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And Proof of Work is better because the haves buy equipment the have-nots can't buy to vote? Unless you have a citizenship based voting of some short where a s

And Proof of Work is better because the haves buy equipment the have-nots can't buy to vote? Unless you have a citizenship based voting of some short where a single person gets a single vote and they actually vote (automatically I guess and assuming without delegating to the big whale because "I am bored") what do you think agreement via resource scarcity implies? P.S. Also lobbying...

inter_netuser 5y ago
This is a common misunderstanding. Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. PoW is a service to the network, to create an immutable ledger. It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change. It's just a boring industrial business, like smelting aluminum or iron.
- mission_failed 5y ago
  Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of work just burns electricity for the random chance of winning a lottery
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    PoW produces something intangible. You're probably basing on an assumption that tangible products are more worthy or justifiable of resources consumed than intangibles. If you work with software development - which you probably do - I'd suggest checking what you do for a living, how much energy it consumes and how much physical product it generates.
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      It produces just what the person said. A lottery win.
    - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
      That argument could even be somehow valid if it were only possible to demonstrate that these intangibles improve life for people, like contributing to food, housing, education or even only entertainment. They do not. We do not have to care for those who are affluent enough to burn electricity just in order to gamble. Those people have the resources to gamble in less harmful ways without raising electricity prices and polluting the air the way they do. Those people could even do something helpful and productive if they chose to. Cryptomining is wasting energy for the sake of wasting energy. You may argue we (the 99.999% who do not cryptomine) are too stupid to see the value of your imaginary intangibles but that's not true. We are the ones who want no part in a pyramid scheme, who do not want to succumb to gambling, and whose time and money are too scarce and too precious to be put on the line. Sure, all activity has its price, its waste, and sure, there are other occupations whose overall usefulness is doubtful and askew with the accompanying resource consumption. Doesn't mean you have too excuse bad behavior just because there are other guys doing no good. Just as an aside, when you move a newspaper or a magazine from print to only existing as a web page, you certainly have 'dematerialized' it to a degree. However you still need hardware to keep and display the data and energy to move it around and light up the screens. In so far it does not stop being physical. The 'intangible' is somewhat of a red herring. Yes, it is less haptic, but it's still physics, physical all the way down. Other than that, currencies, freedom, equality, education, entertainment—we've been having intangibles all the time, at least from the dawn of human culture onward. Cryptomining does not bring anything genuinely new to the table in this respect. It's not even new in being a fraudulent, volatile scheme that betrays traits of a cult, one that benefits a few and hurts the many.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Simply because something is intangible and invisible, like atoms, does not make it any less valuable. It's a system with an immutable monetary policy. Literally unprecedented in human history.
    - lottin 5y ago
      > Literally unprecedented in human history. Hardly unprecedented, considering that until very recently nations did not have a monetary policy.
      - javert 5y ago
        Monetary policy goes at least as far back as the Roman Empire, which adulterated their money supply over time.
        lottin 5y ago
        I don't think this what economists understand by monetary policy.
    - meribold 5y ago
      > It's a system with an immutable monetary policy. Is it though? It seems minor protocol tweaks aren't uncommon and hard forks managing to eclipse the original protocol in popularity are also conceivable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks
      - javert 5y ago
        Every time there is a fork, the market decides how much to value each of the forks. Personally, I think people will value bitcoin as good money if fiat money fails. And because they are seeking good money, will value the fork(s) that preserve bitcoin's prior monetary policy. A fork that changes the monetary policy drastically (particularly, changing the 21M cap) would obviously make for bad money in practical terms.
