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Satoshi said "The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime."[1] Vitalik goin

Satoshi said "The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime."[1] Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense for any crypto electronic cash currency because people can not trust it if core design changes from time to time. Vitalik will probably come back again to POW after miners calm down. [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611

viklove 6y ago
> Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense Being able to change for the better is not nonsense, it's vital to the survival and stability of a coin. The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. Moving to POS solves this problem. Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot. Miners are obviously angry because they spent millions (probably billions) on GPUs in warehouses to mine ETH, and this is threatening their profits. They're not the significant party when it comes to talking about ETH though. The users and larger ecosystem make up the significant parties. POS will happen. ETH 2.0 will happen. This is why ETH is better than BTC -- it has a leader like Vitalik who is open to changes and knows how to lead implementation. If miners want to throw a tantrum in the process, so be it. We'll just leave them behind.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  >The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. And how much power does Google or Facebook consume? How much power does each Google and Facebook click take? There are good power sources like renewables and nuclear. Power is not a problem. And I'm not sure POS is a good solution because Satoshi would've used it or would've switched to it.
  - wmf 6y ago
    If relativity is such a good theory, why didn't Newton use it?
  - drdeca 6y ago
    Is it not plausible that developing the math to get a stable version of PoS, could take longer than Satoshi had before he dropped off the face of the interwebs? It's not like he's God .
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    >And how much power does Google or Facebook consume? In the case of google, almost an order of magnitude less than bitcoin, and it's 100% from buying renewable electricity (though because of the way energy markets work it's not quite like they don't depend on non-renewable sources). Renewable energy is in the minority of bitcoin energy usage (coal makes up a large fraction of this). > And I'm not sure POS is a good solution because Satoshi would've used it or would've switched to it. Satoshi is not omniscient. Just because Satoshi didn't come up with it doesn't mean it's a bad idea (in fact many of the ideas now integrated in bitcoin did not come from him).
    - mrkramer 6y ago
      Then devs should research and develop PoW which is more efficient and takes less energy and come up with solution that does additional useful work on top of verifying transactions.
      - rcxdude 6y ago
        'PoW which takes less energy' is an oxymoron. The whole point is to demonstrate cryptographically a certain amount of effort (combination of energy and efficiency of hardware implementing a deliberatly inefficient function) has taken place. The network adjusts the difficulty dynamically depending on the amount of effort being put in (basically the rewards are fixed: miners simply compete for a bigger slice of the pie by trying to put in more effort than their competitors). The only limit is when the miners stop making money off of it (and with the price of bitcoin they can buy a lot of energy and still make a profit). This is all by design and the whole point is to make it a lot more profitable to secure the system than to attack it. The only way to really reduce the energy use of coin is to reduce the block rewards or reduce the price. But at a certain point it's more profitable to attack the system than secure it, so it's a difficult balancing act. This one which bitcoin makes no attempt at: the block reward is set to automatically decrease over time at a fixed rate and this hasn't and isn't likely to change. There's no particular reason bitcoin's rewards are either not overkill or sufficient to secure the network against an attacker. Etherium takes a more practical view: because the currency has built-in adjustments which can be made by the foundation, in theory it can adjust the block reward dynamically to the right amount, though there's both political issues in terms of appeasing the miners when you cut their profit and technical issues in actually working out what is good enough. Likewise 'doing additional useful work' is not something you can actually do in a trustless manner like with proof of work (at least not most useful work: certainly there's no task which you could use for mining which anyone actually needs the kind of energy bitcoin uses throwing at it). You need something which is easily distributable relative the to the amount of computing power needed to do it (and even SETI/Folding @ home are really struggling at this point with modern hardware: computing power has outgrown bandwidth substantially), and easy verifiable that the work has been done. There are cryptocurrencies which try to distribute coins based on contributions to distributed computing, but they rely on a central authority to do so, defeating the whole point of cryptocurrencies.
- gruez 6y ago
  >Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot. proof of stake vs proof of work is totally orthogonal to transaction processing volume.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    Not entirely true. PoW's centralisation risk increases as bigger blocks mean longer network propagation and hence higher orphan rates. PoS determine the list of proposers in advance, meaning no orphan risks.
- anaganisk 6y ago
  Doesn't Vitalik defeat the purpose of Decentralisation? One man trying to push his agenda thru?
  - chillacy 6y ago
    The network will probably split, and the best chain will win in the long run. That sounds like decentralization to me.
ketamine__ 6y ago
More transactions are happening on BSC. Most traders only care about low fees.
drcode 6y ago
Yes, and Vitalik announced long before Ethereum 0.1 was released that it would switch to POS in the future.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just to initially mine a distribute coins? Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of proof of stake: "an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a cryptocurrency." And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if it is so good. [1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/ https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
  - drcode 6y ago
    Proof of stake technology wasn't good enough in 2014, so POW was the only option.
everfree 6y ago
Vitalik announced the eventual switch to PoS before he was even finished writing Ethereum, before it was released.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just to initially mine a distribute coins? Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of proof of stake: "an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a cryptocurrency." And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if it is so good. [1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/ https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
  - everfree 6y ago
    Both didn't start with PoS because it's much more difficult to come up with a practical PoS design than a practical PoW design. I consider Casper CBC to be the first robust PoS design, and it took many years of research for it to developed. Look at peercoin for an example of an early PoS design that was fundamentally flawed. PoW was ready back then, PoS tech was not there yet.

