6 ms·

Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus".

by max_ 5y ago

Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus". I don't think anything else can solve decentralized rate limiting more effectively than proof of work. I wrote a short blog post about the use of Proof of work beyond crypto mining [0] [0] https://as1ndu.xyz/2019/11/proof-of-work-on-layer-two/ https://as1ndu.xyz/2019/11/proof-of-work-on-layer-two/

delusional 5y ago
> Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus". When you use "but" it's customary for the following statement to disprove or argue against the previous statement. How does it being applicable to more stuff stop it from being a gigantic waste of energy?
- max_ 5y ago
  >How does it being applicable to more stuff stop it from being a gigantic waste of energy? "Applicable" means that it is useful, as it solves the problems I talk about in the post.
- wackro 5y ago
  It's all in the link he posted
- michaelscott 5y ago
  Everything expends energy in order to solve some problem or accomplish some goal. Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. If it can solve more problems then the expending of energy becomes more justified.
  - xg15 5y ago
    > Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. No, it's very much not besides the point - and I'd argue it's one of the core issues with PoW and the reason why people are so appalled by it. Yes, everything expends energy, but the special property of PoW is that the energy cost is intentional. Therefore it's fundamentally impossible to reduce the energy cost as that would defeat the whole point: If someone manages to find a more efficient way to mine, this is a threat to the network and has to be counteracted by raising the difficulty. Conversely, the amount of energy that can be expended for mining a single block is potentially unbounded, in contrast to other problems ehere the energy actually perform useful work. This leaves belief whether or not the problem is worth pursuing as the only measure about the energy cost of PoW. And this belief is influenced by all kinds of factors from technical to financial to psychological. But it is generally not influenced by the amount of energy already spent.
    - mgraczyk 5y ago
      This is factually incorrect. I'm not a fan at all of proof of work schemes, but it's important to criticize them correctly. Energy consumption is not fundamental in any way. Proof of work depends only in the consumption of some resource that has economic value. It doesn't have to require any energy at all. For example, Chia had a proof of work mechanism that uses disk storage instead of computation. It uses comparably very little energy and the difficulty is not substantially sensitive to energy efficiency because the cost is dominated by space rather than computation. There are other examples that attempt to use things like spatially distributed network bandwidth as a resource. I'm not a fan of most of these, but the point is that energy is not fundamental.
      - lisper 5y ago
        > Chia had a proof of work mechanism that uses disk storage instead of computation And how do you think those disks get made? (And how do you run those disks without expending energy?)
        mgraczyk 5y ago
  - kaba0 5y ago
    But if something has a fundamentally monotonically increasing cost in terms of energy, when will we reach the point where it no longer worth the tradeoff? Is taking more energy than Argentina really worthwhile for the few that uses cryptos?
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    To add to this: we can also harvest energy from processes that would happen anyway. Eg solar power and hydro power. The water is going to flow downhill whether there is an electric generator in the way or not. Same for solar panels - whether we capture it and convert it to electrical energy or not makes little difference for the Earth as a whole. We just get a whole bunch of energy "for free" because we're inserting ourselves into a natural process that's ongoing (we do need the apparatus to capture it though). Nuclear and fossil fuels are similar, but the timescales involved there are far too long for humans. Ie burning coal does have negative side effects because we aren't creating new coal from the carbon in the atmosphere at comparable rates.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  It being a waste is a matter of opinion. There are negative externalities in some cases, but profit and services generated by the use of crypto have value to people. If the problem is the pollution produced by power generation, then it's disingenuous to single out crypto for criticism. We really should be enforcing accountability and forcing markets to price in the negative externalities. Carbon capture and other technologies are surfacing to allow for that, and within a decade or so we should see widespread implementation. Legislation will arise out of the consensus of voters and mate technology and regulation. If the problem is that you think crypto is frivolous or implicitly a waste of resources? "Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man..."
  - lwansbrough 5y ago
