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Hi. I'm Vinay Gupta, the release coordinator for the Ethereum launch. Firstly, nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay - it's bleeding money from th

Hi. I'm Vinay Gupta, the release coordinator for the Ethereum launch. Firstly, nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay - it's bleeding money from the currencies that use it at an astonishing rate, and as soon as Proof of Stake (or other algorithms) can replace it, they will. PoW is a direct financial drag on these economies, and it will not last long. Bitcoin will probably take longer to clean up its act than Ethereum, but that's largely for political reasons, not technical ones. Technically, it should be a lot easier to do than Ethereum, in fact. (It helps not being nearly Turing complete.) Secondly, brute force is how things begin. The Unix philosophy has always suggested using brute force first: premature optimization is the root of all evil, as they say. We are at the very earliest stages of designing global public heterogeneous parallel supercomputers, and we should not be surprised that the early approaches are brute force. It won't be that way for long.

pishpash 9y ago
Proof of work isn't a big concern if the hard problems are also economically valuable to solve; there are myriad such problems.
- TylerE 9y ago
  No they aren't. For a PoW to be valuable it needs to be cheap to verify. Hard problems usually aren't.
  - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
    What you want are "moderately hard functions": functions that are neither easy nor excessively hard.
  - nambit 9y ago
    Most solutions to NP problems are cheap to verify.
  - setr 9y ago
    Isn't the entire NP class hard to solve, cheap to verify? Im sure some economically valuable problem can boil down to an NP problem...
  - pishpash 9y ago
    What? Any NP-complete problem is "cheap" to verify vs. to solve. You're telling me there are no economically valuable NP-complete problems?
    - TylerE 9y ago
      If there are, why has no one built a coin around it unstead of using untold watts to calculate hashes?
      - kirillseva 9y ago
        umm, generating a block whose hash starts with N consecutive zeroes (e.g. 000000009A8C3...) seems to be exactly that - an NP hard problem that's trivial to verify in polynomial time.
        TylerE 9y ago
        yes, but it's not useful in someway outside of the blockchain, which was the thrust of GP's argument.
      - setr 9y ago
        They did, like protein folding. Part of it is that if its going to be a currency, its not particularly appealing that some group gets arbitrary benefits from the act of mining, for free. The government has the power to force such a currency on us, but otherwise, unless the economically valuable activity is globally valuable, its a difficult proposition to justify.
- TD-Linux 9y ago
  If a proof of work solution is economically valuable to solve, the hashrate will just increase to the point where it's just marginally profitable again.
pdog 9y ago
> Nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay... Why not? PoW is a classic case of Worse Is Better: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- feedjoelpie 9y ago
  Because it's insanely expensive to operate a PoW blockchain. We literally set things on fire to generate electricity for these global brute force algorithms. Proof of Stake uses game theory (you will avoid cheating if cheating costs you money) to replace expensive raw computing power.
  - jerkstate 9y ago
    it's insanely expensive to mine gold, but we do that too. there are shared delusions about what we are willing to trade our labor for. it doesn't have to make sense.
    - xg15 9y ago
      Yes, and we'll also eradicate the rainforest for profit even though that might spell doom for the ecosystem of the planet. Only because everyone does something doesn't mean it's a good thing to do.
  - aeternus 9y ago
    It seems likely that it is exactly that expense which make bitcoin and other PoW blockchains successful. The proof-of-stake algorithms can disincentivize cheating within the blockchain, but I haven't seen any that have the type of external cost that PoW blockchains have. The fact that so many people are investing so much power in bitcoin vs. other currencies is likely much of what gives it so much value.
    - feedjoelpie 9y ago
      PoW coins have a multi-year headstart, and Bitcoin didn't have any truly interesting decentralized competition until Ethereum. Ethereum is moving to PoS, I presume because being able to more cheaply and quickly execute smart contracts is deemed more valuable than artificial scarcity. A sentiment with which I could not agree more.
deleted 9y ago
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silverlake 9y ago
Totally agree. Bitcoin is version 1 of blockchain tech. Absolutely impressive, but certainly not the last word. It would be as if everyone stopped working on cars after the Model T was introduced.
gus_massa 9y ago
> nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay I do. I prefer to call it "Proof of Burn" instead of "Proof of Work". With Proof of Burn you can assure that it's difficult to create fake blocks because the attacker must burn even more petrol barrels that the good people. Also, with Proof of Burn you get protection against an explosion of too many hard forks. If you have a hard fork in a Proof of Burn coin, the miners must select one chain to mine (or split the resources), so usually only one chain survives. In a Proof of Stake coin, after a hard fork the miners can continue mining in both chains.
