
| in the political sphere will become an echo chamber full
| of corporate shills unless there is constant and public
| vigilance to guard against it, and even then the sub's
| chances for surviving to fulfill its original mission is
| grim. I f'ing hate what Reddit has become.
| vkou wrote:
| Freedom of speech is exactly how you get r/politics,
| private propaganda syndicates, and qanonsense screaming
| loud enough that it drowns out everything else.
|
| "More" of it isn't going to make any of those things go
| away.
|
| "Freedom of speech" isn't a guarantee that _your_ prefered
| brand of rational discourse is going to have an audience of
| millions. If anything, it 's a guarantee that it won't,
| because someone with a self-serving profit motive is far
| more incentivized to shout over you.
|
| _Freedom of speech does not entitle you to broadcast to
| anyone else 's audience._
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| The first amendment of the US constitution _does_ apply to
| private enterprise. This is why Congress cannot make a law
| that limits private enterprises ' editing of third party
| content on the platforms they own.
|
| What you are arguing for requires either an amendment to
| the constitution or nationalization of those private
| enterprises.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Freedom of speech is not the same thing as requirement that
| others listen. If someone has no audience, with all the
| platforms that are available, it's not because they're
| being censored. It's because nobody cares what they have to
| say.
| josephcsible wrote:
| It's not that nobody wants to listen. There are plenty of
| people who want to listen, but the megacorps refuse to
| let the talkers and listeners connect.
| fallingknife wrote:
| This is not what is happening on these platforms.
| r/thedonald had millions of subscribers and not a single
| one was forced to listen. Then it was banned by reddit
| for thoughtcrime.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| You could have brought up hard left subreddits getting
| banned too. Like Chapo. So it doesn't seem like only the
| right is persecuted/appearing to continue the trope of
| how the right are such victims.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Same thing
| TTPrograms wrote:
| 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 distributed consensus
| mechanisms in an extremely sophomoric understanding of asset
| value and the PoW security model. All of these topics (including
| valid ETH criticisms) are discussed in much better ways in many
| other places.
| reginold wrote:
| 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.
| hanniabu wrote:
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
| thruway516 wrote:
| "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 didn't see anything about asset value
| (whatever that is). As far as I can tell they point out that
| the article you cited pretty much agrees with what they're
| saying (about PoS by itself not being self-certifiable or
| irreversible) but disagree with the position that this can be
| acceptable in the real world. Whether you agree with that is
| subjective but the main criticism in the article seems to be
| directed at those who selling PoS as a sufficient distributed
| consensus algorithm to replace of PoW. There are blockchain
| projects raising literally Billions of dollars on this false
| guarantee so it is valid to criticize them.
| TTPrograms wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Thanks for that link, it has been a few years since I've read
| it.
|
| I spent a lot of time talking about this topic with people. The
| article does have a point, that the security model of proof of
| stake is fundamentally different and relies on a key assumption
| (from the article you linked):
|
| > any new node coming onto the network with no knowledge
| except... the set of all blocks and other "important" messages
| that have been published...
|
| This is referenced in the OP as a point of security failure.
| The assumption is that we can rely on social interactions
| between nodes and that that is good enough. The criticism is
| that a new node can have no way of definitively knowing that
| their copy of the chain is the widely used canonical chain. An
| eclipse attack can occur, or as the OP stated new nodes may
| need to rely on authoritative sources to get current state
| which puts centralized power centers in the security model.
|
| It is not a deal breaker (IMO), remember, PoW relies on the
| security assumption that it is prohibitively difficult for more
| than half the network to collude. I'd argue these assumptions
| are equally tenuous. I think as long as disparate, non
| colluding sources of the canonical chain are available
| (arguable if this is foregone, seeing as we need PoW to ensure
| consensus and resistance to collusion, probably not, but all it
| takes is one person to not collude and contention exists) it
| wouldn't be a problem.
|
| Another big sticking point is the fact that no external
| resources must be invested, and/or that there is no ongoing
| cost. I find this to be the big problem with PoS schemes, I've
| had quite a number of discussions focused on these two
| particular issues (stemming from the same fundamental
| difference, that an internal capital stake is made) and I see
| benefits of not having ongoing cost and benefits of having it,
| and also of having a fully self contained system as well as
| having a system grounded in the outside world. All in all I
| have come to the conclusion that these differences make neither
| better nor worse, but that they are simply two completely
| different game theoretical environments with different security
| and incentive properties.
