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Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk

Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).

pmlnr 6y ago
So point them out, please. One that is efficient on all levels.
- ssijak 6y ago
  Nano. It is also very fast, few seconds to transfer funds.
- tarsinge 6y ago
  Ethereum POS chain is live and the migration of the main chain is planned for the end of the year.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Where can I learn more about this assuming I have an 85-90 IQ?
    - rauljordan2020 6y ago
      https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-ethereum-2-0 https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-ethereum-2-0
- Paradigma11 6y ago
  I like Tezos. Its has a very interesting and developed smart contract technology stack: https://tezos.com/developer-portal https://tezos.com/developer-portal and is Proof of Stake. You can run a node on a cheap laptop.
- keorn 6y ago
  Polkadot: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-consensus https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-consensus
- photon-torpedo 6y ago
  Algorand.
- openfuture 6y ago
  First of all I want to preface my comment with the disclaimer that proof of stake is nonsense in many ways (vulnerable to coordinated bribery attacks - we don't know how to coordinate well enough to execute them yet but the math checks out, also plutocracy..) However it is a pretty expedient way to get something out the door fast (it's literally the simplest form of anti-sybil you can make and a cryptocurrency is anti-sybil + consensus). So given that we accept proof of stake as a good way to prototype different approaches then a cryptocurrency that meets you criteria is the avalanche cryptocurrency (AVAX). The way it works is via "stochastic gossip", whenever there is a conflict (double spend or some kind of decision problem where a node is unsure what is reality) then a consensus "game" is started. The way the game works is that you sample some reasonable sample of peers in the network (say 30-40 peers) and ask them "is A or B the legal state of the world?", now an honest participant will naively believe whatever the majority decision is. Due to how stochastic probability stuff works the network will converge if you repeat this game sufficiently often. The idea is that if the initial state is 60% think A is the correct transaction then after a few rounds (they do 17 rounds which is overkill, you get like nine nines of probability or something) the whole network will have come to that conclusion (each time you run a round of the game the majority will _probably_ grow, eventually only the byzantine nodes are still saying B and if they are not the majority then all conflicts are solved). Now bear in mind, there are some drawbacks, if someone is stubborn or does the opposite of what they should then maybe they can have some outsized influence, but in general this works pretty well and you can have a _lot_ of nodes participate in the network (much much more than in nakomoto consensus due to the different nature of the consensus mechanism). Furthermore you get finality in 3 seconds (even with the 17 rounds) so that is also quite nice (if you want to reach VISA level of transactions... A validator in the avalanche network doesn't need some crazy hardware either.. a raspberry pi is fine, the limitation is you need the machine to be online 80% of the time they stake for. That is one solution. There are others. For example amoveo, which is proof of work BUT it solves the second order byzantine fault tolerance problem (also known as the "oracle problem") which means that you can account for externalities (like energy usage) and throttle the mining rewards or adjust parameters in response. I am working on a very raw but next-gen project myself, it's called datalisp (I wrote a very bad "whitepaper" in one sitting a couple of weeks ago... it's at datalisp.is - there is a telegram channel.. we're trying to figure out a lot of hard problems and we'd rather show than tell so if the whitepaper is somewhat up your alley then there is a lot more elaborate stuff happening in the channel). The point of what I am saying is: if we want to kill bitcoin then the simplest way is to just make a better solution and change the narrative around the whole scene. I hate all this nonsense proof of stake ponzi nonsense, if a cryptocurrency is well designed then there is no advantage from being an early adopter (i.e. we solve byzantine fault tolerance _AND_ tragedy of the commons). Please don't shit all over those of us who want to solve hard problems in a good way just because there's a bunch of assholes trying to get rich quick.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- EL_Loco 6y ago
  I'll second Algorand. Founded by Silvio Micali, Turing and Gödel Prize winner MIT prof who got a bunch of MIT people and now has probably solved the problems of speed, safety and energy consumption of the old blockchains. Check out their white papers if you're interested. I would also suggest checking out Hedera Hashgraph for a newer approach on distributed ledgers.
