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Children Playing Blockchain

82 points by brrrrrm 6y ago

ronsor 6y ago
> The first class lost the students that simply couldn't keep up with the increasingly difficult sudokus. This is the story of every proof-of-work cryptocurrency. After a certain point, they only serve to make the rich even richer. Look at Bitcoin for example, where over 50% of the hashing power is controlled by big Chinese mining operations.
- DylanBohlender 6y ago
  I would contest that assertion - some blockchains regularly change their PoW algorithm in an attempt to stay "ASIC-resistant."
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    That simply makes two currencies - before-fork, and after-fork. There's no rule that the one that "should" win does, especially in the face of large computing power making the former more attractive. See Bitcoin Cash, versus Bitcoin Classic.
    - ChainOfFools 6y ago
      OP may be referring to algorithms that rotate between a fixed set of widely dissimilar POW puzzles, in an attempt to make it discouragingly expensive to design and fabricate a rather complex ASIC requiring a lot of die space. IIRC it didn't work for long (the of promoters of these tokens were likely well aware of this), and ASICs for them appeared anyway, once an ROI probability threshold was reached.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      That's just not an accurate nor truthful account of what happens in practice. The example you gave has nothing to do with changing the PoW function to counteract ASICs. Both Bcash and bitcoin classic were forked because of completely different reasons, and had people who believed in those reasons defend the new forks and run the node software etc. For example XMR has been doing ASIC-deterrent forks for years now with great success.
      - atweiden 6y ago
        In 2018, 50-60% of Monero hashrate was rumored to be from secret ASICs. How “successful” at warding off ASICs could hard forking a coin’s hashing algorithm really be if it doesn’t stop the ASIC manufacturers from building ASICs for any given algorithm? Also it seems clear that Monero’s purported “ASIC resistance” is very much a social contract — requiring constant vigilance to uphold — one which isn’t guaranteed to be strictly adhered to over the long run, particularly as the cost/benefit analysis gets murkier.
        Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
        > a social contract Just like the rest of the cryptos that require all the participants to use specific protocol and software and agree on specific rules.
  - ronsor 6y ago
    Ok. Perhaps not every proof-of-work currency, but a vast amount of them still suffer from the issue I mentioned.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    That only makes it slightly more expensive for the rich people who, instead of fabbing ASICs, have to just buy more GPUs.
- xur17 6y ago
  But at the end of the day, PoW is simply a fee that users of the network pay (in the form of inflation) to secure the network. I'm not convinced it's really a distribution mechanism.
  - ronsor 6y ago
    Is the network so secure if relatively few groups hold most of the power? The danger of 51% attacks[0] is well known. [0] https://dci.mit.edu/51-attacks https://dci.mit.edu/51-attacks
    - kleer001 6y ago
      Any discussion of 51% attacks that ignores the game theory of it I think misses the original genius of the Bitcoin white paper. If one has control of 51% of the network it's in one's best interest to keep that network going successfully. Sure, there's suicidal malcontents and those that just want chaos. But barring some brain cancer it's very difficult for individuals to throw away billions of dollars. Because if a 51% attack works it's not going to work for long, the corrupted blocks are going to be immediately known, and everyone else will just fork off and leave that 51% attacker holding the bag.
      - pazimzadeh 6y ago
        You could say the same thing about infectious disease. The most successful diseases don't kill you, they just sap your energy a little bit at a time. What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land?
        atweiden 6y ago
        > What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land? It’s the people insinuating impropriety of Proof-of-Work mining in the hopes of less than transparently promoting a competing premined/ICO’d Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency sans any form of disclosure statement. You know, the sort of thing that’s been plaguing the cryptocurrency space for a good, solid decade now?
- stevev 6y ago
  Looks like someone missed the buying opportunity lol.
  - endisneigh 6y ago
    These types of comments are honestly unhelpful. Unfortunately the said can be about my comment, but I do not have the ability to downvote, alas. If they held bitcoin would their opinion matter more or less? Why should it matter?
  - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
    Is this the level the discussion has reached, Facebook-level 'Dear haters, you are just jealous!' posts? I guess in a way comments like these are actually a really good indication that PoS is superior in virtually every way.
  - dang 6y ago
    Can you please not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN, regardless of how you feel about Bitcoin or whatever? It sends discussions straight to failure mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it - holders can mint new blocks. With proof of work there is actual work involved tol, not just minting money with your capital.
  - spijdar 6y ago