| TTPrograms wrote:
| I think the issue most have with the "no external stake" is
| that there was a common misunderstanding regarding Bitcoin
| value propagated for a while - that is, the cost of the
| consensus mechanism (compute + electricity) defines the price
| of Bitcoin. In reality it just sets a floor on the price of
| Bitcoin. The value of the dollar is not set by the cost of
| paper. So the "self-referential" nature of stake value and
| attack value just means that asset value is not pegged to the
| consensus mechanism in as strong a way as in PoW. As long as
| asset value is driven by other factors (e.g. utility) that is
| not really a major concern.
|
| In practice social networks form a cornerstone of all of the
| unstated assumption of all consensus mechanisms. I'm more
| worried about supply chain compromise in wallet code than I
| am about an eclipse attack on a new node. At that point we
| know our models are too simple to make real world security
| comparisons.
| 127 wrote:
| They might not upvote the article, just the discussion in this
| thread; which in my humble opinion is quite good.
| jeron wrote:
| Occam's razor points to sour grapes
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| omarfarooq wrote:
| One way of conquering FOMO is to totally write the thing off,
| and to stubbornly stick to that thesis.
| lukebitts wrote:
| Questioning people's motives is always a boring endeavor. You
| don't actually know that's the reason, why not respond to the
| arguments that were made?
| omarfarooq wrote:
| Let me qualify my initial comment.
|
| I have conquered [and seen others close to me] FOMO by
| stubbornly writing things off, and I suspect others have
| done the same thing: it's calorically inexpensive and
| cognitively frictionless. No one can reasonably assess
| everything that comes their way.
|
| I am not saying that that's the reason with the writer, but
| it's surely the reason in some people, precisely because
| it's easy. And easier still to click upvote on a take that
| reinforces that stubbornness. It's this latter group whose
| motives are being questioned, as per the GP who asked why
| these takes get upvoted. I wasn't actually questioning the
| motive of the writer of the article, hence why I didn't
| engage in the arguments in the first place.
|
| And of course you have the corollary of true believers who
| will support anything positive of X-thing-they-have-
| adopted.
|
| It's seems to be only these two dichotomies we see, rarely
| balanced takes. And that's the real problem.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I think what rubs a lot of people wrong about PoS is that it puts
| a name behind the validator and people don't trust people. One
| may claim that all validations require some level of trust, but
| it s the same reason why people trust google and not <person>'s
| link directory. And people have reasons to be suspicious because
| they know that when humans become actively malicious they find
| devilish ways to coopt others, while algoritms can just fail.
| tycoat wrote:
| I was thinking deeply about the threat model in a PoS posed about
| coordinated pooling of resources to effectively mimic the size of
| a large institutional borrowers with high collateral, i.e. proof
| of work in the present economic system (US Dollars gathered by
| him by providing real world value).
|
| The main reason proof of work works so effectively is that it
| deals in physics with the actual expenditure of electricity as
| the punishment system for failing to produce the correct desired
| outcome.
|
| Abstracting this away again, we have reality itself to content
| with. Evolutionarily we have evolved in respect to the dominance
| hierarchy (https://youtu.be/rUiG5_GcMyY) Where effort itself is a
| necessary precursor to ascending the ranks and being fit to lead.
|
| Not to get too metaphysical, but essentially it boils down to:
|
| - Social Status is based on real world implications and not self
| derived from the perceived ranking itself, that is if it is to be
| most stable across time. Being labeled the boss is essentially
| useless long term unless you truthfully represent the ideal or
| most capable individual. (Michael Scott from the television
| series The Office is a funny example of this)
|
| - PoS offers reliability for the system based on its election of
| stake amount in the system that favors inventors, early adopters,
| and pre ordained position holders where distribution was not
| derived from effort in the real world with non-reversible
| consequences (burning electricity)
|
| - Instead the selection mechanism its own value structure which
| may or may not accurately assess competence for reliable trust in
| a domain where zero-trust is key to consensus.
|
| - Outsourcing consensus to something mediated by the laws of
| physics is more stable across time, and is yet another
| abstraction upon competence taking it outside the realm of US
| Dollars for social proof, but also adding in the component of
| physical consequences towards the chain of proof.
|
| I'm also thinking as I write this that it would be important to
| consider changes in the environment as useful to the selection
| pressures. Why purely basing it upon success (stake) at one point
| in time is non-useful as the rules of the game may change, or
| reputation lost or abused in a PoS system would not accurately
| reflect changes in the need for rotation of positions of voting
| authority.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| PoW only works for the biggest chains that use the specific
| heading Algo. Smaller PoW chains regularly experience re-orgs.
|
| IMO PoW for the bigger chains produce far too much waste & none
| of the supposed PoS attacks have materialized even though
| hundreds of millions are up for grabs
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| This article is terrible and does not explain how proof of stake
| works let alone how it's broken, but links to another (probably
| better article on etheruem.org). back to studying it for myself,
| then. I literally have a headache after reading the bitcoin
| analogy and trying to guess which parts of the analogy I will
| need to remember for later in the article (hint: none). It would
| have been simpler to just explain what a nonce and hash is.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| > If you have a file on a computer, despite what NFT promoters
| believe, it is not possible to prevent people from copying it.