- disruptalot 6y ago
  The reader will find dozens of suggestion in this thread about how coin X is more "efficient". Note that efficiency would mean producing the same properties but with less resources. Not merely using less resources. While experimentation is certainly desired, it's a fallacy that any coin has actually reproduced bitcoin in a more efficient way. To name a couple, - Bitcoin had what some call an "immaculate conception" where there was no expectation that such a system would work in the first place and where the founder was anonymous. This creates a very different history in comparison with the founder led, pre mined, frothy market launches of today. - Bitcoin has stood the test of time. With each year in production that passes, there is more confidence that the system and specific implementation is sound. Once these other coins have stood in the market for 10 years straight and continued to retain the confidence in their protocol, the comparisons can start.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > have stood in the market for 10 years straight At which point, Bitcoin proponents will up the requirements again. This is an excuse people use to avoid talking about the fact that Bitcoin has spent the last 2-3 years consistently proving that it doesn't scale and that it is unusable as a currency. > had what some call an "immaculate conception" Or, it was a good first try that needs iteration now that we understand that hyper-deflation is a bad thing for a currency, now that we understand that pseudononymous addresses don't provide any real privacy guarantees at all, and now that we understand that transaction speed and cost has to be something that's optimized for early on in a coin's life and that those issues can't be fixed by pasting an ad-hoc, unproven non-blockchain solution on top of the coin 10 years later. The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building.
    - nyolfen 6y ago
      > Or, it was a good first try that needs iteration now that we understand that hyper-deflation is a bad thing for a currency in what sense is bitcoin "hyper-deflation"ary? i think you are thinking of the word "deflation" but i know that doesn't sound as smart >The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building. there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better, so go on
- argvargc 6y ago
  XRP and Stellar were the pioneers in this regard. Since about 2013 and 2014 respectively (or thereabouts). Such systems have negligible energy usage. In general, anything using some flavour of Byzantine Fault Tolerance - of which there are a few - as a method of consensus, consumes very little energy for the payback. If appropriately deployed (similar issue to PoW, decentralisation needs to be maintained) BFT-type consensus mechanisms also exceed the consensus security offered by PoW or PoS. BTC and other PoW models are typically constrained by a 51% corruption of the network. BFT systems typically do better than that, as they often require numbers in excess of 50% to reach agreement (I believe I've seen around 80% - but it's been a while). The way the system usually works is it's constantly reassessing malicious nodes so it becomes difficult for a minority to gain a foothold to cause disruption. They also have the possibility to exhibit less destructive effects if breached (temporary network halt rather than network takeover). Finally, in such systems modifications to the network protocols are voted upon democratically by participants on the network itself, and so far - at least in XRP's case - this appears to have worked well. Ripple has proposed a few changes that have been rejected by the network using this voting process, while others proposed by them or other participants have been approved and become part of the protocol.
  - runeks 6y ago
    XRP is not an alternative to Bitcoin; it's a proposed alternative to SWIFT.
    - argvargc 6y ago
      XRP is whatever any holder wants it to be. If users hold it as a store of value instead of Bitcoin, your strange opinions have absolutely no dominion over that.
- webinvest 6y ago
  I haven’t evaluated and run the code for these 8 cryptocurrencies but the most energy efficient cryptocurrencies with the highest market caps are: Stellar Lumens & Ripple: More centralized but that centralization means there no no wasteful proof of work needed Tezos: like a cheaper version of Ethereum for NFTs. Already powered by proof of stake. Polkadot: Many new coins are beginning to be released on polkadot’s proof of stake network just as they are on Ethereum’s network. Binance coin- centralized and proof of stake. The whole Binance Smart Chain network is powered by just 21 nodes (validates) that stake about 3.5M of Binance coin. Cardano - has a cool name and is powered by proof of stake. Has lots of PHD research papers but most of which are over my head. Algorand- a fast and cheap new cryptocurrency that is powered by two different kinds of validator nodes, one centralized and the other decentralized. Ethereum 2.0 - will probably take 2-3 years to migrate to proof of stake but once it does, it’s possible that many of the above cryptocurrencies will be rendered obsolete unless they’ve captured large amounts of the market before then. All 8 of these coins/tokens should meet your standards of being efficient on all levels. When evaluating cryptocurrencies you’ll notice this pattern. The cryptocurrencies with the cheapest transaction fees tend to use the least amount of energy.