  - marcus_cemes 5y ago
    It's burning electricity (that could in an ideal world be renewable, maybe one day) to provide a service to the network, therefore making it more secure by providing additional processing capacity that is controlled by a good actor, making it harder for a bad actor to get 51% of the pie. It is a waste, but there are also a lot of other sources of wasted resources/energy that we could tackle first and get larger returns from. You get compensated for your service, it may seem like a lottery, but if you do it for a long enough time, you'll get fairly steady returns as in theory it should be random and proportional to your hashrate. I don't mine, and I think it's definitely overhyped at the moment, but maybe it will settle in the future and actually provide a useful service to us folk. It doesn't seem to be going away for now, and it is really easy to send money to friends and family, whether they're nextdoor or in another country.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens. The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper. Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        > It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens. You don't think those get very wasteful in the real world? And there's no equivalent to a real war situation. You can set it up so you don't need to defend against the equivalent of enemy armies. > The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper. What kind of sustainable? When miners locate next to hydro, and buy it up, that doesn't help anything. That hydro could have been sold as somewhat less cheap power elsewhere, after going over long wires, and then it would have reduced the load on coal plants. Miners that eat up excess solar can theoretically do a lot to encourage the installation of solar, but they need to be happy letting their machines be turned off a large fraction of the time. If it's still profitable to run 20 hours a day, then they're still encouraging fossil power plants. > Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them. Dishwashers are better than hand-washing, aren't they? Having plates is a lot more important than running cryptocurrencies in a particular way. If heated swimming pools use that much, then sure let's go after that and use some kind of billing or taxes so they pay extra and encourage sustainable power sources.
  - jakupovic 5y ago
    When I write code for my work does it not exist? I'm in essence minting new programs using my time as proof of work.
    - newswasboring 5y ago
      No, I'm quite sure the proof of work is a program which works.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Perhaps we should insert humans in the loop, to verify whether useful work was performed. Or some AI because humans are prone to bribery to some extent. Or we could make it democratic. "Jeff Bezos asserts that he provided useful work for society and that he therefore deserves $1B this year. Please cast your votes".
    - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
      PoB: Proof of Bullshit
      - lukifer 5y ago
        PoW should actually stand for Proof of Waste. It's not even unprecedented in nature: many species will intentionally waste energy or resources to demonstrate mating fitness, as with a peacock's tail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        amelius 5y ago
        ... or people going to the gym. The problems start, of course, when you take a concept to its logical extreme.
        lukifer 5y ago
        I'm less concerned with wasting resources (which is highly subjective), than with ecological and systemic harms. I don't care whether a terawatt is "wasted" on pointless SHA256 hashes, or calculating triangles for Yet Another Marvel Movie, so long as the externality is being paid for [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
        yellowapple 5y ago
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all Within protocol, no. But when weighing a fork, those with the gold choose the rules.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    forkwars have shown in practise this isn't the case. Status quo will be incredibly difficult to overcome for attackrs, even with a large chunk of industry, exchanges, miners and whales against the status quo, it prevailed.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    The fork-wars of old will never happen again, IMO, on any chain of significance. These days, fork winners will be decided by the stablecoin operations they host. If ETH forks, for instance, hash power will follow whichever chain Jeremy Allaire deems the winner.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      Do you consider nuclear energy sustainable? It's probably not renewable (well, neither is the Sun on large enough timescale), but do you believe nuclear, either fission or fusion, will play a large role in the future?
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        You make it sound like I need a new hobby - which I might haha. > Do you consider nuclear energy sustainable? Low-carbon, yes. Sustainable, yes. Renewable, not until we productionize extraction of uranium from seawater. [1] > ... but do you believe nuclear, either fission or fusion, will play a large role in the future? Fusion if we can crack it, totally. Seems like a clear winner. Fission probably will if there's some political will behind it, but not unless there's a change in sentiment. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/24/is-nuclear-power-a-renewable-or-a-sustainable-energy-source/?sh=21ad8e9f656e https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/24/is-nuclea...
- tromp 5y ago
  > hashing algo You mean Proof of Work algorithm. Which is not quite the same as hashing function [1]. [1] https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mining-hashing/ https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-min...