    In either case you can use your accumulating capital to accumulate more capital -- PoW just means consuming actual resources to do so, as you fold your earnings into more hardware and electricity to earn more.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      And PoW has significant economies of scale. The big Chinese miners have special deals with power companies and ASIC manufacturers. PoS at least gives everyone an even playing field; big or small you get the same percentage return. (Of course that's pretty much the point of the analogy.)
      - atweiden 6y ago
        > PoS at least gives everyone an even playing field; big or small you get the same percentage return. Your cost basis in the underlying coin is by far the largest determinant of ROI. It’s like the old real estate adage: “money is made on the purchase, not on the sale”. Fairness of mining has always been virtually irrelevant to ROI. (Except insofar as accusing competitors of shades of mining “impropriety” supports a narrative — and invariably a narrative which disproportionately benefits investors with an ultra low cost basis in a benefactor to said narrative.) “China miners, special deals” etc — it’s a trope that’s been going around for about a decade. Virtue signaling aside, judging by the raging bull market for ICO coins amongst cryptocurrency investors, clearly no one is concerned with fairness whatsoever. These things are majority premined by insiders and/or sold to prestigious investors in pre-pre-pre ICOs (yes, there are “levels”). What happens is the general public gets sucked into these coins then adopts narratives which suit them. That’s what you’re seeing here. Not that anyone cares. (Disclosure: I’m invested in a true hybrid PoW/PoS coin, and I’m rather familiar with the downsides of both PoW and PoS mining.)
crazypython 6y ago
I found the site's architecture quite interesting: It uses inline JS to transform the Markdown in HTML. view-source:https://jott.live/markdown/elementary_blockchain https://jott.live/markdown/elementary_blockchain Ideally it would be as a Service Worker that pulls pages and transforms them into HTML, so you could serve your Markdown directly, without a separate build step.
- foreigner 6y ago
  For me there was a noticeable FOUC.
  - crummy 6y ago
    FOUC = "Flash of unstyled content" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - brrrrrm 6y ago
    I've never heard of this before. Speaking for myself, I don't mind it, but I'm curious if it tends to irk most people?
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Honestly it just seems like a beginner's weekend idea rather than something useful. If I squint, I can almost pretend I'm insulted that my browser/Javascript had to render the Markdown instead of their server doing it. I can't see how their infrastructure is making any real savings by doing this. There are usually more reasons to just cache the HTML next to the input Markdown. e.g. You can then make money breaking changes to the transformation without breaking old posts. Not to mention it now kinda pointlessly needs Javascript to do something trivial. Unlike what seems to be the prevailing opinion on HN, I'm quite pro-Javascript and pro-SPA. I never saw the need to damn webpages to server-rendered HTML just because it's the only client/server system with the quirk of being able to send markup from the server. But this sending Markdown over the wire with a 24kB Markdown script + `<script>$('post').markdown()</script>` is just cheeky. ;) Does it really matter though? Nah.
kang 6y ago
Funny. The first class was a public class & anybody could join in at any time. The second class had reserved early seats based on the initial supply of the dices; without investment in the initial dices the game doesnt start, whereas sudoku generation is free.
- dgellow 6y ago
  Could you explain? Anyone can run a node for a proof-of-stake, or delegate/stake to the node they want. Why do you add the reserved seat to the story?
  - hjorthjort 6y ago
    Because that's how Bitcoin maximalists view Ethereum, and basically all other major alts.
  - wmf 6y ago
    In the early days of Bitcoin like 2011, you could mine basically for free using a gaming PC you already owned (there are a lot of assumptions here that coiners don't want to get into). I actually did this. This has nothing to do with how PoW works today, where even obscure chains are slammed with GPU farms within minutes of mainnet launch. With PoS you have to buy coins before you can stake. There's no way to bootstrap your stake without spending money.
- juanitolol 6y ago
  amen
- sparkie 6y ago
  In the PoS game, the stakers must be trusted to report their dice roll accurately. To overcome this, you would need some kind of random oracle which can't be influenced by any of the participants. The best random oracle we know is of course, Proof-of-Work.
  - kang 6y ago
    Basically this. You, a mathematician, walk into the class to purchase a brick to label. The first class has solved sudokus with deterministic difficulty to prove they did work to build the structure, whereas in the second class you have just dice sums & have to trust them telling you they rolled the diced only every fixed interval etc. It's distributed but not decentralized.
capnorange 6y ago
> but without 2 years of constantly solving sudoku under their belt, they couldn't compete with the more experienced sudoku-solvers Inaccurate analogy. Miners are more limited by cheap electricity/cooling than CPU which is more generally available.