- ric2b 6y ago
  Nano. It's also very fast and has no fees.
runeks 6y ago
That’s true. But it’s important to point out that proof-of-work (PoW) is more decentralized than e.g. proof-of-stake (PoS). For example, with PoW you only need a single honest node to arrive at the correct chain during initial sync. With PoS there is no such guarantee, since there’s no inherent way for a new node joining the network to decide which chain to pick when presented with two different, but equally valid, chains.
- mratsim 6y ago
  There can't be 2 equally valid chains or your protocol is buggy. One chain must have more votes from stakers than the other after a while.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    The chains themselves determine who has more stakers. The whole concept is self-referential and flawed.
    - mratsim 6y ago
      Well of course they have to determine it themselves otherwise they are centralized and dependent on a third-party. Please expand on what you think is flawed and what are the downsides.
      - stickfigure 6y ago
        A blockchain is, fundamentally, a consensus mechanism which decides which transactions are valid. Proof of Stake is self-referential; the parties with value at stake have value because the blockchain says they do. It's a perpetual motion machine. When the shit hits the fan (say, a controversial fork) the people who thought they had control ("stake") will learn who really makes the decisions WRT which blockchain is canonical. That would be the exchanges, and what they agree on will rule no matter who stakes what. The reason Proof of Work works is because someone has to pony up the compute power. The emperor has no clothes. Sorry.
      - 6y ago
bogomipz 6y ago
Could you or someone else say how the model that uses the token itself to replace the "proof of work model" works? Which crypto(s) is using this model?
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  Several of the top 10 cryptocurrencies (by market cap) use "Proof of Stake" (PoS) to replace "Proof of Work". Cardano is one example, but you may not have heard of it, so let's talk about another one. The second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is in the process of transitioning to PoS. This is the one that will likely have the largest impact on reducing energy use and graphics card demand. Here's a brief excerpt of how PoS makes sense: "Unlike proof-of-work, validators don't need to use significant amounts of computational power because they're selected at random and aren't competing." If you want to go deeper, there's more info here: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
- DennisP 6y ago
  System vary. I'm most familiar with Ethereum's, which is the biggest one in production. It starts with a fairly traditional BFT protocol that reaches consensus as long as everyone follows the rules. These have been known in computer science for decades. The twist is that if anyone breaks the rules, you can prove they did it. So everybody deposits some ETH as a security bond, and if they break the rules, any other staker can submit proof of that to get a small reward, and inflict a penalty on the offender. An offense by a small amount of stake does no damage and is assumed to be an accident, so the penalty is small. An offense by enough stake to cause problems is completely destroyed so the attack can't continue.
lofi_lory 6y ago
Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on massive mineral and energy debt. E.g. natural cycles do not allow for biomass generation for food and energy on today's scale. It's simply impossible, the math doesn't check out. See peak phosphorus or dive into the viability of bio-plastics. If we don't tap into some unlimited energy source soon, we have to massively cut back in everything we consume. It's madness to use any unnecessary energy or resource on crypto finance, when there are more energy efficient alternatives.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.
  - _jal 6y ago
    Yeah, except the days of mining bitcoin in your closet are long over, and a substantial part of the energy budget for the datacenters we're actually talking about is cooling.