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    hi tromp! good to see you are on here too. ...just re-using the terms for continuity and simplicity sake. yes, a PoW algo is probably better generic term, although I am not confident complex algos would be accepted as first-line replacements by the wider community. am I wrong in that assessment?
    - tromp 5y ago
      Some of the hashing functions used with hashcash are exceedingly complex, such as RandomX used in a popular coin. Even scrypt, an extremely popular choice of hash function, is relatively complex, long after its 128KB memory footprint briefly served its purpose of resisting ASICs. You're right that Bitcoin will never accept a change of PoW. At least not until SHA256 shows signs of being broken.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  At the limit, proof of work and proof of stake converge - they are the same thing, except for the Kazakh coal that is burned in the former along the way. PoS staking is simply committing a portion of your capital to the task of validating transactions. You benefit by receiving a reward in the form of additional tokens. In a PoW system, the same exact thing can be accomplished by using your tokens to purchase a stake in a mining pool. You will similarly be unable to access your capital, be rewarded with additional tokens, and at the end of a period of your choice, you can liquidate your position in the mining pool to reclaim your tokens. [edit] PoW in this context is a bit worse because PoW miners can rent out their hash power maliciously without being slashed. In this world, the "nothing at stake" problem also manifests in proof of work, where I believe ownership in the mining pool makes you agnostic to the outcome of any chain splits - although I'm still working this bit through in my head. Opinions welcome!
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    > PoW in this context is a bit worse because PoW miners can rent out their hash power maliciously without being slashed. Sounds wrong. Slashing is a means to prevent people from staking on multiple chains. In PoW, computing power is scarce, so if you allocate some compute time to one chain then you have less of it on another chain. You automatically get slashed. The difficulty in designing a PoS chain is in artificially re-creating this slashing and thereby solving the "nothing at stake" problem.
    - lottin 5y ago
      Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of merely depositing them somewhere?
      - ogogmad 5y ago
        In a blockchain, the chain keeps splitting. Your tokens live on multiple competing chains simultaneously. In PoW, you are forced to pick one of those chains to mine on. In PoS, you can stake on all of them simultaneously. The splitting is unavoidable and happens constantly. Multiple competing future states are constantly being created, and the network has to eventually arrive at a consensus about which possible future is the true one. > Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of merely depositing them somewhere? Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS. Your question reads to me like "In trying to solve problem x, why don't you assume that you've already solved problem x, and use that to solve problem x."
- lottin 5y ago
  > Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. It only buys you the right to append a block of transactions to the ledger, which is the same thing as having 100% of the votes.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    You have it backwards. Nodes decide if they will append your block to their chain. A miner that decides to mine out of consensus blocks is just burning money, and will be on their own fork with their “100% votes” that nobody else uses. Give it a try, spend a few million on mining equipment and then try forcing something on the network. It’s not a democratic system, never was.
    - lottin 5y ago
      Nodes have zero decision power, as far as I understand. They just go with the chain that is the most expensive to produce.
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        That’s incorrect. The proposed block must comply with the rules your node enforced, or it will not be accepted. It’s not just work, but also the entire consensus-set they must abide by. Miners cannot force new rules, if there is no consensus.
        lottin 5y ago
        No, you're misunderstanding everything. The consensus mechanism is about agreeing about the contents of the blockchain, not about the rules that make up the bitcoin protocol.
        drdeca 5y ago
        Eh? Can't miners refuse to include transactions that don't adhere to new conditions in addition to old ones? If 51% of miners decide to, after block #N, not include any transaction that doesn't satisfy the predicate P in any block they produce, nor mine on any chain which has a block after block #N which has a transaction that doesn't satisfy predicate P, then the longest chain will have all the transactions after block #N be ones which satisfy P, and furthermore, if the other 49% of miners are aware that this is happening, if they want their blocks to be in the longest chain, they have incentive to follow the same rules when mining. This is the logic behind soft forks, is it not?