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  The top Bitcoin mining pools in China create their own mining ASICs in house for competitive advantage. You just can't compete without spending years catching up to their hardware designs.
  - capnorange 6y ago
    As long as selling ASIC's are profitable -> more R&D and eventually everyone has access to the most capable ASIC's. Off the top of my head, data from 2 years back(things might have changed now). Bitmain, one of the top 3 mining pools, 90% of their revenue was from ASIC sales rather than mining. As long as Bitmain has competitors, they should always be able to put out the best ASIC's to the public.
    - Jasper_ 6y ago
      Haha, you missed the scam. They don't sell their latest mining equipment. Why would they? They sell the mining equipment after they have no use for it and it's costing them money to keep it running.
dperfect 6y ago
I'm not sure I see how this relates to cryptocurrency. It misses the core attributes that give crypto value: scarcity, and the fact that it can be exchanged for other things of value. If there's no shortage of bricks, and those bricks can't be used (or exchanged) for anything other than the material for making the tower taller, then of course that would be pointless. But that's not how cryptocurrency works. The whole purpose of proof-of-work is to protect the attribute of scarcity in a distributed way where one actor can't control (or change) the rules.
- capnorange 6y ago
  the bricks are the blocks not the currency, here the value is in able to write their own names on the bricks with a sharpie.
  - dperfect 6y ago
    Still doesn't make sense to me. > If they add their brick to the top, other students will pay them (in bricks) to write their own names on it with a sharpie Other students are paying in bricks? Is that supposed to be transaction fees, mining (that's the sudoku puzzles), or what? And is there any indication that a name on a brick means anything (or can be exchanged for anything)? Is there a limit to the number of names on bricks? Can those names be verified at any instant, anywhere in the world with near 100% confidence? I know it's a simplification for the purpose of making a point; it's just that the point becomes invalid when the simplification throws out the central characteristics of the thing that's being represented.
    - capnorange 6y ago
      sorry, I read it wrong trying to compare it to bitcoin. I think the author is only demonstrating PoW/PoS and not Bitcoin itself. > Other students are paying in bricks? This is the transaction fees. > Is there a limit to the number of names on bricks? Not necessary. > And is there any indication that a name on a brick means anything (or can be exchanged for anything)? Pride, having taken part in building the biggest building. > Can those names be verified at any instant, anywhere in the world with near 100% confidence? This is only about PoW/PoS, not decentralisation. Ofcourse, PoW/PoS is meaningless if participants are not able to validate. So, in the end it's all about the pride in being able be a part of the tallest set of bricks, hah!
jamesgreenleaf 6y ago
A third class plays using a consensus model based on explicit relationships of trust. Each student keeps track of which of the others they consider trustworthy. Since they all play together everyday, they know who is nice, and who is naughty. When a supermajority trusts the student placing a new block, that student is allowed to place it anywhere. When not enough people trust the student placing the block, they prevent that person from doing so. That person may try again, but until they're willing to play nice and act trustworthy, they cannot place any blocks. They sit in the corner and pout until they come to their senses. No one has to solve any puzzles, or roll any dice. The tower is built efficiently, and all sorts of interesting designs are made by the creative energy that would have otherwise been wasted on busywork.
- verdverm 6y ago
  This is what I expect post-hype / tech-novelty. There are interesting pieces being built in the blockchain space, they can be assembled in more interesting ways if you think about trust and rule making differently (more traditionally?)
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Which cryptocurrency does this describe?
  - verdverm 6y ago
    Hyperledger, Proof-of-authority, coinless blockchain. Cryptocurrencies are not one-to-one with blockchain, rather one thing you can do with them.
  - vaer-k 6y ago
    Stellar, I think
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - stilisstuk 6y ago
    None. It's the banking system :)
stevebmark 6y ago
There's no way to save the fundamentally terrible design of guessing random numbers to verify a ledger. These are "solutions" to problems that are self created.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
shoo 6y ago
physical-economy interpretation: the teachers and children are lucky enough to live in a rich society where only a fraction of the population are required to do productive work such as growing food, distributing clean water, building and maintain housing and providing healthcare services. the teachers and children are freed from the burden of contributing productive work that benefits society and can instead engage in complex art / ritual / prayer activities involving plastic bricks, dice and sudoku.
- nynx 6y ago
  this is a good thing
Gunax 6y ago
Can someone continue the staking analogy? What exactly is being staked? You put a bunch of bricks in the center and randomly choose one, then return the remaining bricks to their owners?
- sliken 6y ago