|
| Not sure if these quips are meant to be jokes or serious, but
| nonsense like this detracts from the credibility of the argument.
| Nobody believes the data corresponding to an NFT cannot be
| copied.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Part of the problem of the NFT hype is that some people DO
| believe this to sure degree and believe that those
| redistributing the NFT content are somehow attacking the NFT
| itself.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Show me a single example of anybody claiming this in earnest
| (using a real identity, not a troll or stooge) and I'll
| delete my comment
| josephagoss wrote:
| Tezos is Proof of stake, decentralized and clearly has consensus,
| the three things the author argues cannot occur in a proof of
| stake system.
|
| I did not find this post convincing especially as many proof of
| stake systems have been running consistently for years now and
| with significant transaction and economic volume.
|
| As an example Tezos has decentralized apps such as liquidity
| pools, collateral based stablecoin systems, nft ecosystems, coin
| bridges to other networks such as Ethereum (two way) I use these
| smart contracts on a weekly basis and have done for a long time
| now.
|
| Tezos manages several orders of magnitude more transaction
| throughput based on opcode count count vs Bitcoin, transactions,
| even complex ones cost pennies the network has not been attacked,
| is worth billions and Tezos energy usage is easily a million
| times less than Bitcoin.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > the three things the author argues cannot occur in a proof of
| stake system.
|
| The author appears to be saying that "any decentralized
| consensus via proof of stake system is vulnerable to timing
| attacks"
|
| The counter-argument that "This here proof of stake system has
| not been successfully attacked ... that we know of ... yet"
| does not seem to be watertight.
| wfbarks wrote:
| Does proof of history as implemented by Solana find a middle
| ground here?
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| I really like the analogue with aluminium smelting. This is what
| bitcoin mining is nowadays, plus the increasing difficulty.
|
| Prof of stake is analogous to Wall Street institutions and
| probably modelled after them.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Crypto is a weird space. Firdt thing to make clear is if OP has a
| vested interest in another blockchain platform
| theknocker wrote:
| Yet another post where the top comment is some dweeb selling a
| facile perspective and trying to be an activist. Great website,
| Dan.
| gvv wrote:
| "everything I didn't manage to gain from is a scam" - the article
| yunohn wrote:
| Ah yes, the "you're just jealous because you missed the boat"
| retort. Magnificent!
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Do people deploy PoS chain clients that are ok with blocks that
| totally ignore the historical leader schedule or use a leader
| schedule that could not have resulted from the distribution of
| stake in the network at the time? If not, how will the attacker
| who wants to swap out a single block a year later get all the
| other validators to sign a year worth of new blocks?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| > To use an analogy, it is as if someone would sit down to design
| a building in the following way: first, they draw how they would
| like for the exterior to look. Then, they draw how they would
| like for the interior to look. They make basic measurements, to
| confirm that the interior does not exceed the exterior in terms
| of dimensions. They then suggest that the house is plausible, and
| send it off to the construction workers to build.
|
| For what it's worth, this is how plenty of buildings are
| designed. Ignoring silly things like the inside not fitting in
| the outside, an architect may design the building and hand it off
| to a _technical architect_ who works out how to make it stand up
| and has some back and forth with the architect modifying the
| design. At a later stage it goes to a structural engineer who
| will make sure that it really is likely to stand.
| student2k wrote:
| Decred witch is a dao focused on evolving with governance had an
| interesting block reward split, 60% miners, 30% pos (you get
| chosen randomly) and 10% tresuary.
|
| Seems miners have been driving the price down for years and a new
| proposal just was written to give them only 10%, and 80 to
| stakeholders.
|
| https://proposals.decred.org/record/427e1d4
| csomar wrote:
| The author has good points, bad points and badly explained stuff.
| The article is a bit confusing at best and disorientating at
| worst.
|
| But I'll try to explain here, why the author thinks that PoW is
| magical. It's still bound to the readers, or philosophers, to
| pull whatever they want from this.
|
| Proof of Work creates time. In a decentralized system, you don't
| have time. If time was provable, the double-spending problem
| would not happen. You would sign a transaction and broadcast it;
| a second transaction that you would sign later, will have a
| higher timestamp. Obviously, you can sign a transaction later and
| have a lower timestamp, there is nothing that prevents you from
| that.
|
| What Proof of Work does, is create an arrow of time. Using this
| arrow of time, the nodes create a ledger (the blockchain).
|
| The OP is arguing that PoS cannot create an arrow of time; and as
| a result, the PoS is still liable to the double-spending problem.
| darcys22 wrote:
| He lost me at the part where he thinks you can sign messages
| after withdrawing your stake.
|
| The whole point of proof of stake is that you can only sign
| blocks or messages while you have something staked. When you
| withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything.
|
| He also didnt need to spend 1000 words going on about the history
| of bitcoin and proof of work.
|
| This is literally just a filler piece with a provocative
| clickbait title to stir up the anti cryptocurrency folks here
| yanmaani wrote:
| > When you withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything.
|
| Allowed to by whom?
|
| Who's to punish me if I disobey them?