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    Isnt this kind of like saying we should bring back incandescent light bulbs so people will heat their houses with them? Like, I appreciate trying to dual purpose energy use... but I dont see a specialized computer that pumps heat as practical. I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater. My 800w box doesn't generate anywhere near as many BTUs as a 600w ceramic box heater. Even though I may joke otherwise. While on hot days in Florida, there is a difference when it's on or off in a room... on the 5 actual cold days we get, it can barely keep my feet warm. When I lived in Colorado... Haha no. The little office I had with a buddy, there were 4 servers in a room, either rendering or doing video analytics crunching. They didnt do shit when ambient was 60f, plus our desktops. Using bitcoin miners as home heaters seems as practical as Juiceroo was to "fresh juice".
bko 6y ago
Also a good time to point out just because a product is technically superior doesn't mean it'll be adopted if it relies on network effects. There are a lot of sleazy heavily pre-mined crypto assets that are basically pump and dump
rscho 6y ago
The only energy-efficient blockchain is no blockchain at all. Storage is not free, and you can't do without it.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  Central banking requires a lot of storage too so I'm not sure storage is a good argument against most blockchains (the proof of storage ones aside).
New_California 6y ago
The goal is to maximize immutability, not minimize energy usage. Energy expenditure is what roots Bitcoin in reality and what protects against changes (you would have to expand even more energy to change). Other blockchains are relatively easy to mutate and hence not good candidates for the World's reserve currencies.
- exdsq 6y ago
  Other blockchains using proof-of-stake over proof-of-work are not ‘relatively easy to mutate’ for any definition of easy. Can you point a single occurrence of this happening on a top 30 market cap PoS crypto, such as Cardano, Tezos, or Algorand?
  - New_California 6y ago
    Very many examples. EOS (dPoS) reversed transactions multiple times while being top 10 at the time: https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confirmed-transactions-as-pundits-decry-centralization https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confi... Ethereum Classic was attacked multiple times with chain reversing double spends due to not enough energy being committed to immutability: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfully-double-spends-1-68m-in-second-attack-report https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfu... Ethereum reversed the "DAO hack" with a hard fork. So yes, shitcoins are definitely mutable.
    - exdsq 6y ago
      I said that PoS isn't much easier to mutate than PoW. EOS isn't really decentralised so it's not a fair comparison to other PoS chains and the other two are PoW just like Bitcoin. On a side note my colleagues are working on improving ETC against 51% attacks at the moment so hopefully that works out. Definitely wouldn't refer to Ethereum as a 'shitcoin'. https://static.iohk.io/docs/etc/ecip-comparison-for-51-attack-resistance.pdf https://static.iohk.io/docs/etc/ecip-comparison-for-51-attac...
    - imtringued 6y ago
wyager 6y ago
No scheme besides proof-of-work provides the same security guarantees as proof-of-work. Proof-of-stake, the most popular alternative, is vulnerable to attacks like “grinding” because casting conflicting votes doesn’t cost anything. The end result is a much less secure cryptosystem. Attempts to address this are still under active research, and may not be possible at all.
- dlubarov 6y ago
  I would say grinding is a solved problem. We have practical constructions of verifiable delay functions now, e.g. [1] or [2]. (For anyone not familiar with VDFs or how they fit in with , I would recommend one of Dan Boneh's talks, like [3].) Verifiable random functions are another good option -- unlike VDFs, they do allow some manipulation (e.g. the last miner in an epoch can influence one bit by skipping their block), but we've analyzed the effects and (with reasonable parameters) the advantages from manipulation are fairly negligible. We can also combine VDFs with VRFs, so if the VDF was somehow broken, security reduces to VRF security. [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623 https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623 [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/370 https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/370 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN-1q8c50q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN-1q8c50q0
nscalf 6y ago
To call out one I heard about recently, Chia is doing proof of space and time. Computationally heavy to set up a “plot”, like 6-8 hours of work. Then virtually zero overhead unless you’re chosen as a “winner”.
jlrubin 6y ago
running on energy v.s. running on oligarchy. I don't love the energy use but let's not make a false equivalence.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

