6 ms·

It is a much weaker requirement than PoW. Part of the reason PoS (a fitting acronym) is successful is because people are hysterical about Bitcoin's energy usage

It is a much weaker requirement than PoW. Part of the reason PoS (a fitting acronym) is successful is because people are hysterical about Bitcoin's energy usage over time. Rightly so. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, and it's fair to worry. But throughout history, people have always capitalized on fears to get something. Careful that you read these proposals with a skeptical eye. There was an excellent comment on HN that unfortunately I can't dig up anymore, but it went into detail about why PoS has all kinds of subtle issues. Basic issues, like who gets what, can end up with weak guarantees. It's important to remember that Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is almost unkillable. The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin. That's it. There's no other way. PoS weakens those guarantees, and before this gets pushed through, it's good to understand in detail what the tradeoffs are, and game out whether that could give centralization any advantages. (And if they say there are no tradeoffs and PoS confers no advantage to centralization compared to PoW, maybe research it and decide for yourself.) This whole auto-drop-my-comments-to-the-bottom censorship is really tiring and just a way to discourage certain people from contributing to HN. I've been a member here since day 2 of the launch of Startup News, and this feels quite unfair. My pleas for reversing this decision have gone unanswered, so I have no idea what to do about it other than rant periodically until I get banned. Nothing good will come of that, but it's just a completely bogus situation. (Yeah, moderation is hard, and I respect that, but jeez. My comments all start out at the bottom and stay there.) </rant>