  It falls a part a bit. You don't need to stake to use a proof of stake system, much like in bitcoin you don't have to mine to use bitcoin. But generally the bricks you have in play can be lost if the network thinks you are cheating, even lying by omission (downtime) is penalized. So to try to change the blockchain (to allow double spending or zero someone's zccount) or even not to vote for the valid blockchain can be penalized by losing your staked bricks. Another detail lost on the analogy is people get more bricks, just before being a good network citizen by helping the network and staking your bricks.
- whytaka 6y ago
  What's being staked is ETH (or any other units of PoS-based cryptocurrency) itself. The lock-in, and therefore any opportunity cost associated with the locked-in value, is the price to play. The analogy, to my understanding, is not 100% faithful to how PoS works, at least in Ethereum. There's no choosing one of the bricks, or one of the units of currency or anything. You simply lock in your units as collateral for your right to take part in the dice roll selection where, if chosen, you get to add a new block to the blockchain. If you append a block without cheating, you are rewarded with new units of the currency. If you cheat, your collateral is taken away. You may choose to keep your stake in as long as you want.
hmrtn 6y ago
Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.
- DennisP 6y ago
  I didn't really see it as being critical of blockchains in general. It's just comparing two blockchain technologies and pointing out that one has a more level playing field.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Agreed. I think HN's general sentiment against blockchain and crypto is completely counter to the hacker mentality that PG promoted. And it's frustrating, because this is one of the most intellectually stimulating communities on the web. And I see crypto developments rapidly becoming the most disruptive technology of this decade, if not century and we can't discuss it without bikeshedding. Seems to me like there might be a market for an HN-like community that is focused on crypto tech and developments exclusively (and I don't think Reddit or Twitter quite fill the same niche that HN does).
  - jules-jules 6y ago
    Let’s do it! I’ve mostly been coming to HN articles on crypto for the entertainment value only but it’s getting better - slowly.
  - barnabee 6y ago
    I’d be interested in this
  - twiceaday 6y ago
    You are not witnessing normal conversations. You are witnessing engagement on blockchain articles that are themselves only popular whenever the coins are skyrocketing in price. That is the context most of the time. Even though the articles often spend little time on the price. Similarly, the anti-narrative usually attempts to refute the technology but is benefiting from the "this price is nonsense don't purchase this" crowd. And for me, "I am holding coins and writing / promoting positive articles" seems like the slimier position. I love the tech and absolutely hate the profit motive. It is very easy for me to see "pro tech" arguments as just pumping. The tech has almost nothing to do with the price. The tech establishes that a non-zero price can exist, the rest is people manipulation.
pazimzadeh 6y ago
> The class playing Proof-of-stake has a lot of notebooks filled with doodles. The teacher hasn't provided the children with much else to do and they've become quite bored. This sounds like the dream. In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
gus_massa 6y ago
In the proof of stake class, the people that get rich in dollars are the old timers that collected a lot of bricks during the first year, and now can sell the bricks to the newbies that want to enter the game. (And the teacher, that also saved like the 5% of the initial bricks for ... pedagogical purposes.) In the proof of work class, the people that get rich in dollars are owner of the owner of the stationary that can sell better pencils, sharpers and erasers to the students, the writer of a book with tips about solving Sudoku, the person that writes a Sudoku solving program. Newbies can just buy the solver program, and participate without paying the old timers.
- johncolanduoni 6y ago
  Except transitioning back to the real world proof of work situation, it’s dominated by players who make their own ASICs and have access to the most heavily subsidized electricity. Newbies can’t even break even anymore.
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    Don't confuse newbies with amateurs. It's like any normal industry. Anyone can build a car factory, you don't have to go to Ford and buy a lot of toy cars that they made a long time ago. You just have to hire the right people and build it. Anyone can build a space rocket factory, you don't have to go to NASA and buy a lot of Moon rocks they collected a long time ago. You just have to hire the right people and build it. You have to be Elon-Musk-rich to do any of them anyway.
    - wmf 6y ago
      It has been alleged that anyone cannot build crypto ASICs due to sabotage. https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538...
mcbuilder 6y ago
I'm new to the concept of PoS. Would the underlying mechanism of Burstcoin be proof of stake, i.e. large amounts of HDD space instead of computing the solution hash problems? Or is Burstcoin still proof of work? I'm just curious because the proof of space model seems much more environmentally friendly instead of solving random problems with massive amounts of computation.
- wmf 6y ago
  Proof of storage space is not PoS since it still requires external resources.
mr_woozy 6y ago
Here we go again........

