[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479

Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on massive mineral and energy debt. E.g. natural cycles do not allow for biomass generation for food and energy on today's scale. It's simply impossible, the math doesn't check out. See peak phosphorus or dive into the viability of bio-plastics. If we don't tap into some unlimited energy source soon, we have to massively cut back in everything we consume. It's madness to use any unnecessary energy or resource on crypto finance, when there are more energy efficient alternatives.

Financial security isn't worth anything in face of extinction. Bitcoin inherently works against human prosperity. No matter the riches we achieve, PoW will take a massive cut.

Please, play it through in your head: What would happen to the PoW system, if we achieve almost infinite energy proliferation? E.g. some scifi space solar energy harvesting. Don't you see how Bitcoin works against our future?

You need to chill if you think the demand is high enough to literally wipe out humanity.

Yeah, I think that's an extremely ignorant and outdated ideology. Which is evidently progressing towards human extinction.

Optimizing towards the metric of monetary reward/economic growth is just horribly disconnected from human welfare.

There is also the fallacy of assuming all things interchangeable for market dynamics when in reality some things running out means "down-regulating demand" by killing off most of the population, e.g. phosphate rock.

Capitalism isn't set up to get us two cookies later. There is just no incentive for the market to give a fuck about humans. It's like the "stamp making AI" thought experiment. Or the attention optimizing algorithms mindlessly destroying political culture. Oversimplified metrics spiralling out of control.

Tho, economists have realized this and most markets are recognized to fail without regulation for their inherent nature. E.g. housing, water, electricity, education, ...

And keep in mind, capitalism (when working properly) is supposed to find minima. Not create further barriers to getting things done. The group that gets the job done at the highest output:input ratio for as long as the problem they are solving is relevant was the intended optimization point. Irrational markets being what they are, this frequently does not converge as planned.

Without regulation, most essential markets fail humans.

And finally an ancap "free market economy" was the default state of the world and the whole of human history has been the struggle to overcome/refine that stake based hell.

Chia is pretty complicated but I'm not sure its much more complicated than other cryptocurrencies. The complexity seems pretty inherent in them.

For many natural resources, the local concentration is key to viability. See phosphorus, or helium depletion. Once the reserves are gone, we cannot maintain our scale of production, as alternative extraction usually is too energy intensive to scale. Please consider this on an interdependent scope, where it all comes down to burning through the geological work of millennia as the fundamental ressource. 500 years ago, people were already hitting the limits of ecological sustainability where they settled and back then all of earth was home to something like 500 million people.

Maintaining just the food production for 7 billion humans is gonna be an overbearing challenge the next years. Anarchocapitalist delusions have no future.

Every year we delay is another year worth of black holes swallowing up entire galaxies worth or resources.

You went on a rant that started barely connected and ended up talking about food production for 7 billion people (which is currently happening by the way since there are about 7 billion on earth).

For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.

'Work' cannot be losslessly reduced to heat generation and market value does not represent contribution to human welfare.

It's the fallacy of conflating correlation with causation, when the free market economic systems aligns with human interests for a moment. And PoW crypto currencies aim for giving up all governance control to this fallacy. Earth becoming absolutely oxidized into a lifeless rock a valid possible equilibrium for free market economic systems.

Like, I appreciate trying to dual purpose energy use... but I dont see a specialized computer that pumps heat as practical. I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater. My 800w box doesn't generate anywhere near as many BTUs as a 600w ceramic box heater. Even though I may joke otherwise. While on hot days in Florida, there is a difference when it's on or off in a room... on the 5 actual cold days we get, it can barely keep my feet warm. When I lived in Colorado... Haha no. The little office I had with a buddy, there were 4 servers in a room, either rendering or doing video analytics crunching. They didnt do shit when ambient was 60f, plus our desktops. Using bitcoin miners as home heaters seems as practical as Juiceroo was to "fresh juice".

> I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater.

That makes no sense. You literally cannot "waste" waste heat, unless you are venting it to outside or something. If your space is not getting warm enough, it's because your computer is not generating enough heat!

[1] only a very miniscule amount of the power consumed by a PC actually permanently flips bits on harddisks or SSDs or transmits bits across the network. These take extremely low amounts of power.

Electric heaters are only 100% efficient at turning electricity to heat. We can do a lot better than that

However, the theoretical thought of a near infinite energy source inevitably pushing a PoRessource currencies system into finding (another) limitation again is outrageous. With all those free market edgelords in the cryptosphere, why don't they see the catastrophic flaw of dependency on scarcity? That's just insane. No matter the material/energetic efficiency technology will ever achieve, PoR will automatically counterbalance it.

It's full commitment into the long known failings of a free market economy. Giving up all control to the reward delay capacity of a toddler. A modern take on the easter island collapse on a holistic, global scale.

Agreed. Cryptocurrencies that use proof of stake are a great alternative to cryptocurrencies that use natural resource scarcity.

For example, with PoW you only need a single honest node to arrive at the correct chain during initial sync. With PoS there is no such guarantee, since there’s no inherent way for a new node joining the network to decide which chain to pick when presented with two different, but equally valid, chains.

The opposite is true in multiple aspects. PoW has infinite economies of scale which inevitably leads to total centralization as all miners but the most efficient one have to shutdown.

PoS can stay decentralized forever because new stakers arriving aren't going to make existing staking unprofitable, forcing them to shutdown, as actual running costs are negligible.

Regarding resistance to government interference aspect PoS absolutely demolishes PoW. Overwhelming majority of mining is done in big industrial warehouses owned by registered companies. They're trivial to find, very hard to relocate and easy to take physical control of.

In contrast, staking only requires a node, which could conceivably even be on a satellite, on a ship, or anonymized using tor or other anonymity network.

>For example, with PoW you only need a single honest node to arrive at the correct chain during initial sync

This argument doesn't make sense, from the start the user has to choose some specific chain and has to download node software for it. Even soft forks starting from the same genesis block may require a manual choice, as it's possible for old nodes to diverge from the new if majority of miners ignores the soft fork. Chain names are not defined by code over medium to long term, but by dynamic social consensus.

Usually the only people trying to promote PoS are the ones who are financially well-off enough to buy the masternodes. You could make the same argument for mining -- to do it on any worthwhile scale you better be prepared to spend a minimum of $500k -- but "worthwhile" is subjective, and some people are fine only making a residual income off of their mining, because they feel like they are contributing to the "cause" -- to keep the network flowing -- amongst other reasons. Initially, I got started with mining out of pure idealism about decentralization, anonymous currencies, and the cypherpunk roots of it all. That turned into me making significant investments to mine on a larger scale. Maybe people doing it for those reasons will be less important as time goes on and it's more mainstream...I don't know.

My other business is legal MJ cultivation in California and Michigan, and it's the same thing in that industry -- the only people wanting, or not minding, the expensive licensing and startup costs in California are the well-financed companies who can afford it all, who can wait many years for profits if necessary. Everyone else wants a way for easy entrance in the market, low licensing costs, etc.

As for government interference, I was a "traditional market" operator for ~14 years in the MJ business, and have experience with avoiding scrutiny from the government. In fact, the issues with bitcoin mining are identical to that of growing marijuana on a large scale -- exhausting large amounts of heat, the intake of large amounts of fresh air or cooling BTU's, using large amounts of electricity, the need for good airflow in the facility, etc. With that said, you could structure your mining operation so that only a very targeted, focused investigation could find you -- it wouldn't be easy to "fish" and find it. For example, the main indicator would be the electricity usage, but there are tons of legitimate businesses that use far more electricity than a mining operation. Establish a business that is in that industry, buy a warehouse for that purpose, get your electrical installed, and then run all your miners through your own VPN or Tor (I've never tried to run them on Tor, because I was always worried about speed/connection problems.) They would see large electrical usage, yes, but that is normal for your registered business.

In this hypothetical government overreach scenario, hiding a mining business -- if you really had to -- wouldn't be any more difficult than hiding a large scale grow operation, or a meth lab, or anything illicit really. You just have to know what you are doing, but people have been doing this for decades and decades without problem.

As time goes by, the number of people holding a token goes up, and competition among the staking services goes up, which results in more decentralization.

Take for instance on Tezos, with better internet we can eventually get RPi connected to Starlink which can be installed by the users themselves and start staking.

As hardware technology progresses, PoW goes in the opposite direction. Initially anyone can mine, but later only the most specialized optimized hardware will mine irrespective of the number of people holding the token.

can you indicate how many machines you have running to get 1btc/month (plus does that actually mean 1 correct "mine" every 25 months?)

The comparison with illegal mj grow operation breaks down because long-term profit margins on mining collapse to very small percentages, so risking prison for that would be idiotic, especially as legal operators (that eg. enforce some government blacklists) would have lower running costs due to not having to pretend they are something else. In addition, contrary to a mj grow op, you have to order asics from Taiwan/China at least once every few years which would be very hard to hide (gpu mining is going away).

