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> It's interesting to me the amount of energy people spend on convincing themselves that a technology (POW) that didn't even exist 12 years ago and ran on home

by geofft 5y ago

> It's interesting to me the amount of energy people spend on convincing themselves that a technology (POW) that didn't even exist 12 years ago and ran on home PCs up until 7 years ago is somehow responsible for wildfires in California or deforestation in Brazil. I'm not sure why years of time matters. Rapid growth is extremely common in technology. How much time did you need to spend convincing yourself that a microblogging website that didn't exist 12 years before 2016 and was constantly crashing 7 years before 2016 had become a major influence on world politics, up to the level of the US presidency? Hopefully not more than a few seconds. How much time would it take to convince you that one BTC, which did not exist 12 years ago and was worth $300 7 years ago, hit more than 200 times that amount this year? Does it seem impossible? The ecological argument against Bitcoin-style consensus is short and fairly obvious from Satoshi's paper. The innovation in that paper (compared to existing techniques like Merkle trees) was the ability to stop double-spend attacks by "mining" chains of transactions. This requires making sure that no single participant - not even the financially-meddling central banks that Bitcoin is supposed to provide an alternative too, and the might of their governments - can mine at a rate higher than the network. This immediately produces an incentive for both the network to make use of as much computational capacity as possible to keep itself safe, and for any attacker to amass enough computational capacity to mount an attack. The incentive goes up as the block reward goes up, which it has been doing in terms of real value (e.g., number of Big Macs you can buy with a reward), even though the reward denominated in BTC goes down over time. Therefore, Bitcoin-style consensus, if it works, is necessarily a major consumer of worldwide computational power, and as long as computers require energy, it is a major consumer of worldwide energy, which isn't really a thing we have an excess of. That's the entire argument. It doesn't take you very much time - unless, of course, you're incentivized to keep trying to find counterarguments.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eoo 5y ago
There's a non-sequitour in your depiction of an attack. Gaining 50% of hashing power is not that interesting unless you really want to prevent someone from using their Bitcoin. And you can only prevent them from using it while your attack is sustained. When someone has gained ~50% of the hashing power, they only can do a small number of attacks [1], that are only profitable under external conditions, and even then, extremely risky unless you have a lot more than 50%. There really are no arguments for a race-to-the-bottom boundless energy spenditure. The equilibrium point is the market's appreciation of the service of securing a network of inflationless, politically neutral money, which is a pretty cool thing to have in our world of tyrannic governments. [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...
- geofft 5y ago
  I didn't say 50%. Simply, there is some level at which an attacker has enough computational power to pull off an attack, and such an attack is fought off by the legitimate participants in the network having enough computational power to make the attack unfeasible. Whether that's 50%, or even lower as the section you linked to suggests ("someone with only 40% of the network computing power can overcome a 6-deep confirmed transaction with a 50% success rate"), or higher as you claim, that point exists. The service of securing the network, as you put it, consists solely in having enough non-malicious computational power to make attacks unfeasible. Right? Or is it something else? If it does, then my argument stands. In order to be secure, Bitcoin needs the legitimate participants of the network to out-compute the illegitimate ones. Whether that's a one-to-one race, or a ten-to-one, or anything else, doesn't matter. The euphemism "securing the network" means nothing other than amassing computational power. If it is really true that attacks from attackers having lots of computational power are infeasible, and that it's not necessary for the network to have lots of computational power in order to "secure the network," then, quite simply, proof-of-work Nakamoto-style mining isn't necessary at all. You can do something like Stellar or (as I understand it, which I admit is not well) Lightning where transactions are confirmed and protected against double-spend by defining the problem in a different way that doesn't require mining. If that approach indeed works, then the objection in TFA stands - the spec should not encourage proof-of-work systems. Frankly, given that we're talking about decentralized identity and not about currency, and there's no double-spend equivalent in proving one's identity (I think?), it seems like Nakamoto consensus should be totally irrelevant here. Maybe inflationless, politically-neutral money is a great thing to have as a form of money, but what makes it a great form of decentralized identity?
  - eoo 5y ago
    1. My point is that you lost me here: > This immediately produces an incentive for both the network to make use of as much computational capacity as possible to keep itself safe, and for any attacker to amass enough computational capacity to mount an attack This seems false to me. Could you elaborate on what incentives you see at play here? On another note, I feel one of the finest design details of Bitcoin is that its "decentralization-failure-mode", a.k.a. under a 50ish-percent-attack, is technically indistinguishable from normal operation. 2. The DID spec doesn't require the use of Bitcoin. So we agree with your last statement-disguised-as-question. Thus, it shouldn't have been listed as a reason for the rejection of the proposal (which spawned this thread)

by geofft 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

eoo 5y ago

There's a non-sequitour in your depiction of an attack. Gaining 50% of hashing power is not that interesting unless you really want to prevent someone from using their Bitcoin. And you can only prevent them from using it while your attack is sustained. When someone has gained ~50% of the hashing power, they only can do a small number of attacks [1], that are only profitable under external conditions, and even then, extremely risky unless you have a lot more than 50%. There really are no arguments for a race-to-the-bottom boundless energy spenditure. The equilibrium point is the market's appreciation of the service of securing a network of inflationless, politically neutral money, which is a pretty cool thing to have in our world of tyrannic governments. [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...

geofft 5y ago
I didn't say 50%. Simply, there is some level at which an attacker has enough computational power to pull off an attack, and such an attack is fought off by the legitimate participants in the network having enough computational power to make the attack unfeasible. Whether that's 50%, or even lower as the section you linked to suggests ("someone with only 40% of the network computing power can overcome a 6-deep confirmed transaction with a 50% success rate"), or higher as you claim, that point exists. The service of securing the network, as you put it, consists solely in having enough non-malicious computational power to make attacks unfeasible. Right? Or is it something else? If it does, then my argument stands. In order to be secure, Bitcoin needs the legitimate participants of the network to out-compute the illegitimate ones. Whether that's a one-to-one race, or a ten-to-one, or anything else, doesn't matter. The euphemism "securing the network" means nothing other than amassing computational power. If it is really true that attacks from attackers having lots of computational power are infeasible, and that it's not necessary for the network to have lots of computational power in order to "secure the network," then, quite simply, proof-of-work Nakamoto-style mining isn't necessary at all. You can do something like Stellar or (as I understand it, which I admit is not well) Lightning where transactions are confirmed and protected against double-spend by defining the problem in a different way that doesn't require mining. If that approach indeed works, then the objection in TFA stands - the spec should not encourage proof-of-work systems. Frankly, given that we're talking about decentralized identity and not about currency, and there's no double-spend equivalent in proving one's identity (I think?), it seems like Nakamoto consensus should be totally irrelevant here. Maybe inflationless, politically-neutral money is a great thing to have as a form of money, but what makes it a great form of decentralized identity?
- eoo 5y ago
  1. My point is that you lost me here: > This immediately produces an incentive for both the network to make use of as much computational capacity as possible to keep itself safe, and for any attacker to amass enough computational capacity to mount an attack This seems false to me. Could you elaborate on what incentives you see at play here? On another note, I feel one of the finest design details of Bitcoin is that its "decentralization-failure-mode", a.k.a. under a 50ish-percent-attack, is technically indistinguishable from normal operation. 2. The DID spec doesn't require the use of Bitcoin. So we agree with your last statement-disguised-as-question. Thus, it shouldn't have been listed as a reason for the rejection of the proposal (which spawned this thread)