82 points by brrrrrm 6y ago

> The first class lost the students that simply couldn't keep up with the increasingly difficult sudokus. This is the story of every proof-of-work cryptocurrency. After a certain point, they only serve to make the rich even richer. Look at Bitcoin for example, where over 50% of the hashing power is controlled by big Chinese mining operations.

DylanBohlender 6y ago
I would contest that assertion - some blockchains regularly change their PoW algorithm in an attempt to stay "ASIC-resistant."
- freeone3000 6y ago
  That simply makes two currencies - before-fork, and after-fork. There's no rule that the one that "should" win does, especially in the face of large computing power making the former more attractive. See Bitcoin Cash, versus Bitcoin Classic.
  - ChainOfFools 6y ago
    OP may be referring to algorithms that rotate between a fixed set of widely dissimilar POW puzzles, in an attempt to make it discouragingly expensive to design and fabricate a rather complex ASIC requiring a lot of die space. IIRC it didn't work for long (the of promoters of these tokens were likely well aware of this), and ASICs for them appeared anyway, once an ROI probability threshold was reached.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    That's just not an accurate nor truthful account of what happens in practice. The example you gave has nothing to do with changing the PoW function to counteract ASICs. Both Bcash and bitcoin classic were forked because of completely different reasons, and had people who believed in those reasons defend the new forks and run the node software etc. For example XMR has been doing ASIC-deterrent forks for years now with great success.
    - atweiden 6y ago
      In 2018, 50-60% of Monero hashrate was rumored to be from secret ASICs. How “successful” at warding off ASICs could hard forking a coin’s hashing algorithm really be if it doesn’t stop the ASIC manufacturers from building ASICs for any given algorithm? Also it seems clear that Monero’s purported “ASIC resistance” is very much a social contract — requiring constant vigilance to uphold — one which isn’t guaranteed to be strictly adhered to over the long run, particularly as the cost/benefit analysis gets murkier.
      - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
        > a social contract Just like the rest of the cryptos that require all the participants to use specific protocol and software and agree on specific rules.
- ronsor 6y ago
  Ok. Perhaps not every proof-of-work currency, but a vast amount of them still suffer from the issue I mentioned.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  That only makes it slightly more expensive for the rich people who, instead of fabbing ASICs, have to just buy more GPUs.
xur17 6y ago
But at the end of the day, PoW is simply a fee that users of the network pay (in the form of inflation) to secure the network. I'm not convinced it's really a distribution mechanism.
- ronsor 6y ago
  Is the network so secure if relatively few groups hold most of the power? The danger of 51% attacks[0] is well known. [0] https://dci.mit.edu/51-attacks https://dci.mit.edu/51-attacks
  - kleer001 6y ago
    Any discussion of 51% attacks that ignores the game theory of it I think misses the original genius of the Bitcoin white paper. If one has control of 51% of the network it's in one's best interest to keep that network going successfully. Sure, there's suicidal malcontents and those that just want chaos. But barring some brain cancer it's very difficult for individuals to throw away billions of dollars. Because if a 51% attack works it's not going to work for long, the corrupted blocks are going to be immediately known, and everyone else will just fork off and leave that 51% attacker holding the bag.
    - pazimzadeh 6y ago
      You could say the same thing about infectious disease. The most successful diseases don't kill you, they just sap your energy a little bit at a time. What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land?
      - atweiden 6y ago
        > What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land? It’s the people insinuating impropriety of Proof-of-Work mining in the hopes of less than transparently promoting a competing premined/ICO’d Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency sans any form of disclosure statement. You know, the sort of thing that’s been plaguing the cryptocurrency space for a good, solid decade now?
stevev 6y ago
Looks like someone missed the buying opportunity lol.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  These types of comments are honestly unhelpful. Unfortunately the said can be about my comment, but I do not have the ability to downvote, alas. If they held bitcoin would their opinion matter more or less? Why should it matter?
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago
  Is this the level the discussion has reached, Facebook-level 'Dear haters, you are just jealous!' posts? I guess in a way comments like these are actually a really good indication that PoS is superior in virtually every way.
- dang 6y ago
  Can you please not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN, regardless of how you feel about Bitcoin or whatever? It sends discussions straight to failure mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
spurdoman77 6y ago
Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it - holders can mint new blocks. With proof of work there is actual work involved tol, not just minting money with your capital.
- spijdar 6y ago
  In either case you can use your accumulating capital to accumulate more capital -- PoW just means consuming actual resources to do so, as you fold your earnings into more hardware and electricity to earn more.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    And PoW has significant economies of scale. The big Chinese miners have special deals with power companies and ASIC manufacturers. PoS at least gives everyone an even playing field; big or small you get the same percentage return. (Of course that's pretty much the point of the analogy.)
    - atweiden 6y ago
      > PoS at least gives everyone an even playing field; big or small you get the same percentage return. Your cost basis in the underlying coin is by far the largest determinant of ROI. It’s like the old real estate adage: “money is made on the purchase, not on the sale”. Fairness of mining has always been virtually irrelevant to ROI. (Except insofar as accusing competitors of shades of mining “impropriety” supports a narrative — and invariably a narrative which disproportionately benefits investors with an ultra low cost basis in a benefactor to said narrative.) “China miners, special deals” etc — it’s a trope that’s been going around for about a decade. Virtue signaling aside, judging by the raging bull market for ICO coins amongst cryptocurrency investors, clearly no one is concerned with fairness whatsoever. These things are majority premined by insiders and/or sold to prestigious investors in pre-pre-pre ICOs (yes, there are “levels”). What happens is the general public gets sucked into these coins then adopts narratives which suit them. That’s what you’re seeing here. Not that anyone cares. (Disclosure: I’m invested in a true hybrid PoW/PoS coin, and I’m rather familiar with the downsides of both PoW and PoS mining.)