This even assumes that you can order profitable asics at all, indefinitely in the future. The market is structured in such a way that really big mining companies are incentivized to make their own asics - the design of a sha256 asic is relatively trivial (compared to pretty much all other chips) and ordering directly from TSMC or Samsung would save them a fortune. For all we know, it's already happening - it's not like any mining op has an incentive to tell.

The deciding factor is that in PoW a majority can force anything on a minority - smart regulation would enforce blacklists via orphaning once compliant miners achieve a comfortable hashrate majority, totally killing the non-compliant operations. Legal miners would have an enormous financial incentive to comply: orphaning a minority of hashrate directly increases their revenue. In the most extreme case, states could start mining themselves to take control of the industry - something that's borderline impossible in PoS, because they would have to buy the staking tokens from the market, and there's simply not enough supply available at any reasonable prices.

Then there's the defense issue: assume a PoW chain has been captured in such a way. If the PoW algorithm relies on asics, users could fork to a gpu PoW, but there's no second move - nothing can be done to fork away hostile gpu miners, short of going away from PoW entirely. Potentially, this could be used to kill _all_ PoW blockchains - a state first makes enough asics to obtain a majority, then kills the chain by exclusively mining empty blocks and orphaning everything else, then repeats the process with gpus. The victory would be absolute and the cost would be in the low XX billions of dollars. Right now there's really no reason for any state to attack as non-speculative use is very limited - but imagine that Iran somehow switches to bitcoin for all external trade and relies on its bitcoin stash to function. Suddenly an attack becomes a very realistic possibility.

Even if somehow some state controlled enough stake in a PoS system to censor everything, the defense fork can be repeated indefinitely - by deleting deposits of a hostile majority staker(s) on a community fork. For this reason, I expect decentralized PoS networks (those that can be run on home machines and without on-chain governance, not cloud-run DPoS or PoS networks with governance) to never be attacked in such a way - there's no way to truly win, short of total global surveillance I guess.

One chain must have more votes from stakers than the other after a while.

Please expand on what you think is flawed and what are the downsides.

Proof of Stake is self-referential; the parties with value at stake have value because the blockchain says they do. It's a perpetual motion machine. When the shit hits the fan (say, a controversial fork) the people who thought they had control ("stake") will learn who really makes the decisions WRT which blockchain is canonical. That would be the exchanges, and what they agree on will rule no matter who stakes what.

The reason Proof of Work works is because someone has to pony up the compute power.

The emperor has no clothes. Sorry.

PoW doesn't have that problem.

> Please expand on what you think is flawed and what are the downsides.

If I make a parallel version of the chain where I got all the mining rewards from block one and ended up with a majority stake, how do you decide between that and the other chain?

What youve said here makes very little sense.

Note that efficiency would mean producing the same properties but with less resources. Not merely using less resources. While experimentation is certainly desired, it's a fallacy that any coin has actually reproduced bitcoin in a more efficient way.

To name a couple,

- Bitcoin had what some call an "immaculate conception" where there was no expectation that such a system would work in the first place and where the founder was anonymous. This creates a very different history in comparison with the founder led, pre mined, frothy market launches of today.

- Bitcoin has stood the test of time. With each year in production that passes, there is more confidence that the system and specific implementation is sound.

Once these other coins have stood in the market for 10 years straight and continued to retain the confidence in their protocol, the comparisons can start.

At which point, Bitcoin proponents will up the requirements again. This is an excuse people use to avoid talking about the fact that Bitcoin has spent the last 2-3 years consistently proving that it doesn't scale and that it is unusable as a currency.

> had what some call an "immaculate conception"

Or, it was a good first try that needs iteration now that we understand that hyper-deflation is a bad thing for a currency, now that we understand that pseudononymous addresses don't provide any real privacy guarantees at all, and now that we understand that transaction speed and cost has to be something that's optimized for early on in a coin's life and that those issues can't be fixed by pasting an ad-hoc, unproven non-blockchain solution on top of the coin 10 years later.

The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building.

I’d say it’s not weird or religious - it’s a predictable outcome of the incentive structure of then currency.

A key criteria for a better alternative is that it doesn’t incentivize hagiographic thinking.

in what sense is bitcoin "hyper-deflation"ary? i think you are thinking of the word "deflation" but i know that doesn't sound as smart

>The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building.

there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better, so go on

They already did. Half the crypto ecosystem is already better than Bitcoin if you're trying to build a functional currency. We're talking about a coin that doesn't have any privacy guarantees, it's not exactly hard to improve on that.

When I talk about religious loyalty, what I'm getting at is that it turns out the Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't seem to care that much about stuff like privacy, and whenever anyone brings up Bitcoin's flaws, or the fact that it has been outclassed by other coins, suddenly the conversation is all about "stability" and the trust of having an old coin that hasn't fixed its problems in 10 years.

It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. It turns out that PoW is unscalable and prohibitively expensive, which is a barrier to real decentralization, but we have people on here arguing that's a good thing. It's understandable that Satoshi didn't know in advance every problem, but it's not understandable that in all of the years since then, the Bitcoin community has largely failed to evolve or learn anything about the initial flaws that the coin had.

And this is honestly a tricky conversation to have because we have to keep dancing around the fact that Bitcoin is a speculative asset and that very little of the community cares about making a currency at all. But the community won't acknowledge that, so instead we get a lot of weird deflection around "stability" and we all have to pretend that the community is in good faith actually trying to create an alternative to cash, and that people genuinely believe that Bitcoin's tech is the best way to do that.

But obviously that's not what's happening. Nobody would really look at the state of Bitcoin and argue that it's best-positioned to replace traditional currency. It's worse than cash for privacy, it has higher transaction fees than almost any other payment method, it doesn't scale environmentally, and it takes 10 minutes to add a new block. But... it is for the moment an excellent speculative investment because the speculative market is irrational and doesn't care about technology. And the speculative market benefits from pretending that it exists for some kind of grand purpose rather than just as an end to itself, even if doing so makes it harder to accomplish any of the original goals behind the coin.

As a currency? It doesn't. Do people actually think that Bitcoin is succeeding as a currency right now? If you want to talk about the market deeming something sufficient, the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency.

As a speculative investment? Because of what I said in my last paragraph.

> chaumian coinjoin

I've seen multiple vulnerabilities pop up with coinjoin wallets, plus the process costs extra money to do, plus it's not network-wide so the coins involved can still be blocked from future transactions. I don't understand why a community would go down that route when solutions like zero-knowledge proofs already exist and have a better track record. I mean, that's supposedly the whole thing with Bitcoin, right? Stability and security?

The single advantage that coinjoins have is that they don't require iterating on Bitcoin itself, which the community seems to be desperate to avoid. This is something that pops up a lot with Bitcoin-centered "solutions". We have coinjoin, because having a coin with real privacy guarantees would require iterating on Bitcoin and we can't have that. We have the lightning network (which also has serious privacy problems) because building a completely separate layer that operates off of the blockchain is preferable to the community over fixing the problems with transaction delays and fees in the coin itself.

you don't understand why a community at a nash equilibrium wouldn't jump at the opportunity to break consensus? bitcoin is favorable because it is relatively speaking the minimum viable collection of traits needed to function as a cryptocurrency, reduced complexity leaves less attack surface. if zk proofs become obviously necessary or superior to cj because of coin blacklisting, people will switch to zcash or whatever else uses it, but in a world where regulators or businesses block cj'd coins, i don't know why you think zk coins would be any better off. in any case these alternatives still exist and people use them, so why does it even matter? if you're right, everyone will see and you will probably be rich.

> the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency.

man in 1910: the market has universally declared horses superior to automobiles

Reduced attack surface only matters if the remaining surface is secure. Privacy-wise, the comparison here is that you've got a door with no locks, and you're arguing against putting a lock on it because "that'll make it more complicated, and then people will get in and steal my stuff."

There is no particular reason to be confident that coinjoins will protect your privacy in the long run. They've both broken in the past and they're easier to regulate than something built into the core design of the coin. This is a situation where you need a more fundamental guarantee, because Bitcoin at its current complexity level is not capable of protecting your privacy well, and I don't see strong evidence that coinjoins will solve that. You've got to put a lock on your door, even if it makes your door more complicated.

Even disregarding the fact that coinjoins are unproven, paying coordinator fees every time you want to make a private wallet is a bad solution anyway. Even if you could be confident that coinjoin wallets weren't going to leak information, you still wouldn't want a solution that had those fees, because we don't want a world where only rich people have privacy.

> at a nash equilibrium

I think the whole point of what I've been saying is that the nash equilibrium of Bitcoin is terrible. If the crypto market stays in the state it's in, it will not become a viable currency. So yeah, I don't understand why a community in a nash equilibrium where >50% of the network is subject to interference by the PRC, where transaction fees are spiraling out of control, and in which tracking is already a serious problem -- I don't understand why a community would be happy to stay in that state, complexity or equilibrium be damned.

