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It's such a shame that useful proof-of-work is so impractical. The amount of cycles spent mining for the sake of mining is pretty depressing.
by broodbucket 7y ago
It's such a shame that useful proof-of-work is so impractical. The amount of cycles spent mining for the sake of mining is pretty depressing.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoEthereum proof of stake is coming and should fix that elegantly.
- all_blue_chucks 7y agoI hear it's powered by cold fusion and Half Life 3.
- away_throw 7y ago50% since they announced a third Half Life game.
- rsynnott 7y agoI feel like that’s been coming any day now since about 2014. And seems like a TERRIBLE idea, anyway. The rich get richer, built right into the system!
- spir 7y agoPhase 0 of Ethereum v2 arrives in Q1 2020. Coming since 2014 but finally arriving :) Proof of stake reduces the issuance of new ETH to pay for the cost of securing the network. It's cheaper than paying miners. And anybody can buy ETH to stake so it's more egalitarian than mining which requires economies of scale in hardware and electricity.
- tfha 7y agoDoesn't phase 0 exclude the ability to transfer money? The whole point of a "currency"???
- nullc 7y agoMy understanding is that Phase 0 features the ability to lock up eth and take it out of circulation. You might consider if perhaps the parties in control of that system have a different idea of its point than you do.
- meirdavis 7y agoCorrect. Phase 0 isn't useful by itself and phase 1 isn't that useful either. Phase 2 is when people can actually start using ETH2 instead of ETH1.
- celticninja 7y agoPoS would be more egalitarian if it was that way from the start, however as it is transitioning from PoW this means that anyone that bought in early, now has an opportunity to solidify their position. For new entrants to reach the same level of investment would be significantly higher. So the ETH rich get richer and it widens the gap.
- jdnenej 7y agoPoW is exactly the same. The rich can afford the most hardware and electicity. PoS just short circuits the burning power step. It's also the same as bank interest.
- rsynnott 7y agoWhen you put your money in a bank, it doesn’t just sit there. Deposits, while possibly not the most efficient way to do it, support useful economic activity. Proof of work is also terrible, obviously. Proof of stake seems like an awful thing to _aspire_ to, tho.
- Zamicol 7y agoThe minimum stake of 32 eth is probably going to require something like a laptop to run. Those with larger stakes are going to need to devote more computer resources to the network.
- gerikson 7y ago32 ETH is ~$4,800 at today's price of $151.07[1]. What's the expected "payout" for this stake? [1] CoinMarketCap used as source.
- DennisP 7y agoExpected payout depends on the total amount staked. With a large amount staked it's only a couple percent annually; with a small amount it's up to 18% annually. The idea is an equilibrium will be reached in the middle somewhere.
- gerikson 7y agoThat's an interesting formula.
- lawfulcactus 7y agoHow are participants prevented from simply splitting up their stakes?
- wyldfire 7y agoProof-of-stake has been in use in other non-Ethereum cryptocoins for a very long time [1] [2]. In Nano's case, there's no transaction fees paid to stakeholders (nor their delegated representatives). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin [2] https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Nano https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Nano
- _Kristijan_ 7y agoNano consensus mechanism is called Open Representative Voting (ORV). It has similar sides to proof-of-stake, but differs in important places. e.g. it is less a "stake" than a voting weight that the users themselves distribute to nodes of their choice (or their own). ORV's self-description at: https://docs.nano.org/glossary/#open-representative-voting-orv https://docs.nano.org/glossary/#open-representative-voting-o...
- wyldfire 7y ago> or their own Sure, it's an optionally-delegated-proof-of-stake. In practice, most do delegate their stake. But at the end of the day the "voting weight" that secures transactions is majority stake and not a proof of work.
- DennisP 7y agoThe rich get richer in proof of work, too. It's not like those giant mining rigs are free. It's also true in bank accounts; the more money deposited, the more interest you earn. At least in proof of stake everybody gets the same interest rate regardless of deposit size. Banks generally give better rates to larger accounts.