crazypython 6y ago

I found the site's architecture quite interesting: It uses inline JS to transform the Markdown in HTML. view-source:https://jott.live/markdown/elementary_blockchain https://jott.live/markdown/elementary_blockchain Ideally it would be as a Service Worker that pulls pages and transforms them into HTML, so you could serve your Markdown directly, without a separate build step.

foreigner 6y ago
For me there was a noticeable FOUC.
- crummy 6y ago
  FOUC = "Flash of unstyled content" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- brrrrrm 6y ago
  I've never heard of this before. Speaking for myself, I don't mind it, but I'm curious if it tends to irk most people?
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Honestly it just seems like a beginner's weekend idea rather than something useful. If I squint, I can almost pretend I'm insulted that my browser/Javascript had to render the Markdown instead of their server doing it. I can't see how their infrastructure is making any real savings by doing this. There are usually more reasons to just cache the HTML next to the input Markdown. e.g. You can then make money breaking changes to the transformation without breaking old posts. Not to mention it now kinda pointlessly needs Javascript to do something trivial. Unlike what seems to be the prevailing opinion on HN, I'm quite pro-Javascript and pro-SPA. I never saw the need to damn webpages to server-rendered HTML just because it's the only client/server system with the quirk of being able to send markup from the server. But this sending Markdown over the wire with a 24kB Markdown script + `<script>$('post').markdown()</script>` is just cheeky. ;) Does it really matter though? Nah.

kang 6y ago

Funny. The first class was a public class & anybody could join in at any time. The second class had reserved early seats based on the initial supply of the dices; without investment in the initial dices the game doesnt start, whereas sudoku generation is free.

dgellow 6y ago
Could you explain? Anyone can run a node for a proof-of-stake, or delegate/stake to the node they want. Why do you add the reserved seat to the story?
- hjorthjort 6y ago
  Because that's how Bitcoin maximalists view Ethereum, and basically all other major alts.
- wmf 6y ago
  In the early days of Bitcoin like 2011, you could mine basically for free using a gaming PC you already owned (there are a lot of assumptions here that coiners don't want to get into). I actually did this. This has nothing to do with how PoW works today, where even obscure chains are slammed with GPU farms within minutes of mainnet launch. With PoS you have to buy coins before you can stake. There's no way to bootstrap your stake without spending money.
juanitolol 6y ago
amen
sparkie 6y ago
In the PoS game, the stakers must be trusted to report their dice roll accurately. To overcome this, you would need some kind of random oracle which can't be influenced by any of the participants. The best random oracle we know is of course, Proof-of-Work.
- kang 6y ago
  Basically this. You, a mathematician, walk into the class to purchase a brick to label. The first class has solved sudokus with deterministic difficulty to prove they did work to build the structure, whereas in the second class you have just dice sums & have to trust them telling you they rolled the diced only every fixed interval etc. It's distributed but not decentralized.

capnorange 6y ago

> but without 2 years of constantly solving sudoku under their belt, they couldn't compete with the more experienced sudoku-solvers Inaccurate analogy. Miners are more limited by cheap electricity/cooling than CPU which is more generally available.