    It's not a matter of opinion. Crypto provides incredibly little value to the average person vs. its energy usage. It takes an entire tank of gasoline to make a single Bitcoin transaction, don't insult me by telling me it's a matter of opinion that that's a waste. And Proof of Waste is about more than it's impact on the environment through it's egregious energy use. Even in places that use clean energy, Bitcoin mining is putting a strain on the grid. (I suspect mining had something to do with Texas' grid problems last winter.) Even if you're harnessing off grid energy, you're a leech sucking value out of the economy by being a major contributor to the chip/GPU shortage. And for what? All to contribute to a system that has greater wealth inequality than the existing financial system. Brilliant stuff.
    - awrence 5y ago
      This is your opinion.
    - vernon99 5y ago
      Is sun radiating energy in all directions also a waste in your terminology? You can call any use of energy “waste” this way. Would bitcoin mining be better if it would use clean energy? I think you really are mixing two things here: energy production (that can be “good” or “bad” from ethical or evological perspective) and energy consumption that cannot be bad, just inefficient in terms of the return in business value (but it’s for the owners or customers to calculate, not bystanders to judge). Imo mixing two is a massive fallacy. Edit: typos.
- nathias 5y ago
  something is a waste if it is not useful, making new uses makes it less of a waste by definition
jayd16 5y ago
I guess to some degree waste is value judgement but by definition POW is never not incredibly expensive relative to the value it provides. It needs to always be expensive or the system is vulnerable to a sudden burst of new and malicious workers.
staticassertion 5y ago
I certainly look forward to seeing real problems solved with these algorithms, but right now that work seems to be lost in the noise of crypto. I'd be curious to hear more about decentralized rate limiting. That sounds like a reasonable problem to solve with PoW. Although it also sounds like a problem I can solve pretty easily today without PoW so idk.
- CuriousCosmic 5y ago
  I posted about this elsewhere in this thread but you might be interested in this paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379 https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379 It gets about 50% efficiency compared to the current state of the art for the problem space without compromising any of the security properties that make for a good PoW algorithm. Generally I'm not a fan of PoW and prefer internal resource based consensus algorithms but PoUW algorithms seem rather interesting. I think we are reaching a point of maturity in the space that'll allow these types of self-securing service marketplaces (which really is what PoUW is) to reach their logical conclusion.
xg15 5y ago
The fundamental technical problem I see with PoW is that it only seldomly really aligns with the "good guy/bad guy" boundary. I.e. the basic purpose of PoW is security: Allow desirable actors in, keep malicious actors out. But this implies that "ability to put in more work" is actually a working way to distinguish good actors from bad actors. This is true in very specific cases, like blockchains - but I believe in most cases, this is actually not given, such as emails. E.g., suppose we're using PoW to secure email: We do away with SPIF and all that and simply require each email to contain some hash that a sender had to bruteforce (just an example: use whatever PoW scheme you want). If the scheme has a fixed difficulty, spammers can easily defeat it - they just have to rent (or capture) more machines. So you have to dynamically adjust the difficulty to meet some message/time unit quota. Congrats, suddenly the whole network is limitited to some maximum throughput. Alternatively, you can have separate difficulties for each user - but then, you need a way to track individual users, compute individual difficulties, etc. All of this needs some centralized entity again and agents that enforce the rules. If you have all that, why not use traditional rate limit and forgo the energy (or resource) waste?
marcosdumay 5y ago
Well as an example, it's used in cryptographic key generator functions. But there aren't many things it solves well. The easiest and most economical solution to "decentralizing rate limiting" is usually centralizing something.
CuriousCosmic 5y ago
You may be interested in this paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379 https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379 It provides a Proof-of-Useful-Work algorithm that is resistant to pre-computation and most other weaknesses that would otherwise prevent useful work from being done while achieving Nakamoto Consensus while at the same time managing to convert ~50% of the computation spent into useful work. Additionally the work being done is pretty generally useful and is applicable to a lot of different problems. I think the space is starting to reach a point of academic maturity and formalisation of the tech stack such that we can start meaningfully trying to solve these types of problems.
michaelsbradley 5y ago
> I don't think anything else can solve decentralized rate limiting more effectively than proof of work. Have you heard of Rate Limiting Nullifiers? https://github.com/vacp2p/research/blob/master/rln-research/Waku_RLN_Relay.pdf https://github.com/vacp2p/research/blob/master/rln-research/...
maxerickson 5y ago
Is decentralized rate limiting a useful problem to solve?