- diegocerdan 9y ago
  Proof of Work (PoW) is inherent inferior to Proof of Stake (PoS). PoW is just the most simple way to archive consensus through cryptoeconomic incentives and that is why first blockchains implemented it. It is not true that on PoS you can mine multiple forked chains without being penalized. On the chain that "wins" you can be penalized for mining multiple chains which is clearly bad behavior. The main problems of PoS that Casper, the Ethereum implementation, is trying to solve are "Nothing at Stake" and "Long Range Attacks". Both problems are being tackled right now and close to be solved.
  - tromp 9y ago
    > It is not true that on PoS you can mine multiple forked chains without being penalized. You're confusing multiple branches competing for being the most-cumulative-difficulty branch, with multiple distinct cryptocurrencies resulting from a hardforking code change. Penalization only applies to the first case, but the parent was talking about the latter case. E.g. a miner could mine both ETH and ETC once both adopt PoS.
    - diegocerdan 9y ago
      True. OP said hard forks and I talked about natural forks. I don't see any problem in hard forks and being able to stake on multiple chains. Let people hard fork as much as they want and decide, later on, which chains hold value.
LAMike 9y ago
Name the most prominent cryptographer that is in favor of PoS, in my research, very few who have studied this science for decades think it's possible. What's it going to take to make it work?
- Ar-Curunir 9y ago
  I know no cryptographers that have studied PoW for "decades" in the context of cryptocurrencies. Even Bitcoin itself is less than decade old.
  - LAMike 9y ago
    Adam Back came up with the idea of PoW with BitGold I beleive
seanwilson 9y ago
What is stopping Proof of Stake from taking over? Nobody has worked out a good way to do it yet? Could Bitcoin realistically replace its Proof of Work protocol with Proof of Stake later while maintaining the same blockchain?
- TD-Linux 9y ago
  No one has yet created a Proof of Stake system that offers the same guarantees that Proof of Work offers. In fact, there are arguments that it's not possible [1] You can implement any feature you want in Bitcoin, but for a feature like this (hard fork), you need to convince all users to upgrade. I think it's really unlikely you could sell a switch that drastic in Bitcoin land, especially considering the current unknowns. [1] https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
  - charlesdm 9y ago
    They can't even increase the block size, how would they introduce this?
    - rothbardrand 9y ago
      The max block size for bitcoin went from 1mb to 4mb in August of 2017. The ONLY reason it took so long is that the courtesy signaling that core put in for miners was used as a veto as part of this anti-bitcoin effort to try and increase centralization. Please at least familiarize yourself with the oppositions arguments before stating conclusions like this.
      - diegocerdan 9y ago
        8 years to change the value of a constant!
        hdhzy 9y ago
        Remember that Bitcoin is about distributed consensus and for the change to apply a vast majority of users need to approve. Take any other software and see how many people still use old versions (e.g. Microsoft Office). In Bitcoin that wouldn't be acceptable for the change to work.
zeefoo 9y ago
> Firstly, nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay Plenty of people believe that, it's dishonest to say otherwise. You can state your beliefs without trying to speak for everyone else and thus avoiding the inevitable straw man argument such proclamations lead to. Don't misrepresent the other side.
rothbardrand 9y ago
There's nothing cheaper than proof of work: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ The real reason Eth and others are going with proof of stake is that it locks up coins and thus dries up liquidity... this is a way to pump the coin price. It doesn't provide the same level of security as Proof of Work, and the idea that Proof of work is somehow bad because it uses electricity is nonsense. That's like saying we need to stop digging gold up out of the ground because its expensive, and we should just trade paper receipts for virtual gold. The above post is not an actual technical argument (notice its logic is circular) and is just the type of typical FUD pumping of Ethereum you get from ethereum people.
segmondy 9y ago
I was with you, till your second paragraph and how the Unix philosophy has always suggested using brute force first. I don't believe this is so, can you provide any such evidence? Unix has never had such a philosophy.
- pacaro 9y ago
  I can’t speak for anyone else, but the move to use shell builtins rather than spawning processes for say `true` (as the most extreme example) could easily be considered an example of Unix having started with brute force and having become more elegant.

pishpash 9y ago

Proof of work isn't a big concern if the hard problems are also economically valuable to solve; there are myriad such problems.