Jasper_ 6y ago
The top Bitcoin mining pools in China create their own mining ASICs in house for competitive advantage. You just can't compete without spending years catching up to their hardware designs.
- capnorange 6y ago
  As long as selling ASIC's are profitable -> more R&D and eventually everyone has access to the most capable ASIC's. Off the top of my head, data from 2 years back(things might have changed now). Bitmain, one of the top 3 mining pools, 90% of their revenue was from ASIC sales rather than mining. As long as Bitmain has competitors, they should always be able to put out the best ASIC's to the public.
  - Jasper_ 6y ago
    Haha, you missed the scam. They don't sell their latest mining equipment. Why would they? They sell the mining equipment after they have no use for it and it's costing them money to keep it running.

dperfect 6y ago

I'm not sure I see how this relates to cryptocurrency. It misses the core attributes that give crypto value: scarcity, and the fact that it can be exchanged for other things of value. If there's no shortage of bricks, and those bricks can't be used (or exchanged) for anything other than the material for making the tower taller, then of course that would be pointless. But that's not how cryptocurrency works. The whole purpose of proof-of-work is to protect the attribute of scarcity in a distributed way where one actor can't control (or change) the rules.

capnorange 6y ago
the bricks are the blocks not the currency, here the value is in able to write their own names on the bricks with a sharpie.
- dperfect 6y ago
  Still doesn't make sense to me. > If they add their brick to the top, other students will pay them (in bricks) to write their own names on it with a sharpie Other students are paying in bricks? Is that supposed to be transaction fees, mining (that's the sudoku puzzles), or what? And is there any indication that a name on a brick means anything (or can be exchanged for anything)? Is there a limit to the number of names on bricks? Can those names be verified at any instant, anywhere in the world with near 100% confidence? I know it's a simplification for the purpose of making a point; it's just that the point becomes invalid when the simplification throws out the central characteristics of the thing that's being represented.
  - capnorange 6y ago
    sorry, I read it wrong trying to compare it to bitcoin. I think the author is only demonstrating PoW/PoS and not Bitcoin itself. > Other students are paying in bricks? This is the transaction fees. > Is there a limit to the number of names on bricks? Not necessary. > And is there any indication that a name on a brick means anything (or can be exchanged for anything)? Pride, having taken part in building the biggest building. > Can those names be verified at any instant, anywhere in the world with near 100% confidence? This is only about PoW/PoS, not decentralisation. Ofcourse, PoW/PoS is meaningless if participants are not able to validate. So, in the end it's all about the pride in being able be a part of the tallest set of bricks, hah!

jamesgreenleaf 6y ago

A third class plays using a consensus model based on explicit relationships of trust. Each student keeps track of which of the others they consider trustworthy. Since they all play together everyday, they know who is nice, and who is naughty. When a supermajority trusts the student placing a new block, that student is allowed to place it anywhere. When not enough people trust the student placing the block, they prevent that person from doing so. That person may try again, but until they're willing to play nice and act trustworthy, they cannot place any blocks. They sit in the corner and pout until they come to their senses. No one has to solve any puzzles, or roll any dice. The tower is built efficiently, and all sorts of interesting designs are made by the creative energy that would have otherwise been wasted on busywork.

verdverm 6y ago
This is what I expect post-hype / tech-novelty. There are interesting pieces being built in the blockchain space, they can be assembled in more interesting ways if you think about trust and rule making differently (more traditionally?)
UncleOxidant 6y ago
Which cryptocurrency does this describe?
- verdverm 6y ago
  Hyperledger, Proof-of-authority, coinless blockchain. Cryptocurrencies are not one-to-one with blockchain, rather one thing you can do with them.
- vaer-k 6y ago
  Stellar, I think
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- stilisstuk 6y ago
  None. It's the banking system :)

stevebmark 6y ago

There's no way to save the fundamentally terrible design of guessing random numbers to verify a ledger. These are "solutions" to problems that are self created.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

shoo 6y ago

physical-economy interpretation: the teachers and children are lucky enough to live in a rich society where only a fraction of the population are required to do productive work such as growing food, distributing clean water, building and maintain housing and providing healthcare services. the teachers and children are freed from the burden of contributing productive work that benefits society and can instead engage in complex art / ritual / prayer activities involving plastic bricks, dice and sudoku.

nynx 6y ago
this is a good thing

Gunax 6y ago

Can someone continue the staking analogy? What exactly is being staked? You put a bunch of bricks in the center and randomly choose one, then return the remaining bricks to their owners?