- DennisP 5y ago
  And stakers in PoS do exactly the same thing. They don't have any more "votes" than miners do.
- PretzelPirate 5y ago
  > It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change. Changing the hashing algo isn’t a realistic punishment for targeting misbehaving miners. You end up with two choices: 1. Change to an algorithm that uses gpu/cpu instead of ASICs (and is ASIC-resistant), but then your algo runs on general-purpose computing and you can’t fork miners off ever again. 2. Move to another algo that benefits from ASICs. This has the extra overhead that you need to spin up manufacturing and distribution of these ASCIs to honest miners, which takes quite a long time to do and while you’re waiting, your network is being attacked. In either case, you aren’t just punishing a misbehaving miner, you’re punishing *all* miners who now all need to get funding to buy and rack new hardware. You’re making a big assumption that the misbehaving miner won’t be able to get financing or sufficient capital while the honest ones will. If the dishonest miner’s attack was profitable while waiting for the fork, they get to keep all of that money and can spend it on new hardware. In PoS, the attacker will lose their stake, meaning they lose the money they had before, and earned as a result of, the attack. It may be much more difficult for that validator to get access to capital and lenders will be hesitant to lend to an entity that now has a history of burning capital.
- md_ 5y ago
  > Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. Hmm, maybe I’m ignorant, but in practice, don’t miners (socially, not technically) have substantial say in issues like the block size debate? If you want to create a hard fork of the chain for any reason, whether people accept your fork as legitimate will in part reflect the total hashing power of that forked chain, right? So in practice what miners choose to follow will have a big impact. Maybe not quite the same as PoS in-chain voting, but it still seems to give large miners outsized power, no?
tromp 5y ago
PoW at least provides a decent and somewhat fair coin distribution mechanism. With PoS, the coin creators can assign themselves an arbitrary fraction of the coins, concentrating the wealth. Even if there is a public record of all the funds raised in a public sale and all expenditures made (which is rarely the case), it's possible for the creators to participate in the public sale and recover large parts of funds used to buy their own token by generous expenditures on software development and such.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  Do you believe PoW can be used as bootstrap mechanism, and then some combo of PoS/Pow in the maintenance mode? Who is the top researcher on this subject these days?
  - ghughes 5y ago
    It could be interesting to bootstrap a PoS network using the wallet keys for all existing public blockchains, by allowing users to initialize their PoS wallet with the fiat value of their PoW keys held at some agreed moment in time. I toyed with this idea for a while, but I don't know how you could keep the network secure until a significant proportion of the total value has been claimed. Anyway, I'd also be interested to know if there's existing or active research along these lines.
- aqme28 5y ago
  I think this is organizational more than technological. There are plenty of PoW coins with unfair or absurd distributions, and plenty of PoS coins with somewhat equitable distributions.
  - tromp 5y ago
    Yes, PoW coin emission curves often leave something to be desired, tending to emit too much in the first few years, which leads to some wealth concentration as well. In my opinion a fixed block subsidy would be most equitable, but that's a very slow emission, taking 100 years to reach a yearly supply inflation under 1%.
leishman 5y ago
Yes PoW is way better because miners need to constantly expend resources to maintain their right to participate. PoS validators keep their throne for life at virtually no cost.
- everfree 5y ago
  But like PoS, PoW returns all spent resources and more back to the miner - both are designed to be profitable and self-sustaining. I don't see much difference between a PoW mining setup that does $1000/day gross, $990/day expense, $10/day profit and a PoS staking setup that does $12/day gross, $2/day expense, $10/day profit. Both earn $10/day, both require maintenance, and both are run not at a net cost but at a net profit.
  - jude- 5y ago
    You can't transmute Bitcoin back into electricity and ASICs. You have to generate more of both, which is extrinsic to the protocol and thus available to currently-non-participating actors. PoS does not have this property.