That's what I've been saying. Bitcoin as it exists today is terrible, and making it better is going to require actual iteration, not just sitting around and trying to pump the market so somebody can buy a porche.

> why does it even matter?

Because some of us would like a functional, private, inexpensive online payment system at some point, and the entire crypto market is intertwined in the public eye, and silliness like speculative investing and NFTs distort that purpose and get in the way of other coins doing anything useful.

There's a reason why cryptocurrencies are now classified by the IRS as an investment. If you're trying to build a currency, then that's a bad outcome, but none of that matters if the only thing you care about is "becoming rich" instead of building something that's actually useful for the world.

> man in 1910: the market has universally declared horses superior to automobiles

Well OK, then don't act like 5-10 year temporary consolidation around Bitcoin means that the crypto market has decided that Bitcoin is the technologically superior option for a currency, rather than a temporarily valuable speculative asset. Particularly, don't act like Bitcoin prices prove its superiority during the same week that heckin Dogecoin prices spike.

You can't have it both ways here, either the market is always rational or it's not.

If the market is always rational, then credit cards are better than cryptocurrency in its current state. If the market isn't always rational, then speculative investment based on FOMO does not indicate anything about Bitcoin's quality as a tool for transactions.

It's a fallacy to consider bitcoin as an apriori better system than either traditional currencies or other coins when it has failed to achieve the hoped-for results.

However it is a pretty expedient way to get something out the door fast (it's literally the simplest form of anti-sybil you can make and a cryptocurrency is anti-sybil + consensus).

So given that we accept proof of stake as a good way to prototype different approaches then a cryptocurrency that meets you criteria is the avalanche cryptocurrency (AVAX).

The way it works is via "stochastic gossip", whenever there is a conflict (double spend or some kind of decision problem where a node is unsure what is reality) then a consensus "game" is started. The way the game works is that you sample some reasonable sample of peers in the network (say 30-40 peers) and ask them "is A or B the legal state of the world?", now an honest participant will naively believe whatever the majority decision is.

Due to how stochastic probability stuff works the network will converge if you repeat this game sufficiently often. The idea is that if the initial state is 60% think A is the correct transaction then after a few rounds (they do 17 rounds which is overkill, you get like nine nines of probability or something) the whole network will have come to that conclusion (each time you run a round of the game the majority will _probably_ grow, eventually only the byzantine nodes are still saying B and if they are not the majority then all conflicts are solved).

Now bear in mind, there are some drawbacks, if someone is stubborn or does the opposite of what they should then maybe they can have some outsized influence, but in general this works pretty well and you can have a _lot_ of nodes participate in the network (much much more than in nakomoto consensus due to the different nature of the consensus mechanism). Furthermore you get finality in 3 seconds (even with the 17 rounds) so that is also quite nice (if you want to reach VISA level of transactions...

A validator in the avalanche network doesn't need some crazy hardware either.. a raspberry pi is fine, the limitation is you need the machine to be online 80% of the time they stake for.

That is one solution. There are others. For example amoveo, which is proof of work BUT it solves the second order byzantine fault tolerance problem (also known as the "oracle problem") which means that you can account for externalities (like energy usage) and throttle the mining rewards or adjust parameters in response.

I am working on a very raw but next-gen project myself, it's called datalisp (I wrote a very bad "whitepaper" in one sitting a couple of weeks ago... it's at datalisp.is - there is a telegram channel.. we're trying to figure out a lot of hard problems and we'd rather show than tell so if the whitepaper is somewhat up your alley then there is a lot more elaborate stuff happening in the channel).

The point of what I am saying is: if we want to kill bitcoin then the simplest way is to just make a better solution and change the narrative around the whole scene. I hate all this nonsense proof of stake ponzi nonsense, if a cryptocurrency is well designed then there is no advantage from being an early adopter (i.e. we solve byzantine fault tolerance _AND_ tragedy of the commons).

Please don't shit all over those of us who want to solve hard problems in a good way just because there's a bunch of assholes trying to get rich quick.

Regarding plutocracy, it depends on proof-of-stake vs delegated-proof-of-stake. In one, everyone can become a staker and earnings are spread to all, in the other, some stakers are elected and earnings will be concentrated to them.

Proof-of-work has inequality issues:

- economies of scale for those that have the capital to rent a power plant and a large datacenter in a location with cheap electricity and/or cheap cooling.

- latest ASICs / GPUs access at scale.

Proof of work that doesn't solve second order byzantine fault tolerance cannot account for externalities and suffers from the issues you mention.

I agree that neither "solution" is all that great, my project is neither proof of work nor proof of stake.

It's my day job to implement proof-of-stake https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/pull/865

By the way I don't think it's a good argument to say that your job depends on proof of stake being secure and therefore it must be secure (or "therefore you would know if it wasn't").

The coordinated bribery attack can be done by having people stake on a different chain until a majority is reached and then softfork and slash the minority.

If you don't believe the attack will work why not collect the bribe (since the defecting can be done anonymously / out of band) and if you believe it will work then you'd rather be on the winning side.

^ This is a rough sketch of the argument. As I said, it's hard to implement since you need an oracle to decide whether to pay the bribe, so it can only be done if you have second order byzantine fault tolerance and a few constructs. I believe we will see such attacks in this decade though (but ofc it only works if the PoS network is actually decentralized and it will keep working until the network becomes centralized).

My job is literally implementing proof-of-stake securely. Also when I work and implement an algorithm, I provide references and sources, which my PR is.

> The coordinated bribery attack can be done by having people stake on a different chain until a majority is reached and then softfork and slash the minority.

Changing the vote is a slashable offense in the Gasper paper (cited in my PR). https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 A change of vote will be ignored and the validator will be deemed malicious and ejected.

p17 section 4.7 Slashing conditions with proofs.

Furthermore, this has been formally verified https://runtimeverification.com/blog/formally-verifying-fina...

W.r.t. to the proofs in the paper, they happen within certain assumptions, assumptions that do not hold when the attack is as I described because the majority will be byzantine!

The key idea in the argument is not computer science but economics. If you can earn more we have to assume you will do that (charitable behavior exists but is not a good thing to rely on for security) the issue is that PoS is vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons in a similar way to democracy (the amount of influence each person has is small but time investment of being a rational voter big, hence it is rational to be ignorant - in PoS setting the idea is that you defecting is unlikely to change things so the bribe does not need to be big). Once you've obtained a majority you can censor the minority. How much you can do with your soft fork depends on the chain in question but in general the very fact that you can stop byzantine behavior works against you when the majority is malicious.

The reason we cannot do the same in proof of work is because of how expensive the bribes are.

Anti-sybil based in racing is hard to censor but when you start voting you can do bullying.

Regarding formal verification, you can formally verify the algorithm, implement it safely and still it will not work in the real world due to the game theory considerations. However bittorrent worked and that was largely charity. Similarily the data availability problem has not been a problem (e.g. all bitcoin blockchain is accessible even though there is no monetary incentive to make the archive accessible). While there is no way to exploit known vulnerabilities they may as well not exist.

From our exchange you have been appealing to authority but I suggest working through the math and looking at tragedy of the commons. Since you are intimately familiar with how proof of stake works you will be able to convince yourself one way or the other.

Datalisp is a data interchange format rather than a cryptocurrency though.. so it behaves a bit different.

Edit: To be a bit less standoffish and make my position clear.

You only need to form a consensus with the part of the network you are aware of. Datalisp leans into the properties of propagator networks (fully CP systems) to avoid needing to synchronize everyone eagerly.

Edit: see for example slide 30 of this slideshow: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15712/lectures/15-bft.pdf

I'm not (yet) very good at probability theory so it's a bit slow going filling in the model I have in mind (that is; deciding the message format) but propnets are the correct framework to fit it into.

Again, the Byzantine generals problem of the paper is not an accurate description of what is happening in the datalisp network and does not apply except locally (in a 'neighbourhood' of the dispute) so it's not 2/3 of the whole network but rather 2/3 of the echo chamber that needs to agree...

Anyway you seem to be eager to dismiss off-hand so I am losing interest in debating with you as-is.

If not, then why compare it to Avalanche at all?

From what I can tell; I agree with your dismissal of avalanche and offer an intuition for what may be the problem by contrasting it to my work-in-progress idea, then we have a series of back-and-forths where I consistently mention datalisp but never once talk about avalanche..

Regarding global agreement of state, yes it is not a criterion for datalisp. Datalisp approaches the network like a sheaf (locally consistent but globally not necessarily so) and uses the properties of propagator networks (which are fully CP, therefore they converge on a fixpoint) to reason about convergent consensus that executes lazily.