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-
| spec/blob/master/phase...
|
| After withdrawal is completed, your node would no longer be
| in the set of active validators and from that time could not
| validly propose a block or submit an attestation (or, more
| accurately, be selected as a block proposer, etc.)
| yanmaani wrote:
| Yes, "validly" being the operative word here.
|
| I can still propose blocks invalidly, you see. And then
| someone who doesn't already have the consensus (e.g. trying
| to sync) will have no way to tell which is legitimate.
|
| This is the problem - you can't look at what the system
| does when everything's working as it should, you have to
| look at what happens when it's outside of the comfort zone.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think the biggest problem with his whole argument is when he
| wants to give some examples of community consensus being a
| problem, and gave examples from the PoW world (Bitcoin small
| block size decision, Ethereum bhard fork) - that to me complety
| destroyed his own argument that PoS is more community-dependent
| than PoW.
| lilyball wrote:
| Those two examples were demonstrating what happens when you
| don't have provable consensus. They weren't issues with the
| validity of the blockchain, but debates over changing the
| software itself. They're good examples of why centralized
| _development_ of a decentralized protocol still opens up the
| software to attacks (though with the option of continuing the
| blockchain without the software change, as Ethereum Classic
| did for a while), and demonstrates why having a provable
| consensus mechanism is important.
| seniorsassycat wrote:
| I think the argument was that you could withdraw at 201 then
| sign new 200b messages.
| bastiantower wrote:
| But then everyone has a signature that you exited at 200
| runeks wrote:
| Which you don't include in your alternate chain.
| mlyle wrote:
| The argument he's making is, you could stake for blocks
| 10000-10005 and get your money back.
|
| And then produce a big fake chain from 10,002 (in the middle of
| the time you were staking) -> 10,000,000 later, with an
| alternate history in which you didn't stop staking.
|
| I don't think this attack is particularly realistic for a lot
| of reasons, but PoW does have some small amounts of additional
| strength against these scenarios.
| disiplus wrote:
| it's not realistic on POW because you have to mine the block
| and spend the resources. on pow you dont have to. Thats the
| whole problem.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| You wrote POW twice.
| crazypython wrote:
| Signing is a cryptographic operation. You can still sign a
| block after you don't have something staked. People won't
| accept that signature unless you have something currently
| staked. But then the question arises- who decides who withdrew
| their stake? Other stakers?
| lilyball wrote:
| What do you mean by "allowed to"? In a PoW system, the PoW is a
| distributed timekeeping device. That's the actual operation the
| PoW does, and the distributed timekeeping is then what you can
| build a blockchain on. PoS _doesn 't not do distributed
| timekeeping_. If you sign a block now, then go back later and
| sign a different block with the same key, there's no
| distributed clock that can be used to prove which was actually
| signed first.
|
| The obvious argument here is "the one that was signed first
| will then have other blocks built on top of it". But since
| there's no PoW, building a parallel blockchain is trivial to
| compute, the only restriction is being able to produce
| something that's actually convincing enough. That and having
| people say "well, I was there at the time and I saw a different
| block than this", but that's just relying on authority rather
| than something that can be proven within the system.
|
| Basically, PoS requires something external to the system to
| prove that history hasn't been changed. PoW technically does
| too, but what it relies on is "physics" and "provable
| historical fact" (i.e. approximate computing power available in
| the past).
|
| You certainly can build a system that depends on something
| external to itself to ensure its consistency, but this
| challenges its claim to being "decentralized" and limits the
| amount of trust you can place in the system (and consequently
| the power of what it can do).
| light_cone wrote:
| The clock issue is an excellent point, but the ethereum PoS
| have a nano scale PoW mechanism for this exact problem. Look
| at VFD "Verifiable Delay Functions" [1].
|
| In short:
|
| If you take the pbkdf2 key derivation function: its job is to
| slow down hashing a thousand fold or so, so that hashing an
| entire search space becomes impractical. You give your secret
| in input, and it gives you a hash, let's say, in 1 second.
| You'll have to spend the time again to recompute the hash.