pmlnr 6y ago

So point them out, please. One that is efficient on all levels.

ssijak 6y ago
Nano. It is also very fast, few seconds to transfer funds.
tarsinge 6y ago
Ethereum POS chain is live and the migration of the main chain is planned for the end of the year.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Where can I learn more about this assuming I have an 85-90 IQ?
  - rauljordan2020 6y ago
    https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-ethereum-2-0 https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-ethereum-2-0
Paradigma11 6y ago
I like Tezos. Its has a very interesting and developed smart contract technology stack: https://tezos.com/developer-portal https://tezos.com/developer-portal and is Proof of Stake. You can run a node on a cheap laptop.
keorn 6y ago
Polkadot: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-consensus https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-consensus
photon-torpedo 6y ago
Algorand.
openfuture 6y ago
First of all I want to preface my comment with the disclaimer that proof of stake is nonsense in many ways (vulnerable to coordinated bribery attacks - we don't know how to coordinate well enough to execute them yet but the math checks out, also plutocracy..) However it is a pretty expedient way to get something out the door fast (it's literally the simplest form of anti-sybil you can make and a cryptocurrency is anti-sybil + consensus). So given that we accept proof of stake as a good way to prototype different approaches then a cryptocurrency that meets you criteria is the avalanche cryptocurrency (AVAX). The way it works is via "stochastic gossip", whenever there is a conflict (double spend or some kind of decision problem where a node is unsure what is reality) then a consensus "game" is started. The way the game works is that you sample some reasonable sample of peers in the network (say 30-40 peers) and ask them "is A or B the legal state of the world?", now an honest participant will naively believe whatever the majority decision is. Due to how stochastic probability stuff works the network will converge if you repeat this game sufficiently often. The idea is that if the initial state is 60% think A is the correct transaction then after a few rounds (they do 17 rounds which is overkill, you get like nine nines of probability or something) the whole network will have come to that conclusion (each time you run a round of the game the majority will _probably_ grow, eventually only the byzantine nodes are still saying B and if they are not the majority then all conflicts are solved). Now bear in mind, there are some drawbacks, if someone is stubborn or does the opposite of what they should then maybe they can have some outsized influence, but in general this works pretty well and you can have a _lot_ of nodes participate in the network (much much more than in nakomoto consensus due to the different nature of the consensus mechanism). Furthermore you get finality in 3 seconds (even with the 17 rounds) so that is also quite nice (if you want to reach VISA level of transactions... A validator in the avalanche network doesn't need some crazy hardware either.. a raspberry pi is fine, the limitation is you need the machine to be online 80% of the time they stake for. That is one solution. There are others. For example amoveo, which is proof of work BUT it solves the second order byzantine fault tolerance problem (also known as the "oracle problem") which means that you can account for externalities (like energy usage) and throttle the mining rewards or adjust parameters in response. I am working on a very raw but next-gen project myself, it's called datalisp (I wrote a very bad "whitepaper" in one sitting a couple of weeks ago... it's at datalisp.is - there is a telegram channel.. we're trying to figure out a lot of hard problems and we'd rather show than tell so if the whitepaper is somewhat up your alley then there is a lot more elaborate stuff happening in the channel). The point of what I am saying is: if we want to kill bitcoin then the simplest way is to just make a better solution and change the narrative around the whole scene. I hate all this nonsense proof of stake ponzi nonsense, if a cryptocurrency is well designed then there is no advantage from being an early adopter (i.e. we solve byzantine fault tolerance _AND_ tragedy of the commons). Please don't shit all over those of us who want to solve hard problems in a good way just because there's a bunch of assholes trying to get rich quick.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
EL_Loco 6y ago
I'll second Algorand. Founded by Silvio Micali, Turing and Gödel Prize winner MIT prof who got a bunch of MIT people and now has probably solved the problems of speed, safety and energy consumption of the old blockchains. Check out their white papers if you're interested. I would also suggest checking out Hedera Hashgraph for a newer approach on distributed ledgers.
disruptalot 6y ago
