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I warned about this a while ago. The economics are set up for Bitcoin and Ethereum to eat up most of the electricity in the world, unless their price stop going

by EGreg 6y ago

I warned about this a while ago. The economics are set up for Bitcoin and Ethereum to eat up most of the electricity in the world, unless their price stop going up. Unfortunately it’s a very reliable feedback loop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26220992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26220992

rmtech 6y ago
Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake
- EGreg 6y ago
  Alright, but even if they do, the original ETH token will be mined. Look at Ethereum Classic. It just recently pumped a lot. Which smart contracts run on it? That's the thing. Read my analysis... it doesn't matter if something better comes along. As long as the tokens are around they can just be more and more scarce and go up in price.
  - olouv 6y ago
    Many people in the field don’t expect that there will be a viable fork this time, basically all defi smart contracts that are now a huge part of ethereum (not the case at the time of classic) would break triggering a cascading chain of liquidations breaking the usability/viability of the chain. However the past has shown that a broken chain can somehow still be valuable due to irrational speculation so we will have to wait and see.
    - delaaxe 6y ago
      That and USDT/USDC on the PoW chain will no longer be supported
- adhoc32 6y ago
  Proof of work = trust physics to determine what happened. Proof of stake = trust humans to determine what happened. PoW is superior.
  - hudon 6y ago
    > Proof of work = trust physics to determine what happened. This is the kind of vapor Bitcoiners love to inhale and it's just not true. In the history of Bitcoin, it has happened many times where the "work" of a chain was irrelevant because humans disagreed with the contents of that chain. See: 2010 fork, 2013 fork, 2017 fork, etc. When two chains are mined using the same binary, yes, "physics" seems to be in control on which chain wins (ie. the one with the most work). But when one chain expresses a slightly different protocol, humans take over and decide which protocol is the valid one (even if it has less work). And if humans are ultimately deciding on what's valid Bitcoin and what's not, we have to ask ourselves which humans are the most influential in the discussion on what's valid and what's not. We need to know who these players are because with a project worth this much, you can bet that they are targets of powerful and wealthy entities.
    - atweiden 6y ago
      Boring histrionics aside, you haven’t refuted GP’s point. Pure proof-of-stake consensus systems all suffer from the misfeature of not even having a basic quantitative fork ranking protocol. Jude C. Nelson critiques this better than anyone [1]: PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked, and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS, block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and, since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're being honest about this?). Under adversarial conditions like those outlined by Jude C. Nelson, PoS reverts to “phone-a-friend consensus”, or — to use a euphemism coined by Vitalik Buterin — “weak subjectivity”. Centralized Git repos offer a close to identical consensus model. What’s the point in having a “blockchain” at all if under adversarial conditions, miners are necessarily demoted in favor of trusted human coordinators? Git is very “green-friendly”, too. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619
noman-land 6y ago
FWIW Ethereum has been planning to move off PoW for years. Really since the very beginning. No idea if it'll work but nonetheless, it's been the plan all along.
delaaxe 6y ago
"Also, bitcoins are constantly lost as dust or misplaced private keys or other things. And so the supply shrinks." No, block rewards are much bigger than dust & lost keys, so supply will keep expanding for a very long time before it shrinks.
- delaaxe 6y ago
  Why the downvote?

by EGreg 6y ago

rmtech 6y ago

Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake

EGreg 6y ago
Alright, but even if they do, the original ETH token will be mined. Look at Ethereum Classic. It just recently pumped a lot. Which smart contracts run on it? That's the thing. Read my analysis... it doesn't matter if something better comes along. As long as the tokens are around they can just be more and more scarce and go up in price.
- olouv 6y ago
  Many people in the field don’t expect that there will be a viable fork this time, basically all defi smart contracts that are now a huge part of ethereum (not the case at the time of classic) would break triggering a cascading chain of liquidations breaking the usability/viability of the chain. However the past has shown that a broken chain can somehow still be valuable due to irrational speculation so we will have to wait and see.
  - delaaxe 6y ago
    That and USDT/USDC on the PoW chain will no longer be supported
adhoc32 6y ago
Proof of work = trust physics to determine what happened. Proof of stake = trust humans to determine what happened. PoW is superior.
- hudon 6y ago
  > Proof of work = trust physics to determine what happened. This is the kind of vapor Bitcoiners love to inhale and it's just not true. In the history of Bitcoin, it has happened many times where the "work" of a chain was irrelevant because humans disagreed with the contents of that chain. See: 2010 fork, 2013 fork, 2017 fork, etc. When two chains are mined using the same binary, yes, "physics" seems to be in control on which chain wins (ie. the one with the most work). But when one chain expresses a slightly different protocol, humans take over and decide which protocol is the valid one (even if it has less work). And if humans are ultimately deciding on what's valid Bitcoin and what's not, we have to ask ourselves which humans are the most influential in the discussion on what's valid and what's not. We need to know who these players are because with a project worth this much, you can bet that they are targets of powerful and wealthy entities.
  - atweiden 6y ago
    Boring histrionics aside, you haven’t refuted GP’s point. Pure proof-of-stake consensus systems all suffer from the misfeature of not even having a basic quantitative fork ranking protocol. Jude C. Nelson critiques this better than anyone [1]: PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked, and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS, block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and, since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're being honest about this?). Under adversarial conditions like those outlined by Jude C. Nelson, PoS reverts to “phone-a-friend consensus”, or — to use a euphemism coined by Vitalik Buterin — “weak subjectivity”. Centralized Git repos offer a close to identical consensus model. What’s the point in having a “blockchain” at all if under adversarial conditions, miners are necessarily demoted in favor of trusted human coordinators? Git is very “green-friendly”, too. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619

noman-land 6y ago

FWIW Ethereum has been planning to move off PoW for years. Really since the very beginning. No idea if it'll work but nonetheless, it's been the plan all along.

delaaxe 6y ago

"Also, bitcoins are constantly lost as dust or misplaced private keys or other things. And so the supply shrinks." No, block rewards are much bigger than dust & lost keys, so supply will keep expanding for a very long time before it shrinks.

delaaxe 6y ago
Why the downvote?