TylerE 9y ago
No they aren't. For a PoW to be valuable it needs to be cheap to verify. Hard problems usually aren't.
- Ar-Curunir 9y ago
  What you want are "moderately hard functions": functions that are neither easy nor excessively hard.
- nambit 9y ago
  Most solutions to NP problems are cheap to verify.
- setr 9y ago
  Isn't the entire NP class hard to solve, cheap to verify? Im sure some economically valuable problem can boil down to an NP problem...
- pishpash 9y ago
  What? Any NP-complete problem is "cheap" to verify vs. to solve. You're telling me there are no economically valuable NP-complete problems?
  - TylerE 9y ago
    If there are, why has no one built a coin around it unstead of using untold watts to calculate hashes?
    - kirillseva 9y ago
      umm, generating a block whose hash starts with N consecutive zeroes (e.g. 000000009A8C3...) seems to be exactly that - an NP hard problem that's trivial to verify in polynomial time.
      - TylerE 9y ago
        yes, but it's not useful in someway outside of the blockchain, which was the thrust of GP's argument.
    - setr 9y ago
      They did, like protein folding. Part of it is that if its going to be a currency, its not particularly appealing that some group gets arbitrary benefits from the act of mining, for free. The government has the power to force such a currency on us, but otherwise, unless the economically valuable activity is globally valuable, its a difficult proposition to justify.
TD-Linux 9y ago
If a proof of work solution is economically valuable to solve, the hashrate will just increase to the point where it's just marginally profitable again.

pdog 9y ago

> Nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay... Why not? PoW is a classic case of Worse Is Better: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

feedjoelpie 9y ago
Because it's insanely expensive to operate a PoW blockchain. We literally set things on fire to generate electricity for these global brute force algorithms. Proof of Stake uses game theory (you will avoid cheating if cheating costs you money) to replace expensive raw computing power.
- jerkstate 9y ago
  it's insanely expensive to mine gold, but we do that too. there are shared delusions about what we are willing to trade our labor for. it doesn't have to make sense.
  - xg15 9y ago
    Yes, and we'll also eradicate the rainforest for profit even though that might spell doom for the ecosystem of the planet. Only because everyone does something doesn't mean it's a good thing to do.
- aeternus 9y ago
  It seems likely that it is exactly that expense which make bitcoin and other PoW blockchains successful. The proof-of-stake algorithms can disincentivize cheating within the blockchain, but I haven't seen any that have the type of external cost that PoW blockchains have. The fact that so many people are investing so much power in bitcoin vs. other currencies is likely much of what gives it so much value.
  - feedjoelpie 9y ago
    PoW coins have a multi-year headstart, and Bitcoin didn't have any truly interesting decentralized competition until Ethereum. Ethereum is moving to PoS, I presume because being able to more cheaply and quickly execute smart contracts is deemed more valuable than artificial scarcity. A sentiment with which I could not agree more.

deleted 9y ago

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silverlake 9y ago

Totally agree. Bitcoin is version 1 of blockchain tech. Absolutely impressive, but certainly not the last word. It would be as if everyone stopped working on cars after the Model T was introduced.

gus_massa 9y ago

> nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay I do. I prefer to call it "Proof of Burn" instead of "Proof of Work". With Proof of Burn you can assure that it's difficult to create fake blocks because the attacker must burn even more petrol barrels that the good people. Also, with Proof of Burn you get protection against an explosion of too many hard forks. If you have a hard fork in a Proof of Burn coin, the miners must select one chain to mine (or split the resources), so usually only one chain survives. In a Proof of Stake coin, after a hard fork the miners can continue mining in both chains.