The reader will find dozens of suggestion in this thread about how coin X is more "efficient". Note that efficiency would mean producing the same properties but with less resources. Not merely using less resources. While experimentation is certainly desired, it's a fallacy that any coin has actually reproduced bitcoin in a more efficient way. To name a couple, - Bitcoin had what some call an "immaculate conception" where there was no expectation that such a system would work in the first place and where the founder was anonymous. This creates a very different history in comparison with the founder led, pre mined, frothy market launches of today. - Bitcoin has stood the test of time. With each year in production that passes, there is more confidence that the system and specific implementation is sound. Once these other coins have stood in the market for 10 years straight and continued to retain the confidence in their protocol, the comparisons can start.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > have stood in the market for 10 years straight At which point, Bitcoin proponents will up the requirements again. This is an excuse people use to avoid talking about the fact that Bitcoin has spent the last 2-3 years consistently proving that it doesn't scale and that it is unusable as a currency. > had what some call an "immaculate conception" Or, it was a good first try that needs iteration now that we understand that hyper-deflation is a bad thing for a currency, now that we understand that pseudononymous addresses don't provide any real privacy guarantees at all, and now that we understand that transaction speed and cost has to be something that's optimized for early on in a coin's life and that those issues can't be fixed by pasting an ad-hoc, unproven non-blockchain solution on top of the coin 10 years later. The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building.
  - nyolfen 6y ago
    > Or, it was a good first try that needs iteration now that we understand that hyper-deflation is a bad thing for a currency in what sense is bitcoin "hyper-deflation"ary? i think you are thinking of the word "deflation" but i know that doesn't sound as smart >The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building. there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better, so go on
argvargc 6y ago
XRP and Stellar were the pioneers in this regard. Since about 2013 and 2014 respectively (or thereabouts). Such systems have negligible energy usage. In general, anything using some flavour of Byzantine Fault Tolerance - of which there are a few - as a method of consensus, consumes very little energy for the payback. If appropriately deployed (similar issue to PoW, decentralisation needs to be maintained) BFT-type consensus mechanisms also exceed the consensus security offered by PoW or PoS. BTC and other PoW models are typically constrained by a 51% corruption of the network. BFT systems typically do better than that, as they often require numbers in excess of 50% to reach agreement (I believe I've seen around 80% - but it's been a while). The way the system usually works is it's constantly reassessing malicious nodes so it becomes difficult for a minority to gain a foothold to cause disruption. They also have the possibility to exhibit less destructive effects if breached (temporary network halt rather than network takeover). Finally, in such systems modifications to the network protocols are voted upon democratically by participants on the network itself, and so far - at least in XRP's case - this appears to have worked well. Ripple has proposed a few changes that have been rejected by the network using this voting process, while others proposed by them or other participants have been approved and become part of the protocol.
- runeks 6y ago
  XRP is not an alternative to Bitcoin; it's a proposed alternative to SWIFT.
  - argvargc 6y ago
    XRP is whatever any holder wants it to be. If users hold it as a store of value instead of Bitcoin, your strange opinions have absolutely no dominion over that.
webinvest 6y ago
I haven’t evaluated and run the code for these 8 cryptocurrencies but the most energy efficient cryptocurrencies with the highest market caps are: Stellar Lumens & Ripple: More centralized but that centralization means there no no wasteful proof of work needed Tezos: like a cheaper version of Ethereum for NFTs. Already powered by proof of stake. Polkadot: Many new coins are beginning to be released on polkadot’s proof of stake network just as they are on Ethereum’s network. Binance coin- centralized and proof of stake. The whole Binance Smart Chain network is powered by just 21 nodes (validates) that stake about 3.5M of Binance coin. Cardano - has a cool name and is powered by proof of stake. Has lots of PHD research papers but most of which are over my head. Algorand- a fast and cheap new cryptocurrency that is powered by two different kinds of validator nodes, one centralized and the other decentralized. Ethereum 2.0 - will probably take 2-3 years to migrate to proof of stake but once it does, it’s possible that many of the above cryptocurrencies will be rendered obsolete unless they’ve captured large amounts of the market before then. All 8 of these coins/tokens should meet your standards of being efficient on all levels. When evaluating cryptocurrencies you’ll notice this pattern. The cryptocurrencies with the cheapest transaction fees tend to use the least amount of energy.
ric2b 6y ago
Nano. It's also very fast and has no fees.