The casual dismissal of datalisp (as it stands) is that the message format for communicating your beliefs w.r.t. probability of signal-to-noise is not fully worked out yet and all we have is a series of heuristical arguments.

However, datalisp is a data-intechange format first and foremost and optimized for building authenticated datastructures. It is not specialized for cryptocurrencies per-se (since the focus is on second order byzantine fault tolerance).

> I believe the problem in the first place is forcing the network to come to global consensus. In my project the idea is to form "lazy consensus" (i.e. just enough consensus for everyone to have a consistent outlook on the world).

So, which is it? Not coming to global consensus and "just enough consensus for everyone to have a consistent outlook on the world" seem mutually exclusive.

Don't be afraid to lay down a bold system description, and don't hold back on the specifics. Not trying to brag, but I have a PhD in distributed computing, I work on a blockchain at my day-job (https://github.com/blockstack/stacks-blockchain), and I chair its governance process. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to understand a rigorous system design. But, I don't have very much patience for weasel-wording, pussyfooting, or hand-waving.

In the original comment I mention my project and point to resources for learning more. I don't know why you think I am "weasel-wording, pussyfooting or hand-waving" when what is in fact happening is that we are having this discussion in a place that is not exactly optimal for writing pages and pages of explanations but rather for high-level discussion (which is necessarily brief on details but may link to resources).

I will be the first to admit that what I am doing is not fully worked out yet. Then again you are familiar with research work so you know things take a while to become polished enough to stand up to the "surface level scrutiny" even if the ideas may have merit from the beginning. The fact that I am working in the open and engaging people like you in discussion should not be considered "weasel-wording" or whatever slur you come up with.

You claim I am contradicting myself yet you do not elaborate on how so. I have already given you the argument for why it is not a contradiction (global consensus happens eventually due to convergence and "lazy" in computer science is another way to say "demand driven" - i.e. we converge as much as we need to in each "neighbourhood" of the network, the sheaf reference should further enhance your mental image of what is going on).

If you want to go into details with me and discuss things more thoroughly then I suggest you join the datalisp channel on telegram. I would be happy to hear your criticism and try to understand better in which ways I may be lacking. After all, what we all want is better systems of governance and if you are intrigued by this approach (or rather; high level description of a possible approach) then from my point of view our interests are aligned.

This was meant in a general sense; it wasn't an accusation. I apologize if it was interpreted otherwise.

I was hoping to see more about what distributed systems properties datalisp will be providing? It's fine if you're not ready, but if so, then maybe you could speak more to the specific problems you're trying to solve?

First we take canonical S-expressions (made by Ron Rivest for cryptographic signing) as the syntax of the "language" (again it's primarily a data-interchange format meant to be used to build distributed systems).

We enforce the restriction that the csexps must have versioned operators, that is (2:op1:0...) would be a the operation `op` and version `0`, the version is a natural number.

That's it for the data interchange format, now for the semantics of the language.

As I have been saying the primary idea is to use propagator networks (propnets). The name of datalisp comes from datafun which is an extension of datalog. Datalog is something you are probably familiar with, it's not turing complete and is a constructive logic programming language that uses "relations" and postulated "facts" to infer new "facts" - i.e. it builds out a transitive closure of sorts.

Datafun takes this and tries to extend it as much as possible without becoming turing complete, so rather than being limited to the boolean lattice of normal logic it uses any lattice and monotone functions, e.g. a propnet. However it tries to do type inference and be a "programming language".

One nice property of datalog is that the evaluation semantics coincide with the shortest vector path algorithm used to do routing on the internet, except datalog is declerative rather than imperative so it's an interesting way to do routing. The idea of datalisp is to make the "XPath of canonical S-expressions" be a datafun-ish language that can then also do the routing.

Now the reason this has anything to do with cryptocurrencies is based on the claim that the internet is a propnet where each place is a "max-signal lattice". The idea being that each user tries to put the computer into a state that most aligns with their intent (`max` over a total order - in this case ordered by "signal" - is a lattice), therefore they will not choose to persist messages that are spam i.e. messaging in the network is monotone (at the limit you have security and only choose to replace information if it rewards you with higher signal).

The goal of the datalisp network is to make this intuition concrete. There is a lot of details but this is the general gist.

So the anti-sybil mechanism in the network is called "proof of trust" we make participants in the network sign their messages and include a prediction of the signal-vs-noise of their message. Peers in the network will have a prior how much to trust the self-evaluation of this key that they then use to order the message.

Second order byzantine fault tolerance is a class of problems and the representative problem we try to solve (i.e. a "second order decentralization complete problem") is deciding whether to merge a patch and rebuild your system in a byzantine setting. If you can do that then you can of course also do a ledger that simulates some formal language. This is a fancy way to say we want a way to do updates in a distributed system with no single source of truth.

The consensus mechanism is based in lattice theory, we have "join consensus" which is a race of sorts, that is you can always merge a patch ahead of the network if you like (stay on the "bleeding edge" so to speak) and then there is a "meet consensus" which is based on the avalanche algorithm and is used to move up the bottom and collapse all patches (or more generally; metadata) into its state.

So the semantics of datalisp end up being something similar to "probabilistic datafun" if you are familiar with semi-naive datalog evaluation semantics then it's a bit like that except we also have a cutoff w.r.t. how much confidence we are willing to tolerate to use a fact / inference. Instead of programming datalisp in a text editor it is more like a graphql of sorts, it /is/ the internet, or rather it reifies the propnet datastructure. The reason we care so much about canonicality and consensus is so that we can take advantage of content addressing.

I have some ideas about building on top of this framework mixnets and simulations of different political systems, then the idea is to do composition via constant function market makers since they are convex and therefore solve the tragedy of the commons (local optimization is global optimization). Since the network is decentralized you can be byzantine, that is you can make your own identifiers in datalisp (each operator has an infinite namespace due to versioning, we use the probabilistic logic programming and metadata gossiping in the network to find out what schema the data is supposed to fit, if there is a namespace clash we form a local consensus to re-version one of the clashing names to the first unused version).

The properties of lattices allow you to "zoom out" of such echo chamber bickering.. this is how anti-sybil works...

There's a lot of ideas basically, I hope you can see the general picture of what I am planning.

"tries to do"? It either does or it doesn't. If you're not sure which, then it doesn't. Let's not use weasel words and misrepresent what the system actually does.

> One nice property of datalog is that the evaluation semantics coincide with the shortest vector path algorithm used to do routing on the internet,

Routing on the Internet is famously not shortest-path, so I don't know how to interpret the rest of this.

> The idea being that each user tries to put the computer into a state that most aligns with their intent (`max` over a total order - in this case ordered by "signal" - is a lattice), therefore they will not choose to persist messages that are spam i.e. messaging in the network is monotone (at the limit you have security and only choose to replace information if it rewards you with higher signal).

You seem to be describing a system where anyone can submit as many messages as they want, but it's up to each node to decide which ones are worthy of consideration ("not-spam") and which ones are not ("spam"). Identifying messages as spam is a notoriously hard problem. It's not even truly solved with email, for example; Cory Doctorow's humorous checklist applies here: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Which brings me to:

> So the anti-sybil mechanism in the network is called "proof of trust" we make participants in the network sign their messages and include a prediction of the signal-vs-noise of their message. Peers in the network will have a prior how much to trust the self-evaluation of this key that they then use to order the message.

This is not an anti-sybil mechanism in any sense of the word. If anyone can send arbitrary amounts of messages (of which an arbitrary amount can be spam), and run arbitrarily many nodes, then any attempt to predict the ratio of not-spam to spam messages is going to fail. Someone who wanted to break this system can choose how many nodes to run and how many spam/not-spam messages to send in order to trick other nodes into mis-classifying messages 100% of the time.

If you want a better understanding of sybils and how to deal with them (specifically, what not to do), you should read the original paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

But, know that sybil-resistance is not the same as BFT.

> Second order byzantine fault tolerance is a class of problems and the representative problem we try to solve (i.e. a "second order decentralization complete problem") is deciding whether to merge a patch and rebuild your system in a byzantine setting.

Making up new words is a great way to confuse and annoy your readers. If you want nodes to decide whether to make forward-progress when other nodes can fail arbitrarily, you need Byzantine fault tolerance. There's a plethora of papers and real-world implementations of high-performance BFT agreement protocols. The language and data format has absolutely nothing to do with the agreement problem.

> The consensus mechanism is based in lattice theory, we have "join consensus" which is a race of sorts, that is you can always merge a patch ahead of the network if you like (stay on the "bleeding edge" so to speak) and then there is a "meet consensus" which is based on the avalanche algorithm and is used to move up the bottom and collapse all patches (or more generally; metadata) into its state.