sliken 6y ago
It falls a part a bit. You don't need to stake to use a proof of stake system, much like in bitcoin you don't have to mine to use bitcoin. But generally the bricks you have in play can be lost if the network thinks you are cheating, even lying by omission (downtime) is penalized. So to try to change the blockchain (to allow double spending or zero someone's zccount) or even not to vote for the valid blockchain can be penalized by losing your staked bricks. Another detail lost on the analogy is people get more bricks, just before being a good network citizen by helping the network and staking your bricks.
whytaka 6y ago
What's being staked is ETH (or any other units of PoS-based cryptocurrency) itself. The lock-in, and therefore any opportunity cost associated with the locked-in value, is the price to play. The analogy, to my understanding, is not 100% faithful to how PoS works, at least in Ethereum. There's no choosing one of the bricks, or one of the units of currency or anything. You simply lock in your units as collateral for your right to take part in the dice roll selection where, if chosen, you get to add a new block to the blockchain. If you append a block without cheating, you are rewarded with new units of the currency. If you cheat, your collateral is taken away. You may choose to keep your stake in as long as you want.

hmrtn 6y ago

Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.

DennisP 6y ago
I didn't really see it as being critical of blockchains in general. It's just comparing two blockchain technologies and pointing out that one has a more level playing field.
chrisco255 6y ago
Agreed. I think HN's general sentiment against blockchain and crypto is completely counter to the hacker mentality that PG promoted. And it's frustrating, because this is one of the most intellectually stimulating communities on the web. And I see crypto developments rapidly becoming the most disruptive technology of this decade, if not century and we can't discuss it without bikeshedding. Seems to me like there might be a market for an HN-like community that is focused on crypto tech and developments exclusively (and I don't think Reddit or Twitter quite fill the same niche that HN does).
- jules-jules 6y ago
  Let’s do it! I’ve mostly been coming to HN articles on crypto for the entertainment value only but it’s getting better - slowly.
- barnabee 6y ago
  I’d be interested in this
- twiceaday 6y ago
  You are not witnessing normal conversations. You are witnessing engagement on blockchain articles that are themselves only popular whenever the coins are skyrocketing in price. That is the context most of the time. Even though the articles often spend little time on the price. Similarly, the anti-narrative usually attempts to refute the technology but is benefiting from the "this price is nonsense don't purchase this" crowd. And for me, "I am holding coins and writing / promoting positive articles" seems like the slimier position. I love the tech and absolutely hate the profit motive. It is very easy for me to see "pro tech" arguments as just pumping. The tech has almost nothing to do with the price. The tech establishes that a non-zero price can exist, the rest is people manipulation.

pazimzadeh 6y ago

> The class playing Proof-of-stake has a lot of notebooks filled with doodles. The teacher hasn't provided the children with much else to do and they've become quite bored. This sounds like the dream. In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

gus_massa 6y ago

In the proof of stake class, the people that get rich in dollars are the old timers that collected a lot of bricks during the first year, and now can sell the bricks to the newbies that want to enter the game. (And the teacher, that also saved like the 5% of the initial bricks for ... pedagogical purposes.) In the proof of work class, the people that get rich in dollars are owner of the owner of the stationary that can sell better pencils, sharpers and erasers to the students, the writer of a book with tips about solving Sudoku, the person that writes a Sudoku solving program. Newbies can just buy the solver program, and participate without paying the old timers.

johncolanduoni 6y ago
Except transitioning back to the real world proof of work situation, it’s dominated by players who make their own ASICs and have access to the most heavily subsidized electricity. Newbies can’t even break even anymore.
- gus_massa 6y ago
  Don't confuse newbies with amateurs. It's like any normal industry. Anyone can build a car factory, you don't have to go to Ford and buy a lot of toy cars that they made a long time ago. You just have to hire the right people and build it. Anyone can build a space rocket factory, you don't have to go to NASA and buy a lot of Moon rocks they collected a long time ago. You just have to hire the right people and build it. You have to be Elon-Musk-rich to do any of them anyway.
  - wmf 6y ago
    It has been alleged that anyone cannot build crypto ASICs due to sabotage. https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538...

mcbuilder 6y ago

I'm new to the concept of PoS. Would the underlying mechanism of Burstcoin be proof of stake, i.e. large amounts of HDD space instead of computing the solution hash problems? Or is Burstcoin still proof of work? I'm just curious because the proof of space model seems much more environmentally friendly instead of solving random problems with massive amounts of computation.

wmf 6y ago
Proof of storage space is not PoS since it still requires external resources.

mr_woozy 6y ago

Here we go again........