runeks 6y ago

That’s true. But it’s important to point out that proof-of-work (PoW) is more decentralized than e.g. proof-of-stake (PoS). For example, with PoW you only need a single honest node to arrive at the correct chain during initial sync. With PoS there is no such guarantee, since there’s no inherent way for a new node joining the network to decide which chain to pick when presented with two different, but equally valid, chains.

mratsim 6y ago
There can't be 2 equally valid chains or your protocol is buggy. One chain must have more votes from stakers than the other after a while.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  The chains themselves determine who has more stakers. The whole concept is self-referential and flawed.
  - mratsim 6y ago
    Well of course they have to determine it themselves otherwise they are centralized and dependent on a third-party. Please expand on what you think is flawed and what are the downsides.
    - stickfigure 6y ago
      A blockchain is, fundamentally, a consensus mechanism which decides which transactions are valid. Proof of Stake is self-referential; the parties with value at stake have value because the blockchain says they do. It's a perpetual motion machine. When the shit hits the fan (say, a controversial fork) the people who thought they had control ("stake") will learn who really makes the decisions WRT which blockchain is canonical. That would be the exchanges, and what they agree on will rule no matter who stakes what. The reason Proof of Work works is because someone has to pony up the compute power. The emperor has no clothes. Sorry.
    - 6y ago

bogomipz 6y ago

Could you or someone else say how the model that uses the token itself to replace the "proof of work model" works? Which crypto(s) is using this model?

bonestamp2 6y ago
Several of the top 10 cryptocurrencies (by market cap) use "Proof of Stake" (PoS) to replace "Proof of Work". Cardano is one example, but you may not have heard of it, so let's talk about another one. The second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is in the process of transitioning to PoS. This is the one that will likely have the largest impact on reducing energy use and graphics card demand. Here's a brief excerpt of how PoS makes sense: "Unlike proof-of-work, validators don't need to use significant amounts of computational power because they're selected at random and aren't competing." If you want to go deeper, there's more info here: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
DennisP 6y ago
System vary. I'm most familiar with Ethereum's, which is the biggest one in production. It starts with a fairly traditional BFT protocol that reaches consensus as long as everyone follows the rules. These have been known in computer science for decades. The twist is that if anyone breaks the rules, you can prove they did it. So everybody deposits some ETH as a security bond, and if they break the rules, any other staker can submit proof of that to get a small reward, and inflict a penalty on the offender. An offense by a small amount of stake does no damage and is assumed to be an accident, so the penalty is small. An offense by enough stake to cause problems is completely destroyed so the attack can't continue.

lofi_lory 6y ago

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on massive mineral and energy debt. E.g. natural cycles do not allow for biomass generation for food and energy on today's scale. It's simply impossible, the math doesn't check out. See peak phosphorus or dive into the viability of bio-plastics. If we don't tap into some unlimited energy source soon, we have to massively cut back in everything we consume. It's madness to use any unnecessary energy or resource on crypto finance, when there are more energy efficient alternatives.