  - leishman 5y ago
    The main difference is that the top miners don’t stay the top miners. There is constant churn. The top stakers remain the top stakers at virtually no cost, and they will almost always be custodians/financial institutions. Additionally mining isn’t always profitable. There is financial risk and miners can go bust and take financial risk. Staking is basically always profitable if you don’t misbehave.

inter_netuser 5y ago

This is a common misunderstanding. Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. PoW is a service to the network, to create an immutable ledger. It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change. It's just a boring industrial business, like smelting aluminum or iron.

mission_failed 5y ago
Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of work just burns electricity for the random chance of winning a lottery
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  PoW produces something intangible. You're probably basing on an assumption that tangible products are more worthy or justifiable of resources consumed than intangibles. If you work with software development - which you probably do - I'd suggest checking what you do for a living, how much energy it consumes and how much physical product it generates.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    It produces just what the person said. A lottery win.
  - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
    That argument could even be somehow valid if it were only possible to demonstrate that these intangibles improve life for people, like contributing to food, housing, education or even only entertainment. They do not. We do not have to care for those who are affluent enough to burn electricity just in order to gamble. Those people have the resources to gamble in less harmful ways without raising electricity prices and polluting the air the way they do. Those people could even do something helpful and productive if they chose to. Cryptomining is wasting energy for the sake of wasting energy. You may argue we (the 99.999% who do not cryptomine) are too stupid to see the value of your imaginary intangibles but that's not true. We are the ones who want no part in a pyramid scheme, who do not want to succumb to gambling, and whose time and money are too scarce and too precious to be put on the line. Sure, all activity has its price, its waste, and sure, there are other occupations whose overall usefulness is doubtful and askew with the accompanying resource consumption. Doesn't mean you have too excuse bad behavior just because there are other guys doing no good. Just as an aside, when you move a newspaper or a magazine from print to only existing as a web page, you certainly have 'dematerialized' it to a degree. However you still need hardware to keep and display the data and energy to move it around and light up the screens. In so far it does not stop being physical. The 'intangible' is somewhat of a red herring. Yes, it is less haptic, but it's still physics, physical all the way down. Other than that, currencies, freedom, equality, education, entertainment—we've been having intangibles all the time, at least from the dawn of human culture onward. Cryptomining does not bring anything genuinely new to the table in this respect. It's not even new in being a fraudulent, volatile scheme that betrays traits of a cult, one that benefits a few and hurts the many.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  Simply because something is intangible and invisible, like atoms, does not make it any less valuable. It's a system with an immutable monetary policy. Literally unprecedented in human history.
  - lottin 5y ago
    > Literally unprecedented in human history. Hardly unprecedented, considering that until very recently nations did not have a monetary policy.
    - javert 5y ago
      Monetary policy goes at least as far back as the Roman Empire, which adulterated their money supply over time.
      - lottin 5y ago
        I don't think this what economists understand by monetary policy.
  - meribold 5y ago
    > It's a system with an immutable monetary policy. Is it though? It seems minor protocol tweaks aren't uncommon and hard forks managing to eclipse the original protocol in popularity are also conceivable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks
    - javert 5y ago
      Every time there is a fork, the market decides how much to value each of the forks. Personally, I think people will value bitcoin as good money if fiat money fails. And because they are seeking good money, will value the fork(s) that preserve bitcoin's prior monetary policy. A fork that changes the monetary policy drastically (particularly, changing the 21M cap) would obviously make for bad money in practical terms.
