7 ms·

Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once

by toomim 9y ago

Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again. It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in space, so it might end up just as centralized as bitcoin mining. But the power costs will be much lower. There also is a proof-of-time component, that does computation, but it is designed to not be parallelizable, which means that throwing additional power at the problem doesn't help you as much. Instead, imagine that each participant must spend a deterministic length of time to compute a solution, and the person closest to the internet backbone wins. But this proof-of-time component is also smaller subsidiary role to the proof-of-space. So overall, it's a hybrid proof. Bram didn't go into enough detail explaining the actual proof-of-time or space in his talk, so I'm not sure if it all works, but if it does, then you can expect it to use less power. Proof-of-Stake should use even LESS power, though.

kiddico 9y ago
Thanks for the explanation. Does the proof of storage allow that storage to continue to be used?/does the proof use the space on a disk? Or is it sort of like mining bitcoin where a gpu is wholly used for mining?
- tzahola 9y ago
  Certainly the latter. I can imagine proof of space implemented by requiring nodes to store terabytes of random bytes, and compute the hash of specific subsets of this huge blob based on the last block in the ledger.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
Proof of Stake is worth being highly skeptical of. The fact that most people blindly support the idea when it seems to leave fundamental questions swept under the rug is worrying. I wish I could give a further critique, but I'm not familiar enough with the subject. There have been several persuasive comments posted to HN on the brittle nature of Proof of Stake, and the lack of hard answers to basic problems. Tacking it on as "this would use even less power" is a sign that perhaps these alternate schemes (including the one in the article) should be taken with a dash of salt and pepper.
- Qub3d 9y ago
  What is proposed here is not proof of stake. Proof of stake relies on either random selection (lottery) or wealth/age of investment(equity). This is a new beast.
  - bringtheaction 9y ago
    The final sentence of your GP was that PoS would use even less power. Probably that is what your parent was responding to.
cvg 9y ago
I believe this is the recording of that Berkeley talk: https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271/ https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982... Still a lot of implementation details to be revealed, but looks really interesting.
narrator 9y ago
So instead of just using energy we'll be wasting physical resources on making hard drives? Doesn't sound eco-friendly to me. It does sound like a good way to drive up costs for the NSA to store everyone's data. That's a really clever way to fight mass surveillance.
- petre 9y ago
  The NSA gets their money from the taxpayer so you're only looking at more taxes to sustain they're storage costs. We'll also waste money to power empty hard drives.
- infogulch 9y ago
  One might make a general claim that as any coin stabilizes, the money spent on generating it will always approach the amount of money received. So for bitcoin, if miners get X on average to mine it, they will spend X-ε in electricity (in bitcoins case), where ε is a tiny profit margin (or perhaps paying back investment). This will remain true for any other coin and its proof scheme. The amount spent on generating it will asymptotically approach the amount received. The difference is that it might be possible for the byproducts to be useful.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - neilwilson 9y ago
    It's rather more interesting than that. The amount of resources thrown at mining causes the price to be what it is in USD terms. The electricity costs of mining are about 20% of the price of Bitcoin - now as it was in 2011. https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/the-cost-of-bitcoin-47d2fe088e2 https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/the-cost-of-bitcoin-... The value of the token is what it costs to get it. You won't let it go for any less than that.
SilasX 9y ago
I don't think that approach avoids the core problem; it just shoves it onto a different resource; the same fraction of general economic output is still incentivized to convert from "satisfying human needs" to "mining". It will just manifest in difference ways. Remember, the whole point of proof of work is to make it too expensive for "bad guys" to amass enough work to force their skewed version of the ledger[1]. As long as you have the constant rate of coin production, and difficulty adjustments to ensure it, you have the exact same arms race. Miners might not use more energy[2], but they'll still take away workers, land, metal, etc. from the real economy. [1] They can't forge transactions, but they can publish empty blocks, effectively shutting it down. [2] Although even that's doubtful: when you throw money at a problem, you generally end up throwing a proportional amount of energy at it too.
- ktta 9y ago
  >real economy Interesting you don't consider this real economy. Do you think banking is also not part of the 'real economy'
  - SilasX 9y ago
    I may have been imprecise in terminology, but that's no reason to pearl-clutch about my choice of words. Resources spent on PoW are effectively an arms race (outrunning attacks on the network that other systems don't need to deal with). It's meaningful to distinguish between resources devoted to zero-sum arms races vs. positive-sum satisfaction of human desires. Resources spent on PoW take from the latter and add to the former (at the macro level). Edit: So yes, in that categorization, I would count (at least some) banking as in the positive sum part: they identify which opportunities for investment will pay back, and help enforce the agreement, thereby increasing over capital allocation efficiency and therefore wealth.
    - marzipan 9y ago
      In economics jargon, financial services are explicitly defined as not the real economy as an outcome of how "real value" is defined. Finance deals primarily with nominal(price) values, versus real ones(cost of inputs, utility to consumer). There is some imprecision to this, of course: banks do use paper and labor, but not in the same way that a factory uses pig iron and labor. So banks would be defined as not real economy since they are transacting in debt, savings, and other instruments that exist on balance sheets, while Bitcoin mining would be defined as real economy since it bottlenecks on an energy input.