RoboTeddy 9y ago
Weird, this seems like a valuable comment. I wonder what's going on. I hope you keep commenting. Government regulation could drive Bitcoin underground inside a given country. Wouldn't be hard to imagine globalized regulation, a la the US treasury sanctions list. It'd be tough to enforce a ban on cryptocurrency, but doesn't strike me as impossible. It's not hard to take out exchanges like Coinbase. Then could do sting operations to try to catch people willing to transact with Bitcoin in person, etc. One exception: it might be very difficult to enforce a ban on using cryptocurrency to purchase services that are purely digital and don't require identity. No way to run a sting.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Weird, this seems like a valuable comment. I wonder what's going on. I hope you keep commenting. It was intentional. I would love to write more comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602457, but as of now there's no incentive. Exponentially less people see comments at the bottom, because everyone uses the [-] collapse button now to navigate between topics. Why would I spend 30 minutes (or sometimes an hour, it's a fun hobby) to write a good comment when it's simply pinned where <5% of people will see it after an hour or so? My penalty stemmed from writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820. Some sort of penalty may have been warranted. HN probably isn't the proper place for that kind of discussion. But they reacted – I think – by visiting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884400 and adjusting my "gravity" until that comment was near the bottom, or halfway down. And since that comment had ~20 upvotes, that means anything I write with less than 20 upvotes has absolutely no hope of getting anywhere near the top. Meaning it won't even gather any steam anymore. Not only that, but I was originally slowbanned as well. There's a certain penalty that the mods use to discourage certain types of authors, where you can't post more than 5 comments every 3 hours. This is totally undocumented and took much experimentation to even figure out that's what the specific limit is. Imagine going to a bar and being able to only say 5 things every 3 hours. Meanwhile I counted ~23 tptacek comments within a span of <2 hours. ~13 jacqusm comments within 3 hours. Etc. So I suddenly felt like I couldn't even respond to people anymore. I sent a bunch of emails (often angry ones) to hn@ycombinator.com, and I don't blame them for basically writing me off and ignoring them. What incentive do they have to bother with one specific person? So I see their side of it too. But I'm worried this is a trend. I used to periodically see hellbanned commenters complain about HN censorship and that they were excluded specifically for their politics. And I thought that was fine, and they should be. Their hellbanned comments certainly made it seem like HN would be better off without them. Good mods! But I see now why people write like that after being penalized. You just sort of... Give up. What's the point in writing quality when no one will see it? There's no competition anymore, no fun. And it sucks that someone in the world with power decided that you, specifically, suck, and suck enough to merit exclusion. I miss yummyfajitas. The mods made him feel unwelcome at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116601 and talked down at him https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124379. And I don't really blame him for leaving. When it feels like the whole community wants something other than what you want, you migrate communities. I wonder where he's at now... Wherever it is, it's probably interesting. FWIW I've been careful to frame all of this as fairly as possible. And in the spirit of fairness, here are the responses I received: I took the rate limit back off. I put it on a few days ago because the subthread starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820 was problematic. You're not solely responsible for that but commenters who create the initial conditions for these things carry more responsibility than the others, since the seeds of the problem are nearly always present in the initial conditions. It's not a great idea to barrage us with emails because there's a lot Scott and I need to take care of and often we're just under load. As a good programmer you know what sending many messages into a system under load does. In addition to that, it makes us less rather than more interested in replying to you, because it feels like it would be unfair to the other emails who respect normal channels. I'm not saying this because it's in any way personal, just reporting how the dynamics work, since you said you find more information helpful. Daniel -- When I asked why this is fair or whether they simply don't like me, You’re close. A lingering issue with your comments is that they can be more personal than the medium affords. When you’re writing to a large group of people on the internet, they’re not going to hear you in the way that people need to be heard. That needs to come from somewhere else. They’ll only be able to approach what you say from the group’s shared reality, and gaps get filled in with whatever’s going on in the reader. This is what dissolves discourse, and what we need to prevent on Hacker News. It’s why we say ‘substantive’. Warmly, Scott -- Now, I'm pretty sure I'm just an idiot, but I have no idea what this means. All of this could have been avoided by simply saying "Hey, your comments on this topic are kind of annoying and not really a good fit for HN. Could you knock it off?" I'd be like oh yeah, you're right, that makes sense. Sorry. But no, apparently people are "not hearing me in the way people need to be heard." So... shrug. Whatever. There are better things to worry about anyway. And really, I don't matter much, and neither did yummyfajitas. HN will go along fine without us. But it sucks to be sidelined. The thing is, it was fun to write for HN, and to compete here. It was fun to have my ideas challenged and to find out I was mistaken. That's the whole point! There's no better place to figure out the truth. But apparently mistakes are not allowed, and the response to making a mistake is to be gaslighted by putting your comments at the bottom without telling you and slowbanning you without warning until you just give up and stop coming back. I sent two more emails and got no reply. I can only imagine how hard their job is. HN has exploded in popularity, and Dan and Scott are probably the only two people who are allowed to have access to hn@ycombinator.com. The emails sent to that address can be extremely sensitive at times. But that means it's a big scaling problem: judgements have to be swift, correct, fair, and balanced. And even at five minutes per email, they are probably spammed with a hundred emails every week. That adds up. So yeah, I get why this happened. Really. I'm not really trying to make a fuss or complain much. This is just pent-up energy from missing HN. I've been on this site since I was 18, and it felt like a second home. Being "marked" as inferior by someone you respect is disheartening.
ckarmann 9y ago
> The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin. I am not a bitcoin expert at all, I'm actually only starting to look at these things, so I am a bit surprised you sound so confident when saying $2B, because my reaction was: that's all, 2 billion US dollars is all it take to take down Bitcoin? That's pocket money for the US government, and easily achievable for most private banks, very rich individuals and even organized crime. > That's it. There's no other way. Also, it seems to me that Bitcoin is based on softwares. Softwares have vulnerabilities. I guess of course if something big happens, like SHA256 being broken, we would have bigger problems than Bitcoin.
- RoboTeddy 9y ago
  > 2 billion US dollars is all it take to take down Bitcoin? Right -- this is one of the reasons why some people think PoS is better than PoW. Much more expensive to permanently attack in this manner. Realistically, if Bitcoin were attacked in this manner, the community would probably respond by switching its proof of work function. If attacks continued, it'd probably end up doing PoS. So an actual attack might be much more expensive/likely to fail.