mschuster91 6y ago
> Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.
- _jal 6y ago
  Yeah, except the days of mining bitcoin in your closet are long over, and a substantial part of the energy budget for the datacenters we're actually talking about is cooling.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  Isnt this kind of like saying we should bring back incandescent light bulbs so people will heat their houses with them? Like, I appreciate trying to dual purpose energy use... but I dont see a specialized computer that pumps heat as practical. I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater. My 800w box doesn't generate anywhere near as many BTUs as a 600w ceramic box heater. Even though I may joke otherwise. While on hot days in Florida, there is a difference when it's on or off in a room... on the 5 actual cold days we get, it can barely keep my feet warm. When I lived in Colorado... Haha no. The little office I had with a buddy, there were 4 servers in a room, either rendering or doing video analytics crunching. They didnt do shit when ambient was 60f, plus our desktops. Using bitcoin miners as home heaters seems as practical as Juiceroo was to "fresh juice".

bko 6y ago

Also a good time to point out just because a product is technically superior doesn't mean it'll be adopted if it relies on network effects. There are a lot of sleazy heavily pre-mined crypto assets that are basically pump and dump

rscho 6y ago

The only energy-efficient blockchain is no blockchain at all. Storage is not free, and you can't do without it.

bonestamp2 6y ago
Central banking requires a lot of storage too so I'm not sure storage is a good argument against most blockchains (the proof of storage ones aside).

New_California 6y ago

The goal is to maximize immutability, not minimize energy usage. Energy expenditure is what roots Bitcoin in reality and what protects against changes (you would have to expand even more energy to change). Other blockchains are relatively easy to mutate and hence not good candidates for the World's reserve currencies.

exdsq 6y ago
Other blockchains using proof-of-stake over proof-of-work are not ‘relatively easy to mutate’ for any definition of easy. Can you point a single occurrence of this happening on a top 30 market cap PoS crypto, such as Cardano, Tezos, or Algorand?
- New_California 6y ago
  Very many examples. EOS (dPoS) reversed transactions multiple times while being top 10 at the time: https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confirmed-transactions-as-pundits-decry-centralization https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confi... Ethereum Classic was attacked multiple times with chain reversing double spends due to not enough energy being committed to immutability: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfully-double-spends-1-68m-in-second-attack-report https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfu... Ethereum reversed the "DAO hack" with a hard fork. So yes, shitcoins are definitely mutable.
  - exdsq 6y ago
    I said that PoS isn't much easier to mutate than PoW. EOS isn't really decentralised so it's not a fair comparison to other PoS chains and the other two are PoW just like Bitcoin. On a side note my colleagues are working on improving ETC against 51% attacks at the moment so hopefully that works out. Definitely wouldn't refer to Ethereum as a 'shitcoin'. https://static.iohk.io/docs/etc/ecip-comparison-for-51-attack-resistance.pdf https://static.iohk.io/docs/etc/ecip-comparison-for-51-attac...
  - imtringued 6y ago

wyager 6y ago

No scheme besides proof-of-work provides the same security guarantees as proof-of-work. Proof-of-stake, the most popular alternative, is vulnerable to attacks like “grinding” because casting conflicting votes doesn’t cost anything. The end result is a much less secure cryptosystem. Attempts to address this are still under active research, and may not be possible at all.

dlubarov 6y ago
I would say grinding is a solved problem. We have practical constructions of verifiable delay functions now, e.g. [1] or [2]. (For anyone not familiar with VDFs or how they fit in with , I would recommend one of Dan Boneh's talks, like [3].) Verifiable random functions are another good option -- unlike VDFs, they do allow some manipulation (e.g. the last miner in an epoch can influence one bit by skipping their block), but we've analyzed the effects and (with reasonable parameters) the advantages from manipulation are fairly negligible. We can also combine VDFs with VRFs, so if the VDF was somehow broken, security reduces to VRF security. [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623 https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623 [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/370 https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/370 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN-1q8c50q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN-1q8c50q0

nscalf 6y ago

To call out one I heard about recently, Chia is doing proof of space and time. Computationally heavy to set up a “plot”, like 6-8 hours of work. Then virtually zero overhead unless you’re chosen as a “winner”.

jlrubin 6y ago

running on energy v.s. running on oligarchy. I don't love the energy use but let's not make a false equivalence.

deleted 6y ago
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