| With a faster machine, you can compute in maybe 100ms, but
| still, there is a limit in how fast you can obtain the
| result.
|
| Now change the cryptographic properties of pbkdf2, so that
| you can go back from the output to the input in constant
| time, so you can find the secret from the hash in O(1). Then,
| it becomes useless for actual secrets, but you now have an
| instantly verifiable proof that a certain amount of time (or
| serial computation) had to pass to get from the input to the
| output. Plug the input to the previous block hash, and embed
| the result in the next block, and you have your clock, based
| on physics and provable historical facts.
|
| [1] https://vdfresearch.org
| lilyball wrote:
| The site isn't particularly accessible for a quick
| discussion so I appreciate your explanation, thank you.
|
| However, I'm not sure I understand how this is supposed to
| help. Proving that a few seconds passed just slows down
| block generation a little, but this cannot be a significant
| barrier to block generation or else you just have a full
| PoW system again. And if it's not a significant barrier
| then it's not clear to me what this is supposed to do,
| beyond preventing me from generating and signing a new
| block within milliseconds of some event happening.
|
| But since the "nano scale" PoW doesn't define the rate of
| block generation, it just establishes a lower bound, it
| feels like it's just a speed bump for anyone trying to
| attack the system. If it only takes 10 seconds to rebuild
| the last 100 minutes worth of blocks, then it doesn't
| establish a universal clock and therefore cannot prove
| which block came first.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| You can withdraw your stake. Withdrawing a gigawatt plant and a
| silicon foundry is a little more involved, you see.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > When you withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything.
|
| But I didn't withdraw my stake. I have a whole chain of blocks
| saying I never withdrew anything and it's perfectly valid
| because I signed it, and I still have a stake. Oh, you have
| another chain that says I did withdraw? Who are we going to
| believe? Who was first?
| dschlossman wrote:
| In some systems Ive seen, bad actors get slashed (lose stake). I
| like pOs but it gives too much power to centralized exchanges
| that hold a large % of stake...
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| I'd expect we get more and more of these pieces as Ethereum gets
| closer to moving to proof of stake. The current estimate is that
| it'll transition 2022Q1
| lofsigma wrote:
| The cope is strong with this one.
| pshc wrote:
| Is this FUD from Bitcoin maximalists?
|
| _> That key is valid to sign any number of versions of, let's
| say, block #200, and there is no objective, system-internal
| standard for which version is legitimate, other than "the one
| that was published first"._
|
| The real block #200 will have hundreds of attestations courtesy
| of randomly-selected validators, each of those signatures
| attesting to its validity and finality.
| ricardolopes wrote:
| The block 200 will be adding validation to the previous blocks,
| and will be validated by the future ones. Without other types
| of checks, nothing stops you from rewriting the previous 199
| blocks and using block 200 to validate them.
|
| This is not FUD, it's the most obvious PoS flaw, called long
| range attack, and the reason PoS chains often need more checks
| to be more trustworthy (e.g. keeping hardcoded checkpoints,
| choosing the first received block as valid, introducing
| penalties and so on).
| pshc wrote:
| Here's a recent ETH2 block:
| https://beaconcha.in/block/2604970#votes
|
| It was voted for by 8000+ validators. Many of them have been
| validating since beacon chain genesis a year ago. There are
| like 260k validators active right now.
|
| I find it highly unlikely some entity is going to come along
| and try to pretend their alternate history, with a whole new
| set of hundreds of thousands of validators (which wouldn't be
| supported by any ETH1 deposits) and millions of signatures
| signed by 260k freshly generated public keys, is in any way
| legitimate.
| yanmaani wrote:
| > It was voted for by 8000+ validators.
|
| Which parts of this are checked by the client software, and
| which parts are just checked by interested humans in the
| block explorer?
|
| There's a trade-off here. If you require 8000 guys to all
| vote in favor of your block, what does the client do if it
| only sees 7999?
|
| > which wouldn't be supported by any ETH1 deposits ...
| signed by 260k freshly generated public keys
|
| You misunderstand. What happens if some of those private
| keys get compromised? In Bitcoin, if I sell my miners to
| someone else, it's not like they're radioactive waste that
| has to be buried. In PoS, someone can cause quite a bit of
| damage with keys that ostensibly don't contain any money.
| And because I've already withdrawn, I have no reason to
| care.
| pshc wrote:
| The system is fault tolerant. You typically get 99.X%
| participating. Any validator that doesn't perform their
| duty in a timely fashion is penalized and eventually
| ejected if they are disruptive.
|
| Those private keys are useless unless you had something
| like 50% of all the active validators' keys. So, hundreds
| of thousands of private keys hacked. You're not going to
| be able to damage consensus using a few old leaked
| private keys. The best you could do would be to slash
| some active validators and get them ejected, but the
| chain would carry on finalizing without them.