komaromy 9y ago
> The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin. How much hashing power resides in China? I was under the impression that it's >50%. It would cost the Chinese government a lot less than $2B to raid all those farms and take their equipment.
- amenod 9y ago
  ... or more likely, to just order them - but what could they do? Double spend? Transfer Satoshi's money to some new address?
  - freeloop3 9y ago
    Freeze any address they like. Freeze the entire network, preventing any transaction from going through, by mining empty blocks.
- mrep 9y ago
  There is and considering how powerful the chinese government is, they could do it easily: https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin-with-51-pocked-guide-for-governments-83d9bdf2ef6b https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin-with-51-p...
- tigershark 9y ago
  As far as I know is ~80% unless where I read it was spreading misinformation.
popol12 9y ago
If we find out that a state has spend billions in SHA256 equipment, and is censoring transactions, there will be a unanimous switch to another PoW algo, like SHA3. So there is really nothing a government could do to stop Bitcoin. It's a cat and mouse game and the cat has to have unlimited money just to stay in the run !
- bobjordan 9y ago
  Kick the door in and physically shut down the equipment? Or more easily, cut off the power supply somewhere upstream? Not wise to presuppose a State actor will play by the limited set of rules requiring them to spend billions on hashing equipment to shut down a crypto operation.
freeloop3 9y ago
All you did was wave your hands here. What trade off? What subtle disadvantages? What in PoS is weaker than PoW? You assert these things exist without going into any of them. PoS is very new and complex and there are many differences between implementations, much more than in PoW. Any dismissal you might have read would most likely been based on a previous version because the latest versions of PoS are quite new. There doesn't always have to be a meaningful trade-off between different technologies that do the same thing. Is there a meaningful trade-off between a zipped wav file and one compressed with flac? Jeez, just stop spreading FUD.
- dang 9y ago
  > Jeez, just stop spreading FUD. Please edit such incivility out of your comments here, regardless of how wrong someone else is. The last thing we need is flamewars about who's fudding. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tinco 9y ago
I'm sorry man, I noticed that I've been downvoting your comments recently, and it's just because they don't seem very insightful to me. I don't think this comment, that is basically "PoS is weaker than PoW" without any argument is a good contribution to this thread. It's nice that you took out some time to write up a bunch of lines detailing your opinion, but even in your own comment you acknowledge that you can't recall why exactly it is that PoS is significantly weaker than PoW. Now I've read the Casper papers (the ones that are on the Github repository and are not yet complete I think), and I know that there's significant challenge in making a PoS that is actually solid, but I don't think it's impossible to figure out how to do it, and there are very knowledgeable and skilled people researching this topic so it's likely a suitable PoS will arise at some point. If you'd actually been knowledgeable on this topic, you could have pointed out one of the weaknesses of Casper or any of the other PoS protocols, and I would've upvoted your comment, and then typed up a counter to it. Now, I just get the feeling you're defending Bitcoin, which is an outdated technology which's only use is to be a store of large amounts of value, much like gold, against the new innovative technologies that are challenging it. Without even bothering to make a coherent argument, apart from describing some property of Bitcoin that we all already know.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  To clarify, I don't mind the downvotes. What's going on here is that they tweaked the algorithm to specifically whisk my comments to the bottom, immediately, no matter what. Even if I had 12 upvotes, it would still appear at the bottom. The complaint is that this is undocumented, unfair, and I have no recourse. I've shown willingness to alter my behavior and conform to whatever they want out of me, and supposedly this is enough to reverse most decisions. They repeatedly say "We'll unban accounts if we think there's reason to believe they'll behave." I've gone through the email system and spent roughly three weeks complaining at them and asking whether this could be reversed, to no avail. They told me to stop spamming them, so I asked once more, shortly and politely. No response for a week. So this isn't a ban – it's a ban on my ideas. No one is aware that my comments appear at the bottom because the system is set up that way, rather than because it's been fairly decided by the community that it should be there. This, I feel, is a problem. It should at least be explicit, especially for longstanding members who are trying to participate in good faith. The reasons for doing this were less than clear, and it's hard to shake the feeling that they're simply picking on people. I believe them when they say all they care about is the quality of HN, so I don't want to feel that they're just being bullies. But the outcome is much the same. I'm being stuffed in a locker because people other than me have decided it's the best place for me. And yeah, that's pretty hilarious, so I don't really expect the situation to change. Especially not with hamfisted attempts at reversing it. But at least I can make some noise while I'm locked in there, partly for others' entertainment. By the way, if you feel as I do that downvotes are broken on HN (in the sense that they don't really have much signaling power), you can run my Tampermonkey extension to hide them and hide your karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200 Now, I completely agree that my comment was low quality. But that's exactly what you'd expect to happen if you remove someone's incentive to write well. Why would I possibly invest time in detailing any of those things you mention when it would just be pinned to the bottom anyway? May as well say something that's true but unsupported and not waste the time. Hopefully I can figure out a way to get this reversed, but shrug. Part of the irony is that after I was slowbanned back in early December (deservedly so, that time), I actually emailed them asking "Hey, while you're at it, will you tweak my comments so they show up at the bottom too?" I think I was just curious what it would be like, or if quality could stand on its own merits. They refused at the time, saying that it would be a bad idea because a good comment should be up at the top regardless of anything else. And Scott was right about that. This sucks, and when you remove the upvote incentives the whole system breaks. I have no reason to write anything here anymore. The unsettling thing is that this seems like their objective. It seems true to say that they pick out people that they don't want to be on HN, and then crank various knobs until HN is just unfriendly enough to get them to leave. Them, specifically. Yummyfajitas seems like an example of this. But I'd rather assume that this is just a silly corner case (ha). Regarding Bitcoin, I think Satoshi spent a lot of time figuring out a simple system that was impervious to shutdown. The tradeoff is energy. It's the first time in history that the byzantine generals problem (with sybil resistance) has been solved. And we should be careful not to stray too far from that fantastic success – not without carefully understanding and proving there are no unexpected tradeoffs. The key aspect of Bitcoin is that you don't have to be too smart to understand it. A reasonably intelligent person can sit down with bitcoin.pdf and come away understanding exactly why it works. It takes maybe an evening of thinking to fully grok why it can't break, and the implications. That doesn't seem true with PoS. And that seems at least worth being skeptical of.