It sounds like your nodes execute some kind of speculative execution for state-transitions that they somehow believe will be accepted by the network, even though they have no confirmation that they have or will. This is all well and good -- speculative execution of a happy path is a well-known design tactic. But that's not the hard part of distributed system design; the hard part is how to handle the case where the happy path is unavailable. What's the unhappy path look like?

> So the semantics of datalisp end up being something similar to "probabilistic datafun" if you are familiar with semi-naive datalog evaluation semantics then it's a bit like that except we also have a cutoff w.r.t. how much confidence we are willing to tolerate to use a fact / inference. Instead of programming datalisp in a text editor it is more like a graphql of sorts, it /is/ the internet, or rather it reifies the propnet datastructure. The reason we care so much about canonicality and consensus is so that we can take advantage of content addressing.

It sounds like your nodes have no way to actually agree with one another with any certainty, so I take this with a huge bucket of salt.

Alright, I realize that what I wrote out on the spot was quite hand-wavy. The devil is in the details, also I honestly am a bit perplexed why you are so insistent on not looking at the (terrible) paper but willing to invest in the discussion at all.

For example the spam comments; in the paper I mention a construction from a project called Vac that deals with this. Bandwidth can be throttled per node per epoch by leaking secret shares of a key that put up collateral.

Regarding shortest path; interesting, I thought it was. Guess I was wrong. Still it is a valid way to do routing and is how I'd intended to do it in the prototype network. The big idea of versioning the operators is to be able to converge on the desired semantics.

The reason I focus on the proof of trust part is because that is how a bunch of decisions are made (such as amount of bandwidth to allocate). You still need a bunch of other constructions to use this data.

The anti-sybil is not just anti-spam it is also about finding correlated intent and packaging that whole echo chamber up as an individual so that you can rate limit / adjust visibility. Major news from an uninteresting group may be more interesting than minor news from an interesting group.

Regarding "making up words" - there are precise definitions that I didn't reproduce because I figured you would want to hear a different narration than the one presented in the paper / the channel.

The way nodes participate in the network is by pinning content addresses and gossiping metadata about pins. At any given time the "commons" is made explicit because it is pinned by a bunch of nodes. The nodes build metadata on top of the bottom (commons), when a consensus is reached, i.e. there is some metadata that everyone has join-ed into their state, then we have a meet consensus and the pin can be moved.

You are still thinking in terms of first order BFT which is why your criticism is a bit.. off base. The network is not trying to start off automatic but rather manual and then discovered patterns will be automated once proven correct.

If you read (and understand) how the amoveo oracles work and look into the properties of prediction markets then you can see that this is actually a social network built on a data-interchange format that is optimized for building authenticated datastructures (i.e. amenable to automation of any first order problems that can be solved with MPC).

Edit: W.r.t. Datafun "trying to" do type inference. Datafun is a research project, he has found most of the type inference rules but some are still missing. The language is not really usable as-is but it "tries to" be, carrying around two typing contexts (one for lattice types and another for algebraic types) and having modal subtyping and such things is complicated and hard to do well. Datalisp is less interested in such things and is closer to being a probabilistic datalog. Again, the versioning of operators is so that we can converge on desired semantics; the mvp is going to be using bayesian factors for inferences and odds of signal:noise for priors attached to facts, this is just for pragmatic reasons (easy to code / reason about) it is probably insufficient for the economic model and composition of prediction markets.

Stellar Lumens & Ripple: More centralized but that centralization means there no no wasteful proof of work needed

Tezos: like a cheaper version of Ethereum for NFTs. Already powered by proof of stake.

Polkadot: Many new coins are beginning to be released on polkadot’s proof of stake network just as they are on Ethereum’s network.

Binance coin- centralized and proof of stake. The whole Binance Smart Chain network is powered by just 21 nodes (validates) that stake about 3.5M of Binance coin.

Cardano - has a cool name and is powered by proof of stake. Has lots of PHD research papers but most of which are over my head.

Algorand- a fast and cheap new cryptocurrency that is powered by two different kinds of validator nodes, one centralized and the other decentralized.

Ethereum 2.0 - will probably take 2-3 years to migrate to proof of stake but once it does, it’s possible that many of the above cryptocurrencies will be rendered obsolete unless they’ve captured large amounts of the market before then.

All 8 of these coins/tokens should meet your standards of being efficient on all levels. When evaluating cryptocurrencies you’ll notice this pattern. The cryptocurrencies with the cheapest transaction fees tend to use the least amount of energy.

In general, anything using some flavour of Byzantine Fault Tolerance - of which there are a few - as a method of consensus, consumes very little energy for the payback.

If appropriately deployed (similar issue to PoW, decentralisation needs to be maintained) BFT-type consensus mechanisms also exceed the consensus security offered by PoW or PoS.

BTC and other PoW models are typically constrained by a 51% corruption of the network. BFT systems typically do better than that, as they often require numbers in excess of 50% to reach agreement (I believe I've seen around 80% - but it's been a while). The way the system usually works is it's constantly reassessing malicious nodes so it becomes difficult for a minority to gain a foothold to cause disruption. They also have the possibility to exhibit less destructive effects if breached (temporary network halt rather than network takeover).

Finally, in such systems modifications to the network protocols are voted upon democratically by participants on the network itself, and so far - at least in XRP's case - this appears to have worked well. Ripple has proposed a few changes that have been rejected by the network using this voting process, while others proposed by them or other participants have been approved and become part of the protocol.

Verifiable random functions are another good option -- unlike VDFs, they do allow some manipulation (e.g. the last miner in an epoch can influence one bit by skipping their block), but we've analyzed the effects and (with reasonable parameters) the advantages from manipulation are fairly negligible. We can also combine VDFs with VRFs, so if the VDF was somehow broken, security reduces to VRF security.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623

[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/370

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN-1q8c50q0

Here's a brief excerpt of how PoS makes sense: "Unlike proof-of-work, validators don't need to use significant amounts of computational power because they're selected at random and aren't competing."

If you want to go deeper, there's more info here:

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

It starts with a fairly traditional BFT protocol that reaches consensus as long as everyone follows the rules. These have been known in computer science for decades.

The twist is that if anyone breaks the rules, you can prove they did it. So everybody deposits some ETH as a security bond, and if they break the rules, any other staker can submit proof of that to get a small reward, and inflict a penalty on the offender.

An offense by a small amount of stake does no damage and is assumed to be an accident, so the penalty is small. An offense by enough stake to cause problems is completely destroyed so the attack can't continue.

I don't love the energy use but let's not make a false equivalence.

Other blockchains are relatively easy to mutate and hence not good candidates for the World's reserve currencies.

On a side note my colleagues are working on improving ETC against 51% attacks at the moment so hopefully that works out. Definitely wouldn't refer to Ethereum as a 'shitcoin'.

https://static.iohk.io/docs/etc/ecip-comparison-for-51-attac...

You know, this is quite ironic because cryptocurrencies are reaching a dead end, through their own flaws.

"Reality" is itself a fairly mutable concept if you're using that term to a refer to system that produces abstract "coins" with values that float against other world currencies in a system of finance that itself consists of multiple layers of indirection that evolved to solve the scaling problems of direct bartering.

This ROI could be then funneled into carbon offset projects, renewables, and research.

[1]: A quick google brought up a few results spanning those ranges

They could also just take the costs that would go to ASICs and instead put that into the investments in the first place. What actual utility is there in some mathematical computations for society as a whole?

I know it's tempting to argue along the lines of "What could be more important than the environment?" and that is a good question, but that is a shift in societal values question, not an economic one. Economics simply helps one optimize the outcomes towards a values set.

Think of calculating digits of Pi. You can calculate the digits ahead of time and stockpile them, you can use your stockpile to do a 51% attack.

I think datacenters should be providing waste heat for industry, pools, residential hotwater etc. Similar idea for miners. If they can consume 1kw of electricity but then sell 500w of waste heat, that can be quite good for the environment and bottom line.

Sort of seems counterproductive to say that regulation will fix the issues with the currency that's supposed to resist regulation.

Re: PoW, the thing it does provide that no other tech can't is Sybil-resistant open-membership replicated state machines. Anyone can join in deciding state transitions because the barrier to entry (access to mining tech and electricity) is decoupled from the system's operation -- there are no protocol-defined gate keepers. Sybil-resistance comes from the fact that votes on the next epoch of state transitions comes from an irreversible expenditure on the voter's part (i.e. you can't vote for 2 conflicting blocks in PoW without having 2x the mining power). Making the system process state transitions at a fixed pace under these two constraints is the scientific breakthrough that PoW contributes.

This is the same attack model that leads there being a public debate about “Segwit coin VS BCash”. It’s also what happened with the 2013 fork[0]. The system ends up needing politics and power games just like the current financial system. The technology is a distraction to fool intelligent engineers into thinking this system is different. It isn’t.

[0] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...