diegocerdan 9y ago
Proof of Work (PoW) is inherent inferior to Proof of Stake (PoS). PoW is just the most simple way to archive consensus through cryptoeconomic incentives and that is why first blockchains implemented it. It is not true that on PoS you can mine multiple forked chains without being penalized. On the chain that "wins" you can be penalized for mining multiple chains which is clearly bad behavior. The main problems of PoS that Casper, the Ethereum implementation, is trying to solve are "Nothing at Stake" and "Long Range Attacks". Both problems are being tackled right now and close to be solved.
- tromp 9y ago
  > It is not true that on PoS you can mine multiple forked chains without being penalized. You're confusing multiple branches competing for being the most-cumulative-difficulty branch, with multiple distinct cryptocurrencies resulting from a hardforking code change. Penalization only applies to the first case, but the parent was talking about the latter case. E.g. a miner could mine both ETH and ETC once both adopt PoS.
  - diegocerdan 9y ago
    True. OP said hard forks and I talked about natural forks. I don't see any problem in hard forks and being able to stake on multiple chains. Let people hard fork as much as they want and decide, later on, which chains hold value.

LAMike 9y ago

Name the most prominent cryptographer that is in favor of PoS, in my research, very few who have studied this science for decades think it's possible. What's it going to take to make it work?

Ar-Curunir 9y ago
I know no cryptographers that have studied PoW for "decades" in the context of cryptocurrencies. Even Bitcoin itself is less than decade old.
- LAMike 9y ago
  Adam Back came up with the idea of PoW with BitGold I beleive

seanwilson 9y ago

What is stopping Proof of Stake from taking over? Nobody has worked out a good way to do it yet? Could Bitcoin realistically replace its Proof of Work protocol with Proof of Stake later while maintaining the same blockchain?

TD-Linux 9y ago
No one has yet created a Proof of Stake system that offers the same guarantees that Proof of Work offers. In fact, there are arguments that it's not possible [1] You can implement any feature you want in Bitcoin, but for a feature like this (hard fork), you need to convince all users to upgrade. I think it's really unlikely you could sell a switch that drastic in Bitcoin land, especially considering the current unknowns. [1] https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
- charlesdm 9y ago
  They can't even increase the block size, how would they introduce this?
  - rothbardrand 9y ago
    The max block size for bitcoin went from 1mb to 4mb in August of 2017. The ONLY reason it took so long is that the courtesy signaling that core put in for miners was used as a veto as part of this anti-bitcoin effort to try and increase centralization. Please at least familiarize yourself with the oppositions arguments before stating conclusions like this.
    - diegocerdan 9y ago
      8 years to change the value of a constant!
      - hdhzy 9y ago
        Remember that Bitcoin is about distributed consensus and for the change to apply a vast majority of users need to approve. Take any other software and see how many people still use old versions (e.g. Microsoft Office). In Bitcoin that wouldn't be acceptable for the change to work.

zeefoo 9y ago

> Firstly, nobody believes that Proof of Work is here to stay Plenty of people believe that, it's dishonest to say otherwise. You can state your beliefs without trying to speak for everyone else and thus avoiding the inevitable straw man argument such proclamations lead to. Don't misrepresent the other side.

rothbardrand 9y ago

There's nothing cheaper than proof of work: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ The real reason Eth and others are going with proof of stake is that it locks up coins and thus dries up liquidity... this is a way to pump the coin price. It doesn't provide the same level of security as Proof of Work, and the idea that Proof of work is somehow bad because it uses electricity is nonsense. That's like saying we need to stop digging gold up out of the ground because its expensive, and we should just trade paper receipts for virtual gold. The above post is not an actual technical argument (notice its logic is circular) and is just the type of typical FUD pumping of Ethereum you get from ethereum people.

segmondy 9y ago

I was with you, till your second paragraph and how the Unix philosophy has always suggested using brute force first. I don't believe this is so, can you provide any such evidence? Unix has never had such a philosophy.

pacaro 9y ago
I can’t speak for anyone else, but the move to use shell builtins rather than spawning processes for say `true` (as the most extreme example) could easily be considered an example of Unix having started with brute force and having become more elegant.