RoboTeddy 9y ago

Weird, this seems like a valuable comment. I wonder what's going on. I hope you keep commenting. Government regulation could drive Bitcoin underground inside a given country. Wouldn't be hard to imagine globalized regulation, a la the US treasury sanctions list. It'd be tough to enforce a ban on cryptocurrency, but doesn't strike me as impossible. It's not hard to take out exchanges like Coinbase. Then could do sting operations to try to catch people willing to transact with Bitcoin in person, etc. One exception: it might be very difficult to enforce a ban on using cryptocurrency to purchase services that are purely digital and don't require identity. No way to run a sting.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Weird, this seems like a valuable comment. I wonder what's going on. I hope you keep commenting. It was intentional. I would love to write more comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602457, but as of now there's no incentive. Exponentially less people see comments at the bottom, because everyone uses the [-] collapse button now to navigate between topics. Why would I spend 30 minutes (or sometimes an hour, it's a fun hobby) to write a good comment when it's simply pinned where <5% of people will see it after an hour or so? My penalty stemmed from writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820. Some sort of penalty may have been warranted. HN probably isn't the proper place for that kind of discussion. But they reacted – I think – by visiting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884400 and adjusting my "gravity" until that comment was near the bottom, or halfway down. And since that comment had ~20 upvotes, that means anything I write with less than 20 upvotes has absolutely no hope of getting anywhere near the top. Meaning it won't even gather any steam anymore. Not only that, but I was originally slowbanned as well. There's a certain penalty that the mods use to discourage certain types of authors, where you can't post more than 5 comments every 3 hours. This is totally undocumented and took much experimentation to even figure out that's what the specific limit is. Imagine going to a bar and being able to only say 5 things every 3 hours. Meanwhile I counted ~23 tptacek comments within a span of <2 hours. ~13 jacqusm comments within 3 hours. Etc. So I suddenly felt like I couldn't even respond to people anymore. I sent a bunch of emails (often angry ones) to hn@ycombinator.com, and I don't blame them for basically writing me off and ignoring them. What incentive do they have to bother with one specific person? So I see their side of it too. But I'm worried this is a trend. I used to periodically see hellbanned commenters complain about HN censorship and that they were excluded specifically for their politics. And I thought that was fine, and they should be. Their hellbanned comments certainly made it seem like HN would be better off without them. Good mods! But I see now why people write like that after being penalized. You just sort of... Give up. What's the point in writing quality when no one will see it? There's no competition anymore, no fun. And it sucks that someone in the world with power decided that you, specifically, suck, and suck enough to merit exclusion. I miss yummyfajitas. The mods made him feel unwelcome at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116601 and talked down at him https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124379. And I don't really blame him for leaving. When it feels like the whole community wants something other than what you want, you migrate communities. I wonder where he's at now... Wherever it is, it's probably interesting. FWIW I've been careful to frame all of this as fairly as possible. And in the spirit of fairness, here are the responses I received: I took the rate limit back off. I put it on a few days ago because the subthread starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820 was problematic. You're not solely responsible for that but commenters who create the initial conditions for these things carry more responsibility than the others, since the seeds of the problem are nearly always present in the initial conditions. It's not a great idea to barrage us with emails because there's a lot Scott and I need to take care of and often we're just under load. As a good programmer you know what sending many messages into a system under load does. In addition to that, it makes us less rather than more interested in replying to you, because it feels like it would be unfair to the other emails who respect normal channels. I'm not saying this because it's in any way personal, just reporting how the dynamics work, since you said you find more information helpful. Daniel -- When I asked why this is fair or whether they simply don't like me, You’re close. A lingering issue with your comments is that they can be more personal than the medium affords. When you’re writing to a large group of people on the internet, they’re not going to hear you in the way that people need to be heard. That needs to come from somewhere else. They’ll only be able to approach what you say from the group’s shared reality, and gaps get filled in with whatever’s going on in the reader. This is what dissolves discourse, and what we need to prevent on Hacker News. It’s why we say ‘substantive’. Warmly, Scott -- Now, I'm pretty sure I'm just an idiot, but I have no idea what this means. All of this could have been avoided by simply saying "Hey, your comments on this topic are kind of annoying and not really a good fit for HN. Could you knock it off?" I'd be like oh yeah, you're right, that makes sense. Sorry. But no, apparently people are "not hearing me in the way people need to be heard." So... shrug. Whatever. There are better things to worry about anyway. And really, I don't matter much, and neither did yummyfajitas. HN will go along fine without us. But it sucks to be sidelined. The thing is, it was fun to write for HN, and to compete here. It was fun to have my ideas challenged and to find out I was mistaken. That's the whole point! There's no better place to figure out the truth. But apparently mistakes are not allowed, and the response to making a mistake is to be gaslighted by putting your comments at the bottom without telling you and slowbanning you without warning until you just give up and stop coming back. I sent two more emails and got no reply. I can only imagine how hard their job is. HN has exploded in popularity, and Dan and Scott are probably the only two people who are allowed to have access to hn@ycombinator.com. The emails sent to that address can be extremely sensitive at times. But that means it's a big scaling problem: judgements have to be swift, correct, fair, and balanced. And even at five minutes per email, they are probably spammed with a hundred emails every week. That adds up. So yeah, I get why this happened. Really. I'm not really trying to make a fuss or complain much. This is just pent-up energy from missing HN. I've been on this site since I was 18, and it felt like a second home. Being "marked" as inferior by someone you respect is disheartening.