by max_ 5y ago

delusional 5y ago

> Alot of sentiment today thinks proof of work is a waste of energy, but I assert that it can solve a lot more problems beyond its use for "Nakamoto Consensus". When you use "but" it's customary for the following statement to disprove or argue against the previous statement. How does it being applicable to more stuff stop it from being a gigantic waste of energy?

max_ 5y ago
>How does it being applicable to more stuff stop it from being a gigantic waste of energy? "Applicable" means that it is useful, as it solves the problems I talk about in the post.
wackro 5y ago
It's all in the link he posted
michaelscott 5y ago
Everything expends energy in order to solve some problem or accomplish some goal. Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. If it can solve more problems then the expending of energy becomes more justified.
- xg15 5y ago
  > Whether the problem is worth solving or the goal worth pursuing given the required energy is subjective, but beside the point. No, it's very much not besides the point - and I'd argue it's one of the core issues with PoW and the reason why people are so appalled by it. Yes, everything expends energy, but the special property of PoW is that the energy cost is intentional. Therefore it's fundamentally impossible to reduce the energy cost as that would defeat the whole point: If someone manages to find a more efficient way to mine, this is a threat to the network and has to be counteracted by raising the difficulty. Conversely, the amount of energy that can be expended for mining a single block is potentially unbounded, in contrast to other problems ehere the energy actually perform useful work. This leaves belief whether or not the problem is worth pursuing as the only measure about the energy cost of PoW. And this belief is influenced by all kinds of factors from technical to financial to psychological. But it is generally not influenced by the amount of energy already spent.
  - mgraczyk 5y ago
    This is factually incorrect. I'm not a fan at all of proof of work schemes, but it's important to criticize them correctly. Energy consumption is not fundamental in any way. Proof of work depends only in the consumption of some resource that has economic value. It doesn't have to require any energy at all. For example, Chia had a proof of work mechanism that uses disk storage instead of computation. It uses comparably very little energy and the difficulty is not substantially sensitive to energy efficiency because the cost is dominated by space rather than computation. There are other examples that attempt to use things like spatially distributed network bandwidth as a resource. I'm not a fan of most of these, but the point is that energy is not fundamental.
    - lisper 5y ago
      > Chia had a proof of work mechanism that uses disk storage instead of computation And how do you think those disks get made? (And how do you run those disks without expending energy?)
      - mgraczyk 5y ago
- kaba0 5y ago
  But if something has a fundamentally monotonically increasing cost in terms of energy, when will we reach the point where it no longer worth the tradeoff? Is taking more energy than Argentina really worthwhile for the few that uses cryptos?
- Aerroon 5y ago
  To add to this: we can also harvest energy from processes that would happen anyway. Eg solar power and hydro power. The water is going to flow downhill whether there is an electric generator in the way or not. Same for solar panels - whether we capture it and convert it to electrical energy or not makes little difference for the Earth as a whole. We just get a whole bunch of energy "for free" because we're inserting ourselves into a natural process that's ongoing (we do need the apparatus to capture it though). Nuclear and fossil fuels are similar, but the timescales involved there are far too long for humans. Ie burning coal does have negative side effects because we aren't creating new coal from the carbon in the atmosphere at comparable rates.
robbedpeter 5y ago
It being a waste is a matter of opinion. There are negative externalities in some cases, but profit and services generated by the use of crypto have value to people. If the problem is the pollution produced by power generation, then it's disingenuous to single out crypto for criticism. We really should be enforcing accountability and forcing markets to price in the negative externalities. Carbon capture and other technologies are surfacing to allow for that, and within a decade or so we should see widespread implementation. Legislation will arise out of the consensus of voters and mate technology and regulation. If the problem is that you think crypto is frivolous or implicitly a waste of resources? "Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man..."
- lwansbrough 5y ago
  It's not a matter of opinion. Crypto provides incredibly little value to the average person vs. its energy usage. It takes an entire tank of gasoline to make a single Bitcoin transaction, don't insult me by telling me it's a matter of opinion that that's a waste. And Proof of Waste is about more than it's impact on the environment through it's egregious energy use. Even in places that use clean energy, Bitcoin mining is putting a strain on the grid. (I suspect mining had something to do with Texas' grid problems last winter.) Even if you're harnessing off grid energy, you're a leech sucking value out of the economy by being a major contributor to the chip/GPU shortage. And for what? All to contribute to a system that has greater wealth inequality than the existing financial system. Brilliant stuff.
  - awrence 5y ago
    This is your opinion.
  - vernon99 5y ago
    Is sun radiating energy in all directions also a waste in your terminology? You can call any use of energy “waste” this way. Would bitcoin mining be better if it would use clean energy? I think you really are mixing two things here: energy production (that can be “good” or “bad” from ethical or evological perspective) and energy consumption that cannot be bad, just inefficient in terms of the return in business value (but it’s for the owners or customers to calculate, not bystanders to judge). Imo mixing two is a massive fallacy. Edit: typos.
nathias 5y ago
something is a waste if it is not useful, making new uses makes it less of a waste by definition