| crazypython wrote:
| How is that different from 8000-of-260k multisig?
| pshc wrote:
| It's similar in that 8k sigs are collected and coalesced
| to sign something. From there the differences begin.
| M-of-N schemes must be orchestrated ahead of time, using
| Shamir's or by constructing a BTC multisig UTXO or
| something. When signing, one may choose freely among the
| key shards. It's performed in the usual execution layer
| of the chain.
|
| Whereas in ETH PoS, validation happens in the consensus
| layer, following strict self-imposed rules. With each new
| block, one validator is chosen to propose the block, and
| thousands of validators are asked to back the proposer.
| The proposer and attestors are chosen randomly but
| specifically with no freedom to mix and match; the chosen
| validators must attest (and receive a reward) or else be
| penalized. Validators don't know each other and they
| don't need to cooperate to create a shared key ahead of
| time, all they have to do is deposit and follow the
| rules. The signatures are agglomerated by [BLS ellipical
| curve stuff idk it's magic] and help to form the
| consensus chain itself.
| seniorsassycat wrote:
| Are those 8k/260k individuals, or could they all be Syble?
| pshc wrote:
| Whoever the 260k are (and I know some of them) if they're
| all one entity, they would have had to stake eight
| million ETH and counting into the ETH2 deposit contract.
|
| The 8k are randomly selected from this pool of 260k
| validators via RanDAO every 12 seconds.
| suikadayo wrote:
| Even if they tried, it'd take weeks, months to get all of
| their validators accepted by the chain because of the limit
| each day.
| ricardolopes wrote:
| ETH2 was years in the making, with multiple delays and not
| fully migrated yet precisely because of how unsafe standard
| PoS is. Vitalik and co spent years researching the best
| mitigations.
|
| Right now, it seems to be one of the best protected PoS
| chains. It's still fairly new, with novel mitigations, so
| it still doesn't stand the test of time against all
| possible attack vectors.
|
| In that sense, it still can't be considered as secure as a
| PoW chain with high hashrate, which is protected by
| thermodynamics (you can't produce more hashes than the
| physical energy you have access to allows).
| dathinab wrote:
| > unsafe standard PoS
|
| Not "unsafe standard" but
|
| "dangers/unsafe to bootstrap".
|
| But there are ways to mitigate the bootstrapping issue to
| some degree.
|
| And PoW chains tend to have a low cost at the beginning
| making them similar not easy to bootstrap safely (through
| more easy then PoS).
|
| In the end I don't think what theoretically is better
| matters, what only really matters is what practically
| matters for big crypto currencies (and smaller ones can
| during bootstrap (and potentially later one) interlink
| with the large chains).
| DennisP wrote:
| PoS is more quantum-resistant though. If someone were to
| build a quantum computer capable of running Grover's
| algorithm on bitcoin hashes, they would get a quadratic
| speedup over classical miners. That's a threat that
| doesn't exist on PoS.
|
| (Both would be vulnerable to Shor's but post-quantum
| signatures would fix that.)
| yanmaani wrote:
| PoS _is_ not more quantum-resistant, because of the
| situation with Shor 's algorithm, and that a key
| compromise would be much more damaging.
|
| It might be, in the future, _if_ you replaced the keys,
| but it _isn 't_ now. Words mean things, and it really is
| important to use them correctly.
|
| (Also, wouldn't the network respond by just raising the
| difficulty, miners respond by buying quantum computers,
| and the world to spin as usual?)
| anonporridge wrote:
| Attestations don't have a real world economic cost that can be
| validated trustlessly within the system. If you compromise or
| coerce enough validators, you can rewrite the history for no
| cost.
|
| That's what PoW provides that PoS just doesn't. Immutability.
|
| In fact, I would argue that one of the most important products
| of bitcoin, is providing the hardest, most immutable database
| human civilization has ever created. We could theoretically
| lose it and we could control and manipulate what goes into it
| going forward, but once a piece of data gets confirmed and
| buried under a few days worth of bitcoin's PoW, it can never be
| changed or removed from the blockchain. This is a severely
| undervalued use case in my mind.
|
| I suspect that most PoS coins will eventually decide to
| periodically peg themselves into bitcoin's blockchain to
| timelock their blockchains and provide some immutability to
| their users.
|
| Having said that, humanity probably only needs one PoW
| blockchain. Bitcoin.
| ciphol wrote:
| "once a piece of data gets confirmed and buried under a few
| days worth of bitcoin's PoW, it can never be changed or
| removed from the blockchain."