by toomim 9y ago

kiddico 9y ago

Thanks for the explanation. Does the proof of storage allow that storage to continue to be used?/does the proof use the space on a disk? Or is it sort of like mining bitcoin where a gpu is wholly used for mining?

tzahola 9y ago
Certainly the latter. I can imagine proof of space implemented by requiring nodes to store terabytes of random bytes, and compute the hash of specific subsets of this huge blob based on the last block in the ledger.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

Proof of Stake is worth being highly skeptical of. The fact that most people blindly support the idea when it seems to leave fundamental questions swept under the rug is worrying. I wish I could give a further critique, but I'm not familiar enough with the subject. There have been several persuasive comments posted to HN on the brittle nature of Proof of Stake, and the lack of hard answers to basic problems. Tacking it on as "this would use even less power" is a sign that perhaps these alternate schemes (including the one in the article) should be taken with a dash of salt and pepper.

Qub3d 9y ago
What is proposed here is not proof of stake. Proof of stake relies on either random selection (lottery) or wealth/age of investment(equity). This is a new beast.
- bringtheaction 9y ago
  The final sentence of your GP was that PoS would use even less power. Probably that is what your parent was responding to.

cvg 9y ago

I believe this is the recording of that Berkeley talk: https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/2006069823011271/ https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982... Still a lot of implementation details to be revealed, but looks really interesting.

narrator 9y ago

So instead of just using energy we'll be wasting physical resources on making hard drives? Doesn't sound eco-friendly to me. It does sound like a good way to drive up costs for the NSA to store everyone's data. That's a really clever way to fight mass surveillance.

petre 9y ago
The NSA gets their money from the taxpayer so you're only looking at more taxes to sustain they're storage costs. We'll also waste money to power empty hard drives.
infogulch 9y ago
One might make a general claim that as any coin stabilizes, the money spent on generating it will always approach the amount of money received. So for bitcoin, if miners get X on average to mine it, they will spend X-ε in electricity (in bitcoins case), where ε is a tiny profit margin (or perhaps paying back investment). This will remain true for any other coin and its proof scheme. The amount spent on generating it will asymptotically approach the amount received. The difference is that it might be possible for the byproducts to be useful.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- neilwilson 9y ago
  It's rather more interesting than that. The amount of resources thrown at mining causes the price to be what it is in USD terms. The electricity costs of mining are about 20% of the price of Bitcoin - now as it was in 2011. https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/the-cost-of-bitcoin-47d2fe088e2 https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/the-cost-of-bitcoin-... The value of the token is what it costs to get it. You won't let it go for any less than that.

SilasX 9y ago

I don't think that approach avoids the core problem; it just shoves it onto a different resource; the same fraction of general economic output is still incentivized to convert from "satisfying human needs" to "mining". It will just manifest in difference ways. Remember, the whole point of proof of work is to make it too expensive for "bad guys" to amass enough work to force their skewed version of the ledger[1]. As long as you have the constant rate of coin production, and difficulty adjustments to ensure it, you have the exact same arms race. Miners might not use more energy[2], but they'll still take away workers, land, metal, etc. from the real economy. [1] They can't forge transactions, but they can publish empty blocks, effectively shutting it down. [2] Although even that's doubtful: when you throw money at a problem, you generally end up throwing a proportional amount of energy at it too.

ktta 9y ago
>real economy Interesting you don't consider this real economy. Do you think banking is also not part of the 'real economy'
- SilasX 9y ago
  I may have been imprecise in terminology, but that's no reason to pearl-clutch about my choice of words. Resources spent on PoW are effectively an arms race (outrunning attacks on the network that other systems don't need to deal with). It's meaningful to distinguish between resources devoted to zero-sum arms races vs. positive-sum satisfaction of human desires. Resources spent on PoW take from the latter and add to the former (at the macro level). Edit: So yes, in that categorization, I would count (at least some) banking as in the positive sum part: they identify which opportunities for investment will pay back, and help enforce the agreement, thereby increasing over capital allocation efficiency and therefore wealth.
  - marzipan 9y ago
    In economics jargon, financial services are explicitly defined as not the real economy as an outcome of how "real value" is defined. Finance deals primarily with nominal(price) values, versus real ones(cost of inputs, utility to consumer). There is some imprecision to this, of course: banks do use paper and labor, but not in the same way that a factory uses pig iron and labor. So banks would be defined as not real economy since they are transacting in debt, savings, and other instruments that exist on balance sheets, while Bitcoin mining would be defined as real economy since it bottlenecks on an energy input.