- qes 7y agoDecred set up it's mixed PoS/PoW so that there is an opportunity cost to staking - your funds are locked for a random amount of time up to several months. The staking rewards are also not enough to keep indefinitely staking. Your share of stake will continuously decrease, and, aside from ticket splitting, you would need to acquire more decred along the way to continue staking at the same level.
- hanniabu 7y agoEthereum wasn't launched until July 2015 so there's one inaccuracy. Also given you're on HN you should likely be aware that (a) timelines are difficult to estimate and often things take much longer than you thought, even more so with being the first to do something, (b) there's a lot of discussion and review for financial software, (c) it's much harder to change the carriage of a moving train
- ppf 7y ago(d) performing work on a moving train is a bug, not a feature.
- DarthGhandi 7y ago> is coming Yeah that was 5 years ago too if you don't remember. It's an incredibly difficult problem and anyone claiming to have actually solved it in a decentralised way that proof-of-work did is a charlatan. Given all the money slushing around in cryptocurrency looking for a problem to solve I'd argue it's an intractable issue that needs yet another breakthrough rather than marketing and bubble hype.
- jkhdigital 7y agoFrom 2015: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
- nootropicat 7y agoIncorrect. The supposed MR=MC law means that the entire economy is zero-sum and wealth creation is impossible. His reasoning also directly translates to real world physical security, as in, if you want to protect wealth worth $1000 from theft, according to him you have to spend $1000-epsilon, otherwise someone is going to outspend you and steal it. Fortunately, that's not how the world works. Visual illustration of the asymmetric security in action: https://www.pohjoiseen.fi/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/20839601684_2c10210f03_o-800x531.jpg https://www.pohjoiseen.fi/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/2083960...
- jotakami 7y agoFortunately, we get asymmetric security through laws and criminal punishment rather than machine gun bunkers. Also, MR=MC doesn’t imply that wealth is never created, it just means that it can’t be created purely through exchanging commodities.
- nootropicat 7y agoNothing special about commodity exchange. The difference between marginal revenue and marginal cost is marginal wealth creation (destruction if negative). A world in which MR=MC is in a global maximum and no improvement is possible - any state changes imposed externally can either lead to the same score ('wealth') or make it worse. In other words, he first assumes that no improvement is possible, and then indeed manages to show that, according to the assumptions, no improvement is possible.
- wyldfire 7y agoBesides proof-of-stake, there's also a coin that tries (tried?) a proof-of-work with greater public utility: Primecoin [1]. It creates Cunningham chains of prime numbers [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain
- toastal 7y agoWasn't there also like CureCoin that unfolds proteins for medical application?
- haakon 7y agoYes, and there's also SolarCoin which rewards users for producing renewable energy. The problem is that these coins are centralised, so while they may be very useful for what they do, they don't solve the same problem as proof-of-work coins which aim to be decentralised.
- untoreh 7y agothere is also gridcoin but they are not useful pow. they are proof of stake where the stake is the amount of contribution towards boinc projects and the likes, and they are affected by the oracle problem
- swinglock 7y agoIs that useful for anything other than the Primecoin?
- tylersmith 7y ago"Useful PoW" is a dead end. Good PoW functions require properties that rule out real world useful problems.
- web007 7y agoI'm disappointed that PrimeCoin didn't really catch on. It's mathematically sound, relatively quantum safe, and produces useful output. Any improvements to factoring or finding prime chains would be genuine advances in the field, whether algorithm or hardware (ASIC) based.
- ganzuul 7y agoNeed to mention GridCoin because context. Uses BOINC for proof-of-work.
- nootropicat 7y agoWouldn't work, the security of PoW explicitly relies on waste. If the external value from mining is X and an attack costs Y, the net cost of the attack is X-Y=Z, so the real security is Z, the waste portion.
- koheripbal 7y agoNot necessarily waste, no. It just needs to be unpredictable. I think PrimeCoin was a great example of a PoW that had very small but non-zero value.