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Please expand. Frankly if POS isn't viable I don't see a future for POW either; especially when carbon costs are priced in. As things stand POW chains have tr

Please expand. Frankly if POS isn't viable I don't see a future for POW either; especially when carbon costs are priced in. As things stand POW chains have traded massive inefficiency for decentralization. I doubt this can stand long term if we wish to address climate change. Crypto already has a higher energy use than many countries.

eru 4y ago
I agree with most of what you say. However: > [...] especially when carbon costs are priced in. You misunderstand the economics of proof-of-work. Perhaps we should call it 'proof-of-waste'. Basically, in something like bitcoin proof-of-work functions a bit like an auction: the total amount of resources wasted on mining tends to equal the total amount of mining rewards. For simplicity, assume mining rewards are fixed. If hashing becomes cheaper, (eg first because of GPU miners, later because of ASICs), the hash rate will go up, but the total amount of resources wasted on mining will stay the same. If hashing becomes more expensive (eg because of a universal carbon tax), the hash rate will go down, but the total amount miners spend on mining stays the same. Arguably, that's exactly how a carbon tax is supposed to work in the best case. Of course, there will be plenty of incentives to avoid the carbon tax. Both by mining with clean power (good!) and by mining in places that don't implement the carbon tax (less good!).
- spinny 4y ago
  > proof-of-waste half agree with that. PoW is the most efficient method of converting raw energy into a digitally secure token. It would be much better if the work done was actually useful beyond that. Some attempts have been done in the past, but with low success (Riecoin IIRC uses cpus to find sequences of primes, GridCoin used BOINC for the PoW, proof-of-boinc in that case). There is still work to be done on EVM chains. Contract calls need to be processed and verified by every (full) node
  - lubesGordi 4y ago
    Proof of waste is an interesting way of putting it. I don't disagree. Maybe it would be interesting for power companies and govt to pair up and provide coins that are deflationary, and are only mined by putting power back into the grid. Make those coins useful to pay for car registration, taxes, or whatever. At least some deflationary value could be put to work there.
    - eru 4y ago
      > Maybe it would be interesting for power companies and govt to pair up and provide coins that [...] are only mined by putting power back into the grid. That idea sounds good, but would only be a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. Bitcoin's design solves two problems: (1) only someone who owns a coin should be able to spend it (2) they should only be able to spend it once The first problem had been solved for ages: use digital signatures to authenticate messages of essentially the form "I, Alice, hereby send 3 bitcoins to Bob." Given some initial coin assignment to specific private/public key pairs, you can follow along these messages, keep a tally in a ledger, and know how much everyone has. Solving the second problem is where bitcoin innovates. Without a trusted third party coordinating things, Alice could just show a message to Bob and Charles each 'sending' them the same 3 bitcoins. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work to pick (at most) one of these messages to be part of the consensus reality. The scheme you are suggesting requires some trust in the partnership of government and power companies. But as soon as you have very minimal amounts of trust, you can just solve the double-spending problem directly. And that direct solution involves much less trust than what is required for accepting any statements about the power grid. If you want, I can sketch out a minimum trust system for the direct solution I mentioned.
  - eru 4y ago
    > half agree with that. PoW is the most efficient method of converting raw energy into a digitally secure token. It would be much better if the work done was actually useful beyond that. I'd say PoW is not the most efficient method. It's a terrible waste by design. The kind of 'work' that works in PoW has some rather strict requirements, that's why it's almost impossible to shoehorn useful work into a PoW scheme. Wikipedia tells me that eg GridCoin uses proof-of-stake to prevent double-spending attacks; its rewarding people for BOINC work is a totally separate gimmick.
justajot 4y ago
PoS, to my knowledge isn't a viable alternative to PoW. There are too many similarities to the traditional financial system. That's partly (mostly?) why PoW was invented. PoST (Proof of Space and Time) is PoW 2.0 essentially. It addresses the energy consumption of PoW using the same Nakomoto Consensus mechanism that provides true decentralization and the security that comes with it. It does this by doing the work ONCE up-front and saving it to space (generating plot files) rather than doing the work for every block. Lookups are incredibly energy efficient (farming plots). The Time component ensures that a certain amount of time passes between blocks, and is responsible for moving the chain forward. There is also the added benefit of utilizing datacenter drives destined to be scrapped // still perfectly usable for storing plot files.
- Geee 4y ago
  PoST is a step in the wrong direction. It doesn't address anything, because energy use is not a problem. PoST consumes natural resources and produces e-waste, which is way worse than just consuming clean energy and producing heat, which is what PoW does.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    > because energy use is not a problem In what fully decarbonized country do you live? Iceland? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-region?stackMode=absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
    - Geee 4y ago
      Energy production is a problem, if it's produced with fossil fuels.
      - eru 4y ago
        It's also a problem of opportunity costs. Energy is somewhat fungible. Every Joule of electricity used on Bitcoin, can't be used for other purposes (apart from heating the data centre..)

eru 4y ago

I agree with most of what you say. However: > [...] especially when carbon costs are priced in. You misunderstand the economics of proof-of-work. Perhaps we should call it 'proof-of-waste'. Basically, in something like bitcoin proof-of-work functions a bit like an auction: the total amount of resources wasted on mining tends to equal the total amount of mining rewards. For simplicity, assume mining rewards are fixed. If hashing becomes cheaper, (eg first because of GPU miners, later because of ASICs), the hash rate will go up, but the total amount of resources wasted on mining will stay the same. If hashing becomes more expensive (eg because of a universal carbon tax), the hash rate will go down, but the total amount miners spend on mining stays the same. Arguably, that's exactly how a carbon tax is supposed to work in the best case. Of course, there will be plenty of incentives to avoid the carbon tax. Both by mining with clean power (good!) and by mining in places that don't implement the carbon tax (less good!).

spinny 4y ago
> proof-of-waste half agree with that. PoW is the most efficient method of converting raw energy into a digitally secure token. It would be much better if the work done was actually useful beyond that. Some attempts have been done in the past, but with low success (Riecoin IIRC uses cpus to find sequences of primes, GridCoin used BOINC for the PoW, proof-of-boinc in that case). There is still work to be done on EVM chains. Contract calls need to be processed and verified by every (full) node
- lubesGordi 4y ago
  