If I have the power to tweak any/all peers of any p2p system arbitrarily, then I already have supreme authority over what that system does. So your hypothetical is vacuous and uninformative. Wake me up when you've found a way to reliably mine two conflicting Bitcoin blocks using the same amount of PoW guesses.

> This is the same attack model that leads there being a public debate about “Segwit coin VS BCash”. It’s also what happened with the 2013 fork[0].

Wanna know something truly mind-blowing? You can fork Bitcoin at any time! And yet, none of the forked pretenders have come close to replacing the original Bitcoin. The biggest pretender by marketcap has a measly _2.21%_ of Bitcoin's hashpower [0], despite having the same PoW algorithm.

> The system ends up needing politics and power games just like the current financial system

Per the above, PoW has so far done a great job indicating which system is the real Bitcoin, and which are the pretenders. Wake me up when one of them overtakes the original.

> The technology is a distraction to fool intelligent engineers into thinking this system is different. It isn’t.

Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.

[0] https://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

This is not my argument and is your straw man. The point is most clients run whatever the politicians tell them to. What makes it even harder for engineers to see what’s actually going on with Bitcoin is that we suck at politicking and don’t even see it when it’s happening: the shaming if you’re running the wrong version, the worshipping of certain devs to help identify shepherds the sheep should follow, the scapegoating of dissenters, etc. You’re doing it right now by calling a specific chain a “pretender”.

If PoW actually worked as advertised, none of these games would be necessary.

Woah there buddy, speak for yourself, and only yourself. You may be terrible at politics, but I can assure you, not every engineer is.

Also, you are the one who's trying to make the case that the ability to make a derivative work of Bitcoin means that PoW has somehow failed. I'd say it's just the opposite -- the fact that one chain has a lot more PoW than the other is a very strong reading of the collective affinities borne by each chains' stakeholders. That's something you couldn't measure in pre-Bitcoin p2p systems. If anything, it means political shenanigans are harder to come by -- in order to legitimately claim one chain is more well-received than another other, you have to pony up actual energy. Hype, paid followers, ad blitzes, charismatic leaders, etc. only get you so far.

> You’re doing it right now by calling a specific chain a “pretender”.

Bitcoin came first. BCash, BSV, etc. are derivative works, not the original. Bitcoin has nearly two orders of magnitude of hashes per second behind it than the rest. Each project styles itself as "Bitcoin."

These are all facts. My characterization of these other systems as "pretenders" is meant to convey these facts, and nothing more.

> If PoW actually worked as advertised, none of these games would be necessary.

Bitcoin is still Bitcoin, derivative works notwithstanding, but people will believe whatever they want at the end of the day. Honestly, I don't care, because as of right now, far more people believe that the original Bitcoin is the Bitcoin, as evidenced by its significantly higher PoW.

No, I never said this and this another straw man. The point is that the most-work chain is allowed to be ignored if the politics are done right. You just need the right people pushing for adoption of the minority chain, and to label the most-work chain as an “attack” or a “bug”. In this event, there is no protocol defining which chain gets the name “Bitcoin”, it becomes a game of power, of who has more social capital in the space and who can maneuver exchanges and users into agreeing which chain is “real” and which chain is “pretender”.

Maybe a picture will help: imagine all the existing investors who strongly insist on deflationary policy are gone in 100 years, and they get replaced with folks who care a lot less about “sound money” arguments. Imagine devs, exchanges, miners, all agree that a constant supply inflation would be preferred. Then, all they need to do is release a new version of reference software that keeps the block subsidy in perpetuity, and make a very strong case that this fork is for the security and stability of the Bitcoin economy (to make that case here is beside the point). In this example, the handful of folks who will be fussing about Austrian economics and declaring “that chain is not the real Bitcoin!” will be relegated as outcasts, even if they insist on keeping the name “Bitcoin” and release an “original Bitcoin” client, it won’t matter, because the market will have decided for them which chain the rest of the world uses. And it’s this chain that wins the political game that will keep the name “Bitcoin”.

Again, the argument for which monetary policy is best is irrelevant, and how likely you see this event as happening is also irrelevant. The fact that this hypothetical is even _possible_ and that Satoshi’s system doesn’t preclude it from happening, is the argument for why proof-of-work fails. PoW is ultimately subject to politics which means the whole system is subject to politics.

You can also look at the BCash fork itself. The events leading up to that fork were not smooth at all, and the outcome of the fork was wholly uncertain at the time. Popular blockchain analytics sites had public trackers of which ideology had more brainshare, devs drew the party lines, exchanges issued statements declaring party allegiance, miners signaled support in their blocks, users took to Twitter to unite the herd. If Roger/Gavin/Mike had been the only ones with a public platform and Core had never responded with their own campaigning, miners would’ve easily abandoned the “real Bitcoin” and Coinbase and crew would’ve easily pushed for the fork to keep the name “Bitcoin”. It is the political campaigning of the incumbent party that kept them in power and that kept the hash rate on that chain. None of these mechanics are outlined in any Bitcoin whitepaper I know of.

If the best argument against PoW is that people can ignore it, then I don't know what to say to you. Like, don't let me stop you then: go run a Bitcoin miner that ignores PoW, and see if you can convince anyone else to accept your forked coins at 1:1 parity with real Bitcoin.

> Maybe a picture will help

I never once brought up monetary policy, so I'm just going to ignore what you wrote about it. You're answering questions I never asked.

> PoW is ultimately subject to politics which means the whole system is subject to politics.

PoW is ultimately subject to market forces. Miners regularly switch between Bitcoin and BCash, depending on what's profitable at the moment. This indicates that miners are not loyal to any ideology; they're only trying to optimize revenue. Thus the simplest explanation as to why Bitcoin has a much higher PoW than BCash is that Bitcoin has higher demand. Hate to break it to you, but the market has spoken -- there's far more demand for Bitcoin than BCash.

But, let's not mistake that for some grand conspiracy against it. No one is stopping BCash from overtaking Bitcoin; the onus is on the BCash project to convince people to value it more than Bitcoin.

Your counter-argument is "try it, then!". I'm not sure why I have to say this and we can't have an intelligent conversation, but here we go: just because something is possible to do and an argument can be made for its possibility, that doesn't mean that I specifically have the means to pull it off. And talking about my capacity to pull it off derails us from having a meaningful discussion about the potential attack. You're not discussing in good faith I think...

> I never once brought up monetary policy, so I'm just going to ignore what you wrote about it

It wasn't about monetary policy, that was just the context. It was about how the hashrate just goes where the money is, and the money is subject to politics, therefore PoW is subject to politics.

but anyway if you're not going to read my comments, we can't have any meaningful exchange here... especially since you're trying to make this about the BCash cryptobean for some reason, but my point has nothing to do with it. My point is about Proof of Work being ultimately useless.

> PoW is ultimately subject to market forces.

Exactly! Have a good night.

I think if pension funds etc go into bitcoin it'd be an environmental disaster so it's probably worth campaigning against that. The energy consumption comes out kind of proportional to the bitcoin price.

A better comparison would be gold versus Bitcoin, as they’re both similarly decentralized. Just comparing energy consumption between the two probably wouldn’t make sense, though, as gold mining e.g. ruins vast areas of land.

Naturally, a summation of the energy expenditure of all of the related components of the existing fiat system must be included, from the totality of all people operating the various functions that facilitate the existing fiat system; i.e. their commutes, aggregate expenditures due to needing to operate physical banks, power usage at these physical banks, etc. are all factored into this calculation... right? All the way to the minting of new currency (probably almost negligible in the aggregate), to all of the security apparatus that ensure that bills are legitimate, to major parts of the US Secret Service that verify that bills are legitimate (including all of their expenses scaled to the proportion of agents dedicated to this task force)... I honestly don't believe that the electricity usage of BTC is higher than fiat currency operation, in the aggregate.

Please share any sources if you have any information that contradicts this. It's an interesting area of open research + I'm curious if I've missed any publications recently.

Does Bitcoin assess credit risks of governments, companies and people and then extend+manage credit?

What does Bitcoin offer in regards to risk management/hedging for operating businesses?

Maybe Bitcoin has some liquidity management feature for real businesses that I am not aware of?

Bitcoin has very low uptake in payments, so trying to compare its energy consumption to all retail branches and the oil burned by the employees on their commute strikes me as misleading and ignorant

Modern banks and financial institutions are much more than a long list of payments. Please learn a little bit about what a company like Bank of America actually does

It's not misleading at all. It's important to consider that a large group of human operators, using a separately large set of semi automated processes, are a large component of the current energy spend of aggregate financial activity - all those busy worker bees are using energy.

Not really interested in doing some super thorough calculation, hopefully this general outline makes a little bit of sense. I'm just asserting that if we are going to criticize one thing's energy spend, you need to actually define what you are measuring and determine a baseline with respect to what the current thing's energy consumption is, ideally as line items and then sources for each input component.