viklove 6y ago

> Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense Being able to change for the better is not nonsense, it's vital to the survival and stability of a coin. The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. Moving to POS solves this problem. Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot. Miners are obviously angry because they spent millions (probably billions) on GPUs in warehouses to mine ETH, and this is threatening their profits. They're not the significant party when it comes to talking about ETH though. The users and larger ecosystem make up the significant parties. POS will happen. ETH 2.0 will happen. This is why ETH is better than BTC -- it has a leader like Vitalik who is open to changes and knows how to lead implementation. If miners want to throw a tantrum in the process, so be it. We'll just leave them behind.

mrkramer 6y ago
>The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. And how much power does Google or Facebook consume? How much power does each Google and Facebook click take? There are good power sources like renewables and nuclear. Power is not a problem. And I'm not sure POS is a good solution because Satoshi would've used it or would've switched to it.
- wmf 6y ago
  If relativity is such a good theory, why didn't Newton use it?
- drdeca 6y ago
  Is it not plausible that developing the math to get a stable version of PoS, could take longer than Satoshi had before he dropped off the face of the interwebs? It's not like he's God .
- rcxdude 6y ago
  >And how much power does Google or Facebook consume? In the case of google, almost an order of magnitude less than bitcoin, and it's 100% from buying renewable electricity (though because of the way energy markets work it's not quite like they don't depend on non-renewable sources). Renewable energy is in the minority of bitcoin energy usage (coal makes up a large fraction of this). > And I'm not sure POS is a good solution because Satoshi would've used it or would've switched to it. Satoshi is not omniscient. Just because Satoshi didn't come up with it doesn't mean it's a bad idea (in fact many of the ideas now integrated in bitcoin did not come from him).
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    Then devs should research and develop PoW which is more efficient and takes less energy and come up with solution that does additional useful work on top of verifying transactions.
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      'PoW which takes less energy' is an oxymoron. The whole point is to demonstrate cryptographically a certain amount of effort (combination of energy and efficiency of hardware implementing a deliberatly inefficient function) has taken place. The network adjusts the difficulty dynamically depending on the amount of effort being put in (basically the rewards are fixed: miners simply compete for a bigger slice of the pie by trying to put in more effort than their competitors). The only limit is when the miners stop making money off of it (and with the price of bitcoin they can buy a lot of energy and still make a profit). This is all by design and the whole point is to make it a lot more profitable to secure the system than to attack it. The only way to really reduce the energy use of coin is to reduce the block rewards or reduce the price. But at a certain point it's more profitable to attack the system than secure it, so it's a difficult balancing act. This one which bitcoin makes no attempt at: the block reward is set to automatically decrease over time at a fixed rate and this hasn't and isn't likely to change. There's no particular reason bitcoin's rewards are either not overkill or sufficient to secure the network against an attacker. Etherium takes a more practical view: because the currency has built-in adjustments which can be made by the foundation, in theory it can adjust the block reward dynamically to the right amount, though there's both political issues in terms of appeasing the miners when you cut their profit and technical issues in actually working out what is good enough. Likewise 'doing additional useful work' is not something you can actually do in a trustless manner like with proof of work (at least not most useful work: certainly there's no task which you could use for mining which anyone actually needs the kind of energy bitcoin uses throwing at it). You need something which is easily distributable relative the to the amount of computing power needed to do it (and even SETI/Folding @ home are really struggling at this point with modern hardware: computing power has outgrown bandwidth substantially), and easy verifiable that the work has been done. There are cryptocurrencies which try to distribute coins based on contributions to distributed computing, but they rely on a central authority to do so, defeating the whole point of cryptocurrencies.
gruez 6y ago
>Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot. proof of stake vs proof of work is totally orthogonal to transaction processing volume.
- dannyw 6y ago
  Not entirely true. PoW's centralisation risk increases as bigger blocks mean longer network propagation and hence higher orphan rates. PoS determine the list of proposers in advance, meaning no orphan risks.
anaganisk 6y ago
Doesn't Vitalik defeat the purpose of Decentralisation? One man trying to push his agenda thru?
- chillacy 6y ago
  The network will probably split, and the best chain will win in the long run. That sounds like decentralization to me.

ketamine__ 6y ago

More transactions are happening on BSC. Most traders only care about low fees.

drcode 6y ago

Yes, and Vitalik announced long before Ethereum 0.1 was released that it would switch to POS in the future.

mrkramer 6y ago
I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just to initially mine a distribute coins? Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of proof of stake: "an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a cryptocurrency." And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if it is so good. [1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/ https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
- drcode 6y ago
  Proof of stake technology wasn't good enough in 2014, so POW was the only option.

everfree 6y ago

Vitalik announced the eventual switch to PoS before he was even finished writing Ethereum, before it was released.

mrkramer 6y ago
I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just to initially mine a distribute coins? Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of proof of stake: "an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a cryptocurrency." And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if it is so good. [1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/ https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
- everfree 6y ago
  Both didn't start with PoS because it's much more difficult to come up with a practical PoS design than a practical PoW design. I consider Casper CBC to be the first robust PoS design, and it took many years of research for it to developed. Look at peercoin for an example of an early PoS design that was fundamentally flawed. PoW was ready back then, PoS tech was not there yet.