- marcus_cemes 5y ago
  It's burning electricity (that could in an ideal world be renewable, maybe one day) to provide a service to the network, therefore making it more secure by providing additional processing capacity that is controlled by a good actor, making it harder for a bad actor to get 51% of the pie. It is a waste, but there are also a lot of other sources of wasted resources/energy that we could tackle first and get larger returns from. You get compensated for your service, it may seem like a lottery, but if you do it for a long enough time, you'll get fairly steady returns as in theory it should be random and proportional to your hashrate. I don't mine, and I think it's definitely overhyped at the moment, but maybe it will settle in the future and actually provide a useful service to us folk. It doesn't seem to be going away for now, and it is really easy to send money to friends and family, whether they're nextdoor or in another country.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens. The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper. Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens. You don't think those get very wasteful in the real world? And there's no equivalent to a real war situation. You can set it up so you don't need to defend against the equivalent of enemy armies. > The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper. What kind of sustainable? When miners locate next to hydro, and buy it up, that doesn't help anything. That hydro could have been sold as somewhat less cheap power elsewhere, after going over long wires, and then it would have reduced the load on coal plants. Miners that eat up excess solar can theoretically do a lot to encourage the installation of solar, but they need to be happy letting their machines be turned off a large fraction of the time. If it's still profitable to run 20 hours a day, then they're still encouraging fossil power plants. > Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them. Dishwashers are better than hand-washing, aren't they? Having plates is a lot more important than running cryptocurrencies in a particular way. If heated swimming pools use that much, then sure let's go after that and use some kind of billing or taxes so they pay extra and encourage sustainable power sources.
- jakupovic 5y ago
  When I write code for my work does it not exist? I'm in essence minting new programs using my time as proof of work.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    No, I'm quite sure the proof of work is a program which works.
- amelius 5y ago
  Perhaps we should insert humans in the loop, to verify whether useful work was performed. Or some AI because humans are prone to bribery to some extent. Or we could make it democratic. "Jeff Bezos asserts that he provided useful work for society and that he therefore deserves $1B this year. Please cast your votes".
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    PoB: Proof of Bullshit
    - lukifer 5y ago
      PoW should actually stand for Proof of Waste. It's not even unprecedented in nature: many species will intentionally waste energy or resources to demonstrate mating fitness, as with a peacock's tail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - amelius 5y ago
        ... or people going to the gym. The problems start, of course, when you take a concept to its logical extreme.
        lukifer 5y ago
        I'm less concerned with wasting resources (which is highly subjective), than with ecological and systemic harms. I don't care whether a terawatt is "wasted" on pointless SHA256 hashes, or calculating triangles for Yet Another Marvel Movie, so long as the externality is being paid for [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
        yellowapple 5y ago
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all Within protocol, no. But when weighing a fork, those with the gold choose the rules.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  forkwars have shown in practise this isn't the case. Status quo will be incredibly difficult to overcome for attackrs, even with a large chunk of industry, exchanges, miners and whales against the status quo, it prevailed.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  The fork-wars of old will never happen again, IMO, on any chain of significance. These days, fork winners will be decided by the stablecoin operations they host. If ETH forks, for instance, hash power will follow whichever chain Jeremy Allaire deems the winner.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Do you consider nuclear energy sustainable? It's probably not renewable (well, neither is the Sun on large enough timescale), but do you believe nuclear, either fission or fusion, will play a large role in the future?
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      You make it sound like I need a new hobby - which I might haha. > Do you consider nuclear energy sustainable? Low-carbon, yes. Sustainable, yes. Renewable, not until we productionize extraction of uranium from seawater. [1] > ... but do you believe nuclear, either fission or fusion, will play a large role in the future? Fusion if we can crack it, totally. Seems like a clear winner. Fission probably will if there's some political will behind it, but not unless there's a change in sentiment. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/24/is-nuclear-power-a-renewable-or-a-sustainable-energy-source/?sh=21ad8e9f656e https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/24/is-nuclea...
tromp 5y ago
> hashing algo You mean Proof of Work algorithm. Which is not quite the same as hashing function [1]. [1] https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mining-hashing/ https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-min...
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  hi tromp! good to see you are on here too. ...just re-using the terms for continuity and simplicity sake. yes, a PoW algo is probably better generic term, although I am not confident complex algos would be accepted as first-line replacements by the wider community. am I wrong in that assessment?