Looking forward to some sources. (If you are referring to the Argentina article, please just identify that as your source). No need to be antagonistic, we're all friends here.

A lot of that is compliance though. Some (or maybe even most, I'm not in the industry) of that doesn't need to exist for the system to function - the banking system would work just fine without suspicious activity reports. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison as these checks don't and can't exist in cryptocurrency.

That's just scratching the tip of the iceberg, as mentioned above the traditional financial system provides lots of services that cryptocurrencies can't provide or don't provide at any meaningful scale.

Take a simple thought experiment. Someone makes a transaction with VISA. That requires updating the seller's bank's ledger, the buyer's bank's ledger, and VISA's computer. Let's round that up to a dozen computers who need to know about that transaction. Now consider Bitcoin. Those same three computers need to know about that transaction... and so does everybody else who runs a full node. We haven't considered a picojoule of energy consumed by proof-of-work yet, and Bitcoin has already consumed far more energy than VISA.

So how about that proof-of-work? Well, let's compare a bank's energy consumption. Go to their financial statements, and pick out the line item that includes energy costs. If you're not sure which line item that is, add all of the plausible ones together (and round up, because what's the harm in overestimating here?). I don't know how much they pay for energy, so let's say it's 1¢ per kWh because what's the harm in rounding up? Crunch the numbers, and banks still use far less energy than Bitcoin's proof-of-work, even by our wastrel overestimation numbers. Oops, I forgot to account for the different volumes. Doesn't matter--banks are moving more money on less energy than Bitcoin.

Much of the ancillary functions you want to include to make Bitcoin's energy consumption seem less embarrassing would still exist even if the world magically switched from USD to BTC overnight. The loan officer evaluating how much interest to offer on a mortgage to a first-time home buyer would still be doing exactly the same thing. The loan shark driving to bust someone's kneecaps for not paying back loans on time would still be doing exactly the same thing.

Tangential thought...

I might be mistaken, but how can one even collect on defaulted debt denominated in BTC? I thought that the BTC owner still has to transfer BTC themselves, since only they would know the private keys.

Wouldn't the collector literally have to physically threaten the individual to transfer the BTC back, since it's not like they can get a court to order the bank to do it.

I know that ETH supports smart contracts that could in theory automate the terms of the loan, but then what happens if the debtor goes bankrupt?

What makes you think the court can't order the bank to do it? The court can order you to give some assets up, and if you refuse, they can order your employer to deposit wages directly into creditor's accounts, or the creditor can seize other assets for nonpayment. (For example, some creditors managed to temporarily have an Argentinian Navy ship seized after their default.)

The bank doesn't have the private keys for the wallet

Also, it's important to consider that commercial banks do much more than just keep track of "who owns how much USD". Banks are primarily middle men in the credit markets, and this is not related to establishing people's balance (which is all the Bitcoin network does). If Bitcoin persists then BTC credit markets will also develop, which would be very different from just keeping track of "who owns how much" (which is all the Bitcoin blockchain does).

The largest single asset within the category is bitcoin + the majority of crypto-assets (in market cap terms, in aggregate) are currently PoW based systems (exception of Eth2 if you're just looking at top 5 but the bridge isn't live yet to my knowledge) so it makes sense to take a step back and really try to understand whether we are measuring the same things across both systems - the terms (in a linguistic sense) need to be defined for any serious discussion/analysis can be undertaken. Basically the Fed Reserve system's budget (some % of their budget) + cost of operating basic banking operations across all banks needs to be part of the calculation, at a minimum. Any other terms (in the equation that represents the relative spend across the two systems) could add greater accuracy, but the record keeping seems like the biggest cost that needs to be factored in to accurately reflect the energy consumption differences between the two systems.

Where is it?

If you imagine that people wouldn't lend BTC to the US, remember that, when Standard&Poor's reduced America's credit rating, US bonds shot up in price (even though technically they were the one asset that S&P's rating was about the most).

You could say that money printing and counterfeiting are similar things on opposite sides of the law. But that is still a shallow, high-school level understanding. When a con artist pays for things with counterfeit money they don't typically invest this back into the economy and produce more value, so counterfeiting is virtually guaranteed to produce inflation if it is not curtailed.

But governments print money in huge quantities all the time with minimal inflation.

This seems like a novel claim: that bitcoin would reduce world conflict.

They have an extremely detailed explanation and process to determine the footprint of Bitcoin transactions.

Anyways, they also have the numbers for Visa based transactions, which can start to give you an idea how efficient the old system of digital transactions are. Its 980,000+ Visa transactions to equate the energy used for 1 bitcoin transaction.

Apples to oranges. VISA can't do those things, it is a centralized settlement layer for US Dollar transactions. So when we selectively compare the transactions per energy metric, we are conveniently ignoring the fact that VISA is not responsible for securing the stability of the global US Dollar network.

There was an article on HN regarding money laundering in the past week. Lots of people were surprised and denounced how easy it is to launder money... so... with Bitcoin's features making it a beautiful means of money laundering... if it becomes truly adopted as a currency, those features are going to go bye-bye. Stealing bitcoin hasn't been rare either. Search engine of choice look up, "bitcoin stolen". It doesn't really seem that much better that current systems. There's always a way to steal from someone. That xkcd comic on security makes a good joke on it. The best hash doesn't protect you from someone hitting you with a $5 wrench.

So what visa isnt responsible for securing the stability of the dollar? Who in their right mind thinks they are responsible for shit other than skimming off the top when communicating between two banks? Seriously? You think a mainstream bitcoin transaction service is going to be a non-profit? Visa is simply part of the network. If they go down, there are other services that still function. Best part, if all telecom goes down, paper money still works. Crypto doesn't. Anything that affects visa, Mastercard or any other high or low level merchant service, affects crypto too. Generally, crypto is just another merchant service using it's own chucky cheese tokens instead of an multi organization agreed upon one.

Most of the "benefits" are either rare, extremely niche or just brute forcing a wall that just requires stepping around it.

Compare Bitcoin to the energy usage of federal reserve and resources spent on securing the US Dollar (implicit and explicit), because that's what the Bitcoin network does. It secures immutable property via a decentralized, open source protocol.

If you want to compare layer 2 solutions, compare Coinbase or Paypal's internal settlement of Bitcoin transactions to VISA. Those metrics are much more relevant.

You must be living under a rock then, because bitcoin just had a sizable correction last night. Sounds too volitile to protect any savings.

>also to send anonymous donations to causes I support.

Nope. The ledger is public and your transactions can be seen on it basically forever and, with some sleuthing of the ledger by interested parties, you could be deanonymized.

If you invested less than a month ago, you are down. If you invested any other time in the last 10 years than you are up. You might be the one under a rock.

As the old saying goes "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Bitcoin could get legislated into oblivion causing a massive decrease in the value of your holdings (especially if world governments take climate change seriously, they may see Bitcoin mining as a major threat), a quantum computer could literally "break" into wallets and steal, Satoshi's wallet could suddenly move and expect billions of USD to be extracted out at once.

Too many variables here to suggest that your savings are secure. You're a braver man (or woman) than I would be.

There is a big difference between necessary and inevitable. Crime is inevitable. Is it necessary? I believe a civilisation could exist if the people decided to outlaw money. There are so many other ways to allocate resources: bartering, contracts (which get you asynchronicity), centralised allocation (which can be at a national level, e.g. communism or a local level, like a feudal system), gift economies. All of these have existed and worked for a time.

It's the preferred method of payment for scammers, so visibility means absolutely nothing.

Reminder that 51% were even possible in the past. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GHash.io

Seeing the transactions weren't a solution then and aren't a solution now.

Detection is worthless without applying counter measures.

The actual problem is that Bitcoin's incentive structure works against energy efficiency. Usually we would expect to see improvements in technology result in reductions in energy consumption. Instead, when a new hashing machine is built that computes the same number of hashes for less energy, the response from Bitcoin miners is to compute more hashes using the same amount of energy. That is what Bitcoin incentivizes, and that is why Bitcoin will always be an environmental catastrophe even if we only had renewable power sources (take a look at the environmental cost of producing a solar panel -- there is more to the environment than carbon emissions).

The utopian view is that not all energy is currently being used for other things. On grids with heavy penetration of renewables, peak production can overwhelm demand, causing bulk power to become effectively free.

In a suitably regulated environment, bitcoin or an equivalent could act as a last-resort user of such power. Doing so would provide a baseline demand for excess generation, effectively subsidizing renewable buildout.

This effect becomes stronger with carbon taxes, which would make non-renewable power comparatively much more expensive and effectively reduce bitcoining-demand from such sources relative to renewables.

However, the non-utopian view is that this possible arbitrage is global, not local. Through bad regulation, corrupt governments, or outright theft, miners somewhere on the planet can access power even more cheaply than from the excess renewables contemplated above.

