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I am not convinced that PoW is immune to those pressures or even resistant to it. The people with capital control the mining. At least the environmental proble
by aqme28 5y ago
I am not convinced that PoW is immune to those pressures or even resistant to it. The people with capital control the mining.
At least the environmental problems are reduced with PoS
- fredfoobar 5y agoThere's a whole book written about the history of this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-war https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-w... "Roughly 90% of the hash power once threatened to change the rules of #Bitcoin believing the users didn’t matter in the decision. The users spun up 10s of thousands of full nodes & told them to go f*ck themselves." [1] [1] https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/1394006548876308485?s=20 https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/13940065488763084...
- dahfizz 5y agoWhy wouldn't a similar "takeover" be possible in a PoS system? You really haven't addressed the parent's point.
- fredfoobar 5y ago[responding to the pre-edit question about PoW] I just did, you don't need any capital to run a node. The book documents an incident where there was majority hash-rate (miners) wanting to change the rules against the wishes of the users. more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k
- crispyporkbites 5y agoBut at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power and therefore lots of money. It doesn’t really make a difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to be influential. Now if we could make it Proof of Human, one vote, one person, non-transferable, that would be true distributed consensus. Even then you would get people buying votes with advertising as we see today in “normal” elections.
- fredfoobar 5y ago> But at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power and therefore lots of money. It doesn’t really make a difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to be influential. You're missing the energy part of the equation (opex), that is continuously required.
- hanniabu 5y ago> you don't need any capital to run a node Please point me in the direction where I can find some of these free ASIC miners.....
- fredfoobar 5y agofull node != miner Run your own full node, easiest option: getumbrel.com
- SilasX 5y agoDid you mean PoS? Parent was talking about a PoW system.
- dahfizz 5y agoYes, editted.
- grubles 5y agoYou can do much worse things in a PoS system since power in the system is tied to the asset (ETH). Ethereum DeFi toys are hacked on a daily basis and millions upon millions of dollars worth of ETH is stolen. It's exactly why the DAO hacker was censored -- they controlled more ETH than any single account in the system.
- ekerstein 5y agoThis is only relevant if people aren’t holding their coins on exchanges. Most users are and that concentration will increase as transaction fees are designed to do over the next decade.
- fredfoobar 5y agoI'm here to help that transition, It's already happening, many folks I know are transitioning to a hardware wallet. I've personally helped people onboard on to lightning and running their own node. The whole process of running your own node has improved so much nowadays: getumbrel.com comes to mind.
- vbuterin 5y agoThat was about users' nodes being able to validate blocks; that's an orthogonal issue from PoW vs PoS.
- jude- 5y agoCoins that no ones' nodes validate are worthless, aren't they?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- owens99 5y agoYou're smart, I like your comments.
- leishman 5y agoThe difference is that PoW is censorship resistant. Anybody can be a miner and existing miners cannot censor new miners. Performing new work is external to the network state. In PoS, existing stakers can prevent new stakers from registering. Very important distinction.
- incrudible 5y agoThe network majority can enforce any rule, doesn't matter if it's PoW or PoS.
- sunsu 5y agoWrong. NODEs (individual network participants) enforce the rules, not miners.
- incrudible 5y agoFantasy. Nothing forces miners to accept transactions sent by nodes attempting to enforce some rule.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y agoIts the other way round -- nothing forces nodes to accept bad blocks from miners. An honest node would simply ignore the bad data. The exchanges run nodes, so I would rather be generating or receiving transactions on a chain (or fork) that its users are engaging with. Nodes accept blocks from miners, miners don't accept blocks from nodes.
- incrudible 5y agoWhere do those honest blocks come from, if not from honest miners? Where do honest miners come from?
- minsc__and__boo 5y agoNodes still work on consensus, and given that they have no incentivization to exist, they have been dropping in number over years.
- minsc__and__boo 5y agoThat's a good point, though mining is also controlled by access to the cheapest costs (i.e. siphoning electricity off of a grid).
- colordrops 5y agoControlling the mining doesn't allow you to control much about how transactions work.
- incrudible 5y agoThe network majority decides everything, including how transactions work, how many coins there are, what the block size is... The prospect that there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin is ensured by nothing except majority opinion. It's not inconceivable that this will be relaxed in the future and Bitcoin will have a "Bitcoin Classic" fork where old rules are enforced. This could happen if, for instance, transaction fees don't make up for miner majority rewards.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y agoNot quite -- the 21 million (or more accurately, 2.1 Quadrillion sat) is a hard line. Any coin not enforcing this rule is not bitcoin. There of course will be forks that dont, but they are not bitcoin.
- incrudible 5y ago> Any coin not enforcing this rule is not bitcoin. That's your opinion. > There of course will be forks that dont, but they are not bitcoin. Again, that's your opinion.
- drdeca 5y agoThat’s a definition you can use, sure. And, I do tend to value using words in a consistent way over time. But definitions are choices. People are free to choose what definitions they think of as “the definition of <x>”. Some such choices are likely to cause more confusion when they interact with others, but this is not always sufficient to discourage/prevent some faction of people from choosing some definition that differs from that used by some other faction. Under the definition you are using for bitcoin, such a thing would not be the thing that you currently would consider bitcoin. That’s fine. This doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t use the name “bitcoin” for it. Perhaps 2000 years from now, the word “bitcoin” will instead refer to apples instead, due to random linguistic drift. (Or, a fruit which resembles apples. Will they technically count as apples, according to our current notion of apples?)
- Taek 5y agoThere's a couple of misunderstandings here. Mining is expensive and low margin. Generally, the people who own the most Bitcoins are not the same as the people with the most mining rigs, the two parties tend to be completely divorced, and the miners tend to be strongly incentivized around not rocking the boat (for better or worse). The other misunderstanding is that mining doesn't shape the protocol. The users shape the protocol, and can run any validation software they want. No user has to accept a block by a miner, and every block made by a miner has to conform to the protocol's rules.
- beambot 5y agoPOW is permissionless, in that you don't need anyone's permission to setup a mining rig and contribute significant work. POS isn't permissionless -- you literally have to buy a stake from existing holders in order to participate.
- kelnos 5y agoThe money to build a mining rig and consume the electricity needed to run it is not even remotely permissionless. To add insult to injury, most miners ignore the externalities of that electricity use.
- chrischattin 5y agoIt costs a couple hundred bucks to setup the hardware to run a Bitcoin node. As of today's exchange rate, you need ~$130k to stake ETH.
- drdeca 5y agoWait, to run a node (like, just keeping track of the chain), or to mine in a way that isn’t entirely ineffectual? Because the former doesn’t seem like the proper analogy to staking.
- chrischattin 5y agoYou can mine with a Raspberry Pi. It won't be profitable. But, you'll be contributing to the security of the network.
- drdeca 5y agoWhat is the impact of a miner on the security of the network, conditioned on the event that it never successfully mines a block? I would think it would be 0. The probability that a raspi ever mines a block (like, if it were to start now, not if it was going since the network first started) is negligible. Therefore, I consider the probability that a given raspi would contribute to the security of the network, or, I suppose equivalently, the degree to which it contributes, to be negligible.