  - tromp 5y ago
    Some of the hashing functions used with hashcash are exceedingly complex, such as RandomX used in a popular coin. Even scrypt, an extremely popular choice of hash function, is relatively complex, long after its 128KB memory footprint briefly served its purpose of resisting ASICs. You're right that Bitcoin will never accept a change of PoW. At least not until SHA256 shows signs of being broken.
arcticbull 5y ago
At the limit, proof of work and proof of stake converge - they are the same thing, except for the Kazakh coal that is burned in the former along the way. PoS staking is simply committing a portion of your capital to the task of validating transactions. You benefit by receiving a reward in the form of additional tokens. In a PoW system, the same exact thing can be accomplished by using your tokens to purchase a stake in a mining pool. You will similarly be unable to access your capital, be rewarded with additional tokens, and at the end of a period of your choice, you can liquidate your position in the mining pool to reclaim your tokens. [edit] PoW in this context is a bit worse because PoW miners can rent out their hash power maliciously without being slashed. In this world, the "nothing at stake" problem also manifests in proof of work, where I believe ownership in the mining pool makes you agnostic to the outcome of any chain splits - although I'm still working this bit through in my head. Opinions welcome!
- ogogmad 5y ago
  > PoW in this context is a bit worse because PoW miners can rent out their hash power maliciously without being slashed. Sounds wrong. Slashing is a means to prevent people from staking on multiple chains. In PoW, computing power is scarce, so if you allocate some compute time to one chain then you have less of it on another chain. You automatically get slashed. The difficulty in designing a PoS chain is in artificially re-creating this slashing and thereby solving the "nothing at stake" problem.
  - lottin 5y ago
    Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of merely depositing them somewhere?
    - ogogmad 5y ago
      In a blockchain, the chain keeps splitting. Your tokens live on multiple competing chains simultaneously. In PoW, you are forced to pick one of those chains to mine on. In PoS, you can stake on all of them simultaneously. The splitting is unavoidable and happens constantly. Multiple competing future states are constantly being created, and the network has to eventually arrive at a consensus about which possible future is the true one. > Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of merely depositing them somewhere? Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS. Your question reads to me like "In trying to solve problem x, why don't you assume that you've already solved problem x, and use that to solve problem x."
lottin 5y ago
> Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. It only buys you the right to append a block of transactions to the ledger, which is the same thing as having 100% of the votes.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  You have it backwards. Nodes decide if they will append your block to their chain. A miner that decides to mine out of consensus blocks is just burning money, and will be on their own fork with their “100% votes” that nobody else uses. Give it a try, spend a few million on mining equipment and then try forcing something on the network. It’s not a democratic system, never was.
  - lottin 5y ago
    Nodes have zero decision power, as far as I understand. They just go with the chain that is the most expensive to produce.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      That’s incorrect. The proposed block must comply with the rules your node enforced, or it will not be accepted. It’s not just work, but also the entire consensus-set they must abide by. Miners cannot force new rules, if there is no consensus.
      - lottin 5y ago
        No, you're misunderstanding everything. The consensus mechanism is about agreeing about the contents of the blockchain, not about the rules that make up the bitcoin protocol.
      - drdeca 5y ago
        Eh? Can't miners refuse to include transactions that don't adhere to new conditions in addition to old ones? If 51% of miners decide to, after block #N, not include any transaction that doesn't satisfy the predicate P in any block they produce, nor mine on any chain which has a block after block #N which has a transaction that doesn't satisfy predicate P, then the longest chain will have all the transactions after block #N be ones which satisfy P, and furthermore, if the other 49% of miners are aware that this is happening, if they want their blocks to be in the longest chain, they have incentive to follow the same rules when mining. This is the logic behind soft forks, is it not?
DennisP 5y ago
And stakers in PoS do exactly the same thing. They don't have any more "votes" than miners do.