That's a "both and" issue. An energy generator could hypothetically mine cryptocurrencies to buffer their excess-power periods right now with little capital investment, whereas developing new storage technology is an expensive and long-term problem.

> Why do you think Bitcoin miners would shut their operations down during periods of high demand in any regulatory environment

A non-criminal bitcoin miner (the argument applies to any other proof-of-work coin in the same way) will reduce their mining effort if the marginal cost of mining (the power bill) is larger than the reward from doing so (mining rewards plus transaction fees).

The problem then is one of value, but cryptocurrency valuations aren't fixed. If the price of bitcoin durably collapses for some reason, miners will turn off their rigs and the energy cost per coin will fall. (Note that I'm not a "bitcoin bull," but I also know better than to predict future prices with false confidence.)

It isn't, but it could be. If we had proper taxes on carbon emissions; The cheapest power would always be from renewables, bitcoin miners would invest in renewable energy which would make it cheaper in the long run as mass production scales with demand.

Energy efficiency is not important in carbon neutral energy production, and in fact can stifle development and raise prices making fossil fuels more attractive.

- Until hydro and other renewables cover all electricity needs, crypto mining hogging hydro just pushes other non-crypto power demands to fossil fuel.

Energy usecases are worth what energy they use. Energy exists in a mostly free market and that's the best way to determine value. Everything else is conjecture.

Useless energy expenditure is useless and objectively bad.

we do. One just need to see the world beyond their own planet.

>Useless energy expenditure is useless and objectively bad.

your comment cost some energy to be expended. Basically most of computer use by humans is a useless energy expenditure, yet somehow some people single out crypto.

Heat death of the universe would like a world with you. And before you say that it is so damn far we should not care about it, meaningful space travel is similarly so. We should save our own planet because a goddamn apocalyptic Earth after ww3 is still a more livable place then any planet in the Solar system.

Also, is being globally connected to each other with comparatively less energy expenditure bad? How about hosting free educational resources, but even just fun things? It is not comparable to hashing random numbers for proof of work levels of useless.

Bitcoin exists because there is no alternative decentralised, self sovereign currency. PoW exists because there is no other method to achieve that. It is by no means useless. You are not the user.

I do question whether we need one. We choose our governments to create laws protecting our values. I do agree that they are pretty far from perfect, but I don’t see why should we circumvent said laws. If I got a failed product, how will I get it replaced, when the seller could have disappeared? Yeah, there are smart contracts, but it’s not like our entire financial system was made up on the spot. It has many many warts, but it does solve real world problems.

> PoW exists because there is no other method to achieve that.

And as others mentioned in the thread, there are cryptos not dependent on PoW

as i already said - that is mainly because we fail to see the world beyond our planet.

>It is not comparable to hashing random numbers for proof of work levels of useless.

you find something not important to you and declare it useless. Other people do seems to value the planetary-scale decentralized consensus at like a $1T.

Well, closer to the Sun it is way too hot, further away it is way too cold. There are also tiny problems like not having an atmosphere, too great or too small gravity, or small details like not having a solid surface, but sure, which planet would you like to travel to?

As far as I can recall, there was power shortage a few months ago, and I have suspected bitcoin mining would contributed to some of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belo_Monte_Dam

I don't get it, doesn't this effectively mean China can force a 51% attack by just strongarming the pools that operate there?

A 51% attack mainly lets you double spend, so you have to: (1) get a lot of coins and spend them on something (2) start mining a fork where that spending didn't happen (but other real transactions continue to happen) --- your hash power will now need to be dedicated to this new fork at the exclusion of the old "real" fork since all future hashes will diverge (3) wait until the thing you paid for with coins can no longer be "taken back", all while continuing efforts on the alternate fork (4) do the 51% attack to swap out the old "real" fork with your new fork where you never bought the thing, thus keeping the thing _and_ the coins you spent on them (5) all this needs to be balanced with the opportunity cost had you just continued mining on the real chain...

Such an attack would trigger immediate attention since at (2) the main chain would suddenly see a drop in contributions. Also realistically most things you can purchase with coins (like fiat or other goods/services) can be relatively easily "taken back" unless a considerable amount of time is spent to launder them --- say if you "buy" a car with crypto and reverse the transaction, what you've really done is just stolen a car with a lot of extra steps... Which means your only real viable path is to redeem for some other cryptocurrency... Now given that a big attack just happened on the largest market cap crypto, there's a pretty good chance the other coins are going to take a hit and exchanges might even temporarily limit activities while this situation is "investigated", greatly reducing what you can actually do at the end of the day.

This kind of thing is more reasonable on the smaller market cap "meme" coins where you can just exchange them for for a mass-market crypto.

These miners are probably making USD or some other foreign fiat at the end of the day which adds to the supply of foreign reserves without needing to use trade... And if they're siphoning power to get around currency exchange limits moving wealth abroad then a traditional crackdown to confiscate their equipment would be much more effective (you can't exactly "hide" a mining operation).

Frankly China, with so much mining output, benefits more from seeing crypto moon than crash...

(Also "collapsing the price" is something that can be done (and may have actually even already been done in the past) with far far less effort than an attack...

(As one example, articles pointing out that "China can do 51% attacks" are much more effective in crashing crypto prices... maybe keep an eye out for those

The minors are not making USD for foreign reserves to be honest, they are mostly a way to transfer wealth out of the country (buying equipments and electricity and sell bitcoins abroad or not selling it at all). That's why China has banned its bank to do crypto related transactions and exchanges mostly. However, it is hard to enforce. You can find many exchange use Bank Transfer, AliPay and WeChat pay.

Owning Bitcoins are legal in China. Who knows once the digital RMB is out.

Every time a miner exchanges crypto for RMB (like with Alipay or WeChat), China overall benefits a bit. Because Chinese banks (as you correctly stated) are not allowed to hold crypto and exchanges are illegal, what really happens is the crypto gets exchanged for foreign fiat (like USD) where exchanges are legal, which then gets exchanged for RMB, building up foreign reserves.

In the past, a lot of miners were "foreign investors" (likely other Chinese "nationals" rather than citizens) who lived abroad and would keep the exchanged fiat in foreign bank accounts, which _is_ harmful as they pay for electricity with RMB but get to keep USD. In recent years, a lot of local mining outfits are appearing, and because they ultimately need to spend RMB, the government has no problem with turning a blind eye to them.

If a government moved to confiscate all mining operations and run them itself to perform such an attack, the fight such people put up against that would be so obvious that it would be incredibly easy for parties external to the situation (Bitcoin devs + Node operators outside of China) to stop any ensuing Sybil attack. They’d just blacklist Chinese IPs from the network statically in the client code—effectively hard-forking the other 49% of the network in advance so it doesn’t later become confused.

Bitcoin mining has outgrown this stage. It's more like companies, now.

> the people who mine Bitcoin don’t like governments very much, and wouldn’t cooperate with a government-imposed Sybil attack...

Early Bitcoin proponents don't like governments much. Chinese miners are another story. They see a business opportunity and have no interest in losing social credit points or, worse, going to a labor camp.

Myself - I pay my 28%. No loopholes.

Bitcoin gets around those - which is why it’s popular there, and also why I think it’s likely China will ban Bitcoin at some point.

Bitcoin is an economic weapons created by the chinese government.

If you're a nation state, and want to undermine the legitimacy of bitcoin, you can easily just institute laws to ban it. Much cheaper.

The fact that mining operations still exist today at large scales in China means that at least the government has found a way to profit off of crypto (strategically or economically).

Or government do not really care. If it is officially discouraged/illegal: it also means that officials are happy to take bribes.

Closest thing to that I can think of is nuclear proliferation but you’d have to get countries to agree and play strong arm tactics. Possible I guess but not “easily”

Might makes right, aka USA foreign policy since its inception. US sanctions are applied for everyone - e.g. if the US sanctions Iran, a French company does business in Iran, the US fines them heavily. And considering the US market is more lucrative than the Iranian one, most companies would prefer to have the US one. For a recent-ish example, check BNP Paribas. The US has no legal right to forbid a French company with a US branch to not do business with another country from another branch besides when they say so. The same way they say so for crimes against humanity, or invading other countries.

So the US can absolutely ban cryptocurrencies on a global-ish scale.

A significantly powerful actor could exert sufficient force. Russia or the US threatening nuclear war over bitcoin would probably lead to a worldwide ban, although obviously the repercussions would be dramatic. More realistically, the US could state that any bank that does business with bitcoin isn't welcome to participate in the US economy. The US economy is big enough that such a threat might work. This is similar to how the embargoes against Iran worked, and why that Chinese executive is being extradited to the US from Canada.

In reality, if Bitcoin got the point of destabilization where the US felt the need to ban it, the effects would probably be widespread enough that the EU, Japan, the various Commonwealth countries would be convinced to take coordinated action.