|
| Could someone put child porn in the blockchain? Would that
| have legal consequences for anyone using Bitcoin in places
| that have laws about such porn?
| paulgb wrote:
| Some researchers found some legally questionable content
| already in there.
|
| https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf
| pshc wrote:
| I have to say I appreciate your transparency in directly
| Bitcoin shilling.
|
| _> If you compromise or coerce enough validators, you can
| rewrite the history for no cost._
|
| If you can. You would need to compromise thousands of
| randomly selected validators just to forge one block. That
| impossible task nonwithstanding, the validators are selected
| with maybe five minutes' warning.
|
| PoW doesn't even offer absolute immutability, it's just
| longest fork wins. Which is secure because of the economics,
| not because of a notion of perfect immutability.
|
| Likewise, ETH2 provides a definition of finality that's
| backed by economics.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Exactly. These PoS FUDers fail to realize that largely the
| same, even if not stronger, economical factors protect the
| PoS as does the PoW blockchain. Both fundamentally rely on
| that 50% of validators need to be honest. With PoW, anyone
| with sufficient computational resources can execute a 50%
| double spending attack. I am sure that if few of the
| largest BTC miners conspired, they could right now execute
| a 50% attack. That's not in their best interest however, as
| it would permanently ruin the reputation of BTC and they'd
| be left with whatever proceeds the attack yielded, but also
| millions of USD worth of mining equipment that'd be
| rendered largely useless.
|
| With PoS exactly the same works. Most of the holders should
| be honest, and a successful attack would require spending
| at least 50% of the market cap of the coin to successfully
| execute - and then losing that stake as the reputation of
| the coin is soiled.
| [deleted]
| tylerhou wrote:
| > but once a piece of data gets confirmed... it can never be
| changed or removed from the blockchain.
|
| But it can, in the exact same manner as described in this
| article: have an 51% attacker build up a long chain and hide
| it from the world; then publish it.
|
| PoW is vulnerable to exactly the same type of attack
| described in this article. In order to build a longer chain
| with non-negligible probability, you need to stake at least
| 51% of the pool.
| disiplus wrote:
| no the difference is, to build a side chain you have to
| produce the work, work that has a real cost and takes time,
| remember in POW the chain with most work wins.
| vegai_ wrote:
| There's so much money in crypto that it's a bit difficult to
| believe anything people write about it.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I've invented a new get high quick scheme called "NFTHC", which
| is based on "Proof of Weed" instead of "Proof of Work".
|
| It's 100% green, and based purely on sustainable renewable
| resources.
|
| NFTHC: Burn Weed, Not Coal!
| samarama wrote:
| This person doesn't have any idea how PoS works and all of the
| people upvoting it don't either.
|
| It's very astonishing that the HN crowd still doesn't understand
| blockchain after 13 years.
|
| The article is complete nonsense because:
|
| 1. The author thinks that PoS is about having computing power. If
| someone thinks that they seriously don't know anything about PoS
| and haven't done any research
|
| 2. Proof of Work is 100x more centralized because 2 companies
| control the majority of mining equipment production and 4
| companies control the hashpower including all kinds of attack
| vectors, instead of the around 200 entities in PoS.
|
| 3. There are many attack vectors for the PoW model of which many
| only require malicious behaviour of 1 person, be it the CEO of
| one of these companies or a disgruntled worker that is bribed
| with a couple of million dollars.
|
| 3. The cost of taking over consensus for a PoS network, such as
| Solana or Ethereum 20 requires billions or trillions of dollars
| worth of coins that then all would rank heavily in value
|
| That's why PoS is around 1,000x -1,000,000x more secure than PoW
| depending on how big the market cap of the PoS network is.
| mercurial_sucks wrote:
| this forum is actually retarded. Either you dismiss both or
| neither given there are literally no differences
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| This is a silly article. Only working in a weaker security model
| does not, a priori, mean that proof of stake is a scam; it just
| means you need to convince yourself that the weaker security
| model holds. You can read the post linked
| (https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...)
| and decide for yourself.
|
| Personally, I think this kind of "quiescent" knowledge, letting
| you differentiate the real chain from the fake chain on long
| enough timescales (which basically amounts to knowledge of a
| single hash, when you get right down to it), is perfectly
| reasonable to assume under realistic circumstances, for the same
| reason that synchronized time is not a remotely difficult problem
| on long enough timespans. The only problem lies in new nodes
| (that enter the system when there's _not_ a quiescent state, and
| the longer chain is being withheld) being exposed to fake chains.