PretzelPirate 5y ago
> It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change. Changing the hashing algo isn’t a realistic punishment for targeting misbehaving miners. You end up with two choices: 1. Change to an algorithm that uses gpu/cpu instead of ASICs (and is ASIC-resistant), but then your algo runs on general-purpose computing and you can’t fork miners off ever again. 2. Move to another algo that benefits from ASICs. This has the extra overhead that you need to spin up manufacturing and distribution of these ASCIs to honest miners, which takes quite a long time to do and while you’re waiting, your network is being attacked. In either case, you aren’t just punishing a misbehaving miner, you’re punishing *all* miners who now all need to get funding to buy and rack new hardware. You’re making a big assumption that the misbehaving miner won’t be able to get financing or sufficient capital while the honest ones will. If the dishonest miner’s attack was profitable while waiting for the fork, they get to keep all of that money and can spend it on new hardware. In PoS, the attacker will lose their stake, meaning they lose the money they had before, and earned as a result of, the attack. It may be much more difficult for that validator to get access to capital and lenders will be hesitant to lend to an entity that now has a history of burning capital.
md_ 5y ago
> Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. Hmm, maybe I’m ignorant, but in practice, don’t miners (socially, not technically) have substantial say in issues like the block size debate? If you want to create a hard fork of the chain for any reason, whether people accept your fork as legitimate will in part reflect the total hashing power of that forked chain, right? So in practice what miners choose to follow will have a big impact. Maybe not quite the same as PoS in-chain voting, but it still seems to give large miners outsized power, no?

tromp 5y ago

PoW at least provides a decent and somewhat fair coin distribution mechanism. With PoS, the coin creators can assign themselves an arbitrary fraction of the coins, concentrating the wealth. Even if there is a public record of all the funds raised in a public sale and all expenditures made (which is rarely the case), it's possible for the creators to participate in the public sale and recover large parts of funds used to buy their own token by generous expenditures on software development and such.

inter_netuser 5y ago
Do you believe PoW can be used as bootstrap mechanism, and then some combo of PoS/Pow in the maintenance mode? Who is the top researcher on this subject these days?
- ghughes 5y ago
  It could be interesting to bootstrap a PoS network using the wallet keys for all existing public blockchains, by allowing users to initialize their PoS wallet with the fiat value of their PoW keys held at some agreed moment in time. I toyed with this idea for a while, but I don't know how you could keep the network secure until a significant proportion of the total value has been claimed. Anyway, I'd also be interested to know if there's existing or active research along these lines.
aqme28 5y ago
I think this is organizational more than technological. There are plenty of PoW coins with unfair or absurd distributions, and plenty of PoS coins with somewhat equitable distributions.
- tromp 5y ago
  Yes, PoW coin emission curves often leave something to be desired, tending to emit too much in the first few years, which leads to some wealth concentration as well. In my opinion a fixed block subsidy would be most equitable, but that's a very slow emission, taking 100 years to reach a yearly supply inflation under 1%.

leishman 5y ago

Yes PoW is way better because miners need to constantly expend resources to maintain their right to participate. PoS validators keep their throne for life at virtually no cost.

everfree 5y ago
But like PoS, PoW returns all spent resources and more back to the miner - both are designed to be profitable and self-sustaining. I don't see much difference between a PoW mining setup that does $1000/day gross, $990/day expense, $10/day profit and a PoS staking setup that does $12/day gross, $2/day expense, $10/day profit. Both earn $10/day, both require maintenance, and both are run not at a net cost but at a net profit.
- jude- 5y ago
  You can't transmute Bitcoin back into electricity and ASICs. You have to generate more of both, which is extrinsic to the protocol and thus available to currently-non-participating actors. PoS does not have this property.
- leishman 5y ago
  The main difference is that the top miners don’t stay the top miners. There is constant churn. The top stakers remain the top stakers at virtually no cost, and they will almost always be custodians/financial institutions. Additionally mining isn’t always profitable. There is financial risk and miners can go bust and take financial risk. Staking is basically always profitable if you don’t misbehave.