ckarmann 9y ago

> The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin. I am not a bitcoin expert at all, I'm actually only starting to look at these things, so I am a bit surprised you sound so confident when saying $2B, because my reaction was: that's all, 2 billion US dollars is all it take to take down Bitcoin? That's pocket money for the US government, and easily achievable for most private banks, very rich individuals and even organized crime. > That's it. There's no other way. Also, it seems to me that Bitcoin is based on softwares. Softwares have vulnerabilities. I guess of course if something big happens, like SHA256 being broken, we would have bigger problems than Bitcoin.

RoboTeddy 9y ago
> 2 billion US dollars is all it take to take down Bitcoin? Right -- this is one of the reasons why some people think PoS is better than PoW. Much more expensive to permanently attack in this manner. Realistically, if Bitcoin were attacked in this manner, the community would probably respond by switching its proof of work function. If attacks continued, it'd probably end up doing PoS. So an actual attack might be much more expensive/likely to fail.

komaromy 9y ago

> The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin. How much hashing power resides in China? I was under the impression that it's >50%. It would cost the Chinese government a lot less than $2B to raid all those farms and take their equipment.

amenod 9y ago
... or more likely, to just order them - but what could they do? Double spend? Transfer Satoshi's money to some new address?
- freeloop3 9y ago
  Freeze any address they like. Freeze the entire network, preventing any transaction from going through, by mining empty blocks.
mrep 9y ago
There is and considering how powerful the chinese government is, they could do it easily: https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin-with-51-pocked-guide-for-governments-83d9bdf2ef6b https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin-with-51-p...
tigershark 9y ago
As far as I know is ~80% unless where I read it was spreading misinformation.

popol12 9y ago

If we find out that a state has spend billions in SHA256 equipment, and is censoring transactions, there will be a unanimous switch to another PoW algo, like SHA3. So there is really nothing a government could do to stop Bitcoin. It's a cat and mouse game and the cat has to have unlimited money just to stay in the run !

bobjordan 9y ago
Kick the door in and physically shut down the equipment? Or more easily, cut off the power supply somewhere upstream? Not wise to presuppose a State actor will play by the limited set of rules requiring them to spend billions on hashing equipment to shut down a crypto operation.

freeloop3 9y ago

All you did was wave your hands here. What trade off? What subtle disadvantages? What in PoS is weaker than PoW? You assert these things exist without going into any of them. PoS is very new and complex and there are many differences between implementations, much more than in PoW. Any dismissal you might have read would most likely been based on a previous version because the latest versions of PoS are quite new. There doesn't always have to be a meaningful trade-off between different technologies that do the same thing. Is there a meaningful trade-off between a zipped wav file and one compressed with flac? Jeez, just stop spreading FUD.