jayd16 5y ago

I guess to some degree waste is value judgement but by definition POW is never not incredibly expensive relative to the value it provides. It needs to always be expensive or the system is vulnerable to a sudden burst of new and malicious workers.

staticassertion 5y ago

I certainly look forward to seeing real problems solved with these algorithms, but right now that work seems to be lost in the noise of crypto. I'd be curious to hear more about decentralized rate limiting. That sounds like a reasonable problem to solve with PoW. Although it also sounds like a problem I can solve pretty easily today without PoW so idk.

CuriousCosmic 5y ago
I posted about this elsewhere in this thread but you might be interested in this paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379 https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379 It gets about 50% efficiency compared to the current state of the art for the problem space without compromising any of the security properties that make for a good PoW algorithm. Generally I'm not a fan of PoW and prefer internal resource based consensus algorithms but PoUW algorithms seem rather interesting. I think we are reaching a point of maturity in the space that'll allow these types of self-securing service marketplaces (which really is what PoUW is) to reach their logical conclusion.

xg15 5y ago

The fundamental technical problem I see with PoW is that it only seldomly really aligns with the "good guy/bad guy" boundary. I.e. the basic purpose of PoW is security: Allow desirable actors in, keep malicious actors out. But this implies that "ability to put in more work" is actually a working way to distinguish good actors from bad actors. This is true in very specific cases, like blockchains - but I believe in most cases, this is actually not given, such as emails. E.g., suppose we're using PoW to secure email: We do away with SPIF and all that and simply require each email to contain some hash that a sender had to bruteforce (just an example: use whatever PoW scheme you want). If the scheme has a fixed difficulty, spammers can easily defeat it - they just have to rent (or capture) more machines. So you have to dynamically adjust the difficulty to meet some message/time unit quota. Congrats, suddenly the whole network is limitited to some maximum throughput. Alternatively, you can have separate difficulties for each user - but then, you need a way to track individual users, compute individual difficulties, etc. All of this needs some centralized entity again and agents that enforce the rules. If you have all that, why not use traditional rate limit and forgo the energy (or resource) waste?

marcosdumay 5y ago

Well as an example, it's used in cryptographic key generator functions. But there aren't many things it solves well. The easiest and most economical solution to "decentralizing rate limiting" is usually centralizing something.

CuriousCosmic 5y ago

You may be interested in this paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379 https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379 It provides a Proof-of-Useful-Work algorithm that is resistant to pre-computation and most other weaknesses that would otherwise prevent useful work from being done while achieving Nakamoto Consensus while at the same time managing to convert ~50% of the computation spent into useful work. Additionally the work being done is pretty generally useful and is applicable to a lot of different problems. I think the space is starting to reach a point of academic maturity and formalisation of the tech stack such that we can start meaningfully trying to solve these types of problems.

michaelsbradley 5y ago

> I don't think anything else can solve decentralized rate limiting more effectively than proof of work. Have you heard of Rate Limiting Nullifiers? https://github.com/vacp2p/research/blob/master/rln-research/Waku_RLN_Relay.pdf https://github.com/vacp2p/research/blob/master/rln-research/...

maxerickson 5y ago

Is decentralized rate limiting a useful problem to solve?