|
| By using a VDF as mentioned below to make sure it takes just as
| long to construct a new chain as it took to construct the old
| one, one can ensure that as long as _at the time the stakers held
| their keys_ (rather than for all time) a majority were
| trustworthy, then the probability that they were able to maintain
| a longer chain becomes vanishingly small. Therefore, nodes will
| be able to reliably choose the longer chain on reconnecting to
| the system. This trust model seems pretty realistic to me, and it
| 's not like Bitcoin can handle the case of a continuous partition
| to begin with.
|
| So this just reduces to "once a majority is not trustworthy, the
| chain can't be trusted anymore" which is the _actual_ security
| tradeoff of PoW vs. PoS (PoW puts trust in hashpower rather than
| staked coins, so by definition it 's immune to this sort of
| issue; if your private key is stolen you "only" lose your coins,
| not any voting power). I don't think this is news to anyone who's
| done much research into cryptocurrency.
| Cantinflas wrote:
| Great comment, let's do a TL;DR of the article: - Clickbait
| title. - Some of the claims can be debunked with a 2014 blog
| post. - Tradeoffs pow/pos are known and accepted for a long
| time. Nothing new added except drama.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| > Essentially, VDFs take a certain amount of steps to compute
| and cannot be parallelized. However, the correctness of their
| output can be verified efficiently.
|
| this...sounds exactly like proof of work?
|
| Indeed, you can probably fix plutocracy with some PoW.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Indeed, you can probably fix plutocracy with some PoW.
|
| Uh... great! Glad you agree that this is a solution?
|
| Let's switch to this new "some PoW" system as soon as
| possible, because it uses less than a megawatt to calculate
| proofs. Total, for the entire network.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| The more complex is the math, the more opportunities to
| screw up, or should we say, optimizations.
|
| VDFs are far too new, at best bleeding edge research,
| nobody is going to gamble serious money on the robustness
| of such new constructions.
|
| You would need unanimous agreement from the entire
| cryptology field.
|
| However, yes, there are some workshops on quantum and
| implications for mining, and some other fanciful stuff that
| are also just research at this point.
|
| The current setup of PoW relies on rather well understood,
| battle hardened primitives, that have been in actual usage
| under adversarial conditions for _decades_.
|
| Do you think any major central bank will hold any asset
| that's secured by a paper written last year?
| floatboth wrote:
| > nobody is going to gamble serious money on the
| robustness of such new constructions
|
| Thounsands of buttcoiners would gamble their entire life
| savings on shitcoin, pisscoin, asscoin, PonziCoin,
| whatever. When there's enough of them, it gets big enough
| so institutional investors start gambling on that too. It
| really doesn't seem like "serious money" is spending
| anything on actual technological research, the management
| of big money is also often done by idiots who follow any
| kind of hype.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| It is not. At least, not in the usual environmentally
| destructive sense that people tend to mean by PoW. The idea
| behind VDFs is that they can only be computed in a single-
| threaded fashion, so you don't gain any benefit from
| computing them on giant server farms. This is the exact
| _opposite_ of PoW which is designed to be computable
| massively in parallel. In this context, of course, not
| benefiting from giant server farms is _good_ , because it
| means people won't wreck the environment to compute them.
|
| The tradeoff is fundamental: _because_ VDFs don 't benefit
| from throwing computational resources at them, there is no
| disadvantage to computing a bunch of them in parallel. So if
| you had bad intentions from the getgo (and you had a majority
| of stake at the time), you could still secretly compute a
| fake bad chain starting at time t, and then release an
| alternative at time t+n that was as long or longer than the
| real chain; the security they provide is that if someone
| compromises your keys _later_ (after you already lost your
| majority), they can 't do this. Since in practice proof of
| stake chains start very centralized and then distribute over
| time, this is a useful practical thing to care about!
|
| With PoW, on the other hand, computing a fake chain requires
| you to not use all your hashpower, which opens you up to
| economic attacks from someone else who _is_ willing to use
| that hashpower. When someone uses more hashpower than you
| were, they 'll be able to make a longer chain faster (before
| the difficulty readjusts again), so now all your secret
| chains have been made useless (and in cases of equal chain
| length, people tiebreak by hashpower, so you can't just
| maintain a little side network that eventually catches up
| when hashpower decreases, either). That's the theory, anyway:
| it's heavily based on economic incentives, so if some
| government decided that they didn't really care about the
| economics and just wanted to screw over chain users by
| pumping out hashpower, they could do so quite easily. Note
| that by contrast, proof of stake is _not_ susceptible to
| this: you actually do have to compromise a majority of the
| active stakers no matter how much money you have.
|
| Personally, I think this is a distinction without a
| difference because I don't think any cryptocurency can stand
| up to sustained attacks by large nation-states (which is part
| of why I don't think it's very useful). But like I said,
| that's an assessment of the threat model, so it's subjective
| and up to you to decide.
| [deleted]
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