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>The only way to really reduce the energy use of coin is to reduce the block rewards or reduce the price. You can rewrite difficulty formula and make it easier

>The only way to really reduce the energy use of coin is to reduce the block rewards or reduce the price. You can rewrite difficulty formula and make it easier to mine and therefore decrease energy consumption. Bitcoin's protocol is set in stone but if some dev likes to play with protocol like Vitalik he or she can do it. It would shift market and coin price downwards but if energy consumption is really a problem it is tax you have to pay. >There's no particular reason bitcoin's rewards are either not overkill or sufficient to secure the network against an attacker. Satoshi introduced blockchain checkpoint which basically enforces consensus. "The security safeguard makes it so even if someone does have more than 50% of the network's CPU power, they can't try to go back and redo the block chain" [1] This is centralized decision but it is better than changing protocol completely like Vitalik did (going from PoW to PoS). >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. So centralized foundation controls decentralized network? And what is right amount? >But at a certain point it's more profitable to attack the system than secure it, so it's a difficult balancing act. How come? When all coins are mined miners will switch to transaction fees and they will compete for transaction fees. If you want faster confirmation time you will pay higher transaction fee for your transaction meaning miners earning more, you can do this now as well. >Likewise 'doing additional useful work' is not something you can actually do in a trustless manner like with proof of work It doesn't have to be additional useful work it can be in the core design of the proof of work. In 2013 there was a coin called Primecoin which "computed chains of prime numbers (Cunningham and bi-twin chains), the results of which were published on its blockchain's public ledger, available for use by scientists, mathematicians, and anyone else."[2] "Use of a proof-of-work system to calculate chains of prime numbers was an innovation that produced useful results while also meeting the criteria for a proof-of-work system: it involved a calculation that was difficult to perform but easy to verify, and the difficulty was adjustable." It was first coin which had a proof of work with a practical use. It is still early days but this is the most recent paper I found about this matter: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/203.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/203.pdf [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=437.msg3807#msg3807 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=437.msg3807#msg3807 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

rcxdude 6y ago
> You can rewrite difficulty formula and make it easier to mine and therefore decrease energy consumption. Bitcoin's protocol is set in stone but if some dev likes to play with protocol like Vitalik he or she can do it. It would shift market and coin price downwards but if energy consumption is really a problem it is tax you have to pay. easy to mine == easy to attack. If you make it easier to do the miners (and attackers) will simply do it more (in fact an important attribute of proof of work is that the difficulty is dynamically adjustable to keep the block rate reasonably steady). Changing your proof of work does nothing but change the hardware miners are using. etherium has a function designed to work best (or at least close to best) on GPUs compared to bitcoin's which is most optimally implemented on an ASIC. You can also try to optimise for general purpose CPUs or FPGAs. But it does not change the amount of energy miners are incentivised to put in. Only changing the block reward does that. The whole deal with proof of work is that the work is what secures the network by incentivising miners to do more work than an attacker is willing or able to put in. > Satoshi introduced blockchain checkpoint which basically enforces consensus. This is a nice sanity check but it basically does nothing against 51% attacks. No realistic attack scenario involves a complete rewriting of the chain, nor is that necessary to make money or substantially destroy trust in the system. If you are waiting for your transaction to be in a checkpoint in a version rolled out to almost all bitcoin nodes, I submit that you have a cryptocurrency which is even less convenient for transactions than gold bars. It's also got nothing to do with whether bitcoin's block reward is well chosen or not. > So centralized foundation controls decentralized network? And what is right amount? Indeed. it can't rule entirely without the consent of the markets, but in practice it has a fair amount of control. And what is the right amount of proof of work is a very difficult question to answer. My main point is there's no particular reason bitcoin's reward structure (either block rewards or transaction fees) should correlate with it. Etherium at least in principle has more potential to react to changes in the situation, even if 'what the community/foundation thinks is the right amount' is also probably a relatively poor estimator of the correct level. > computed chains of prime numbers (Cunningham and bi-twin chains), the results of which were published on its blockchain's public ledger, available for use by scientists, mathematicians, and anyone else I would be interested in whether anyone actually used this information. I have similar reservations about other 'useful' proofs of work. I'll believe it when people are actually bidding to have their problems used in the chain (which is inevitable as soon as such a proof of work is useful).

rcxdude 6y ago

> You can rewrite difficulty formula and make it easier to mine and therefore decrease energy consumption. Bitcoin's protocol is set in stone but if some dev likes to play with protocol like Vitalik he or she can do it. It would shift market and coin price downwards but if energy consumption is really a problem it is tax you have to pay. easy to mine == easy to attack. If you make it easier to do the miners (and attackers) will simply do it more (in fact an important attribute of proof of work is that the difficulty is dynamically adjustable to keep the block rate reasonably steady). Changing your proof of work does nothing but change the hardware miners are using. etherium has a function designed to work best (or at least close to best) on GPUs compared to bitcoin's which is most optimally implemented on an ASIC. You can also try to optimise for general purpose CPUs or FPGAs. But it does not change the amount of energy miners are incentivised to put in. Only changing the block reward does that. The whole deal with proof of work is that the work is what secures the network by incentivising miners to do more work than an attacker is willing or able to put in. > Satoshi introduced blockchain checkpoint which basically enforces consensus. This is a nice sanity check but it basically does nothing against 51% attacks. No realistic attack scenario involves a complete rewriting of the chain, nor is that necessary to make money or substantially destroy trust in the system. If you are waiting for your transaction to be in a checkpoint in a version rolled out to almost all bitcoin nodes, I submit that you have a cryptocurrency which is even less convenient for transactions than gold bars. It's also got nothing to do with whether bitcoin's block reward is well chosen or not. > So centralized foundation controls decentralized network? And what is right amount? Indeed. it can't rule entirely without the consent of the markets, but in practice it has a fair amount of control. And what is the right amount of proof of work is a very difficult question to answer. My main point is there's no particular reason bitcoin's reward structure (either block rewards or transaction fees) should correlate with it. Etherium at least in principle has more potential to react to changes in the situation, even if 'what the community/foundation thinks is the right amount' is also probably a relatively poor estimator of the correct level. > computed chains of prime numbers (Cunningham and bi-twin chains), the results of which were published on its blockchain's public ledger, available for use by scientists, mathematicians, and anyone else I would be interested in whether anyone actually used this information. I have similar reservations about other 'useful' proofs of work. I'll believe it when people are actually bidding to have their problems used in the chain (which is inevitable as soon as such a proof of work is useful).