dang 9y ago
> Jeez, just stop spreading FUD. Please edit such incivility out of your comments here, regardless of how wrong someone else is. The last thing we need is flamewars about who's fudding. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tinco 9y ago

I'm sorry man, I noticed that I've been downvoting your comments recently, and it's just because they don't seem very insightful to me. I don't think this comment, that is basically "PoS is weaker than PoW" without any argument is a good contribution to this thread. It's nice that you took out some time to write up a bunch of lines detailing your opinion, but even in your own comment you acknowledge that you can't recall why exactly it is that PoS is significantly weaker than PoW. Now I've read the Casper papers (the ones that are on the Github repository and are not yet complete I think), and I know that there's significant challenge in making a PoS that is actually solid, but I don't think it's impossible to figure out how to do it, and there are very knowledgeable and skilled people researching this topic so it's likely a suitable PoS will arise at some point. If you'd actually been knowledgeable on this topic, you could have pointed out one of the weaknesses of Casper or any of the other PoS protocols, and I would've upvoted your comment, and then typed up a counter to it. Now, I just get the feeling you're defending Bitcoin, which is an outdated technology which's only use is to be a store of large amounts of value, much like gold, against the new innovative technologies that are challenging it. Without even bothering to make a coherent argument, apart from describing some property of Bitcoin that we all already know.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
To clarify, I don't mind the downvotes. What's going on here is that they tweaked the algorithm to specifically whisk my comments to the bottom, immediately, no matter what. Even if I had 12 upvotes, it would still appear at the bottom. The complaint is that this is undocumented, unfair, and I have no recourse. I've shown willingness to alter my behavior and conform to whatever they want out of me, and supposedly this is enough to reverse most decisions. They repeatedly say "We'll unban accounts if we think there's reason to believe they'll behave." I've gone through the email system and spent roughly three weeks complaining at them and asking whether this could be reversed, to no avail. They told me to stop spamming them, so I asked once more, shortly and politely. No response for a week. So this isn't a ban – it's a ban on my ideas. No one is aware that my comments appear at the bottom because the system is set up that way, rather than because it's been fairly decided by the community that it should be there. This, I feel, is a problem. It should at least be explicit, especially for longstanding members who are trying to participate in good faith. The reasons for doing this were less than clear, and it's hard to shake the feeling that they're simply picking on people. I believe them when they say all they care about is the quality of HN, so I don't want to feel that they're just being bullies. But the outcome is much the same. I'm being stuffed in a locker because people other than me have decided it's the best place for me. And yeah, that's pretty hilarious, so I don't really expect the situation to change. Especially not with hamfisted attempts at reversing it. But at least I can make some noise while I'm locked in there, partly for others' entertainment. By the way, if you feel as I do that downvotes are broken on HN (in the sense that they don't really have much signaling power), you can run my Tampermonkey extension to hide them and hide your karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200 Now, I completely agree that my comment was low quality. But that's exactly what you'd expect to happen if you remove someone's incentive to write well. Why would I possibly invest time in detailing any of those things you mention when it would just be pinned to the bottom anyway? May as well say something that's true but unsupported and not waste the time. Hopefully I can figure out a way to get this reversed, but shrug. Part of the irony is that after I was slowbanned back in early December (deservedly so, that time), I actually emailed them asking "Hey, while you're at it, will you tweak my comments so they show up at the bottom too?" I think I was just curious what it would be like, or if quality could stand on its own merits. They refused at the time, saying that it would be a bad idea because a good comment should be up at the top regardless of anything else. And Scott was right about that. This sucks, and when you remove the upvote incentives the whole system breaks. I have no reason to write anything here anymore. The unsettling thing is that this seems like their objective. It seems true to say that they pick out people that they don't want to be on HN, and then crank various knobs until HN is just unfriendly enough to get them to leave. Them, specifically. Yummyfajitas seems like an example of this. But I'd rather assume that this is just a silly corner case (ha). Regarding Bitcoin, I think Satoshi spent a lot of time figuring out a simple system that was impervious to shutdown. The tradeoff is energy. It's the first time in history that the byzantine generals problem (with sybil resistance) has been solved. And we should be careful not to stray too far from that fantastic success – not without carefully understanding and proving there are no unexpected tradeoffs. The key aspect of Bitcoin is that you don't have to be too smart to understand it. A reasonably intelligent person can sit down with bitcoin.pdf and come away understanding exactly why it works. It takes maybe an evening of thinking to fully grok why it can't break, and the implications. That doesn't seem true with PoS. And that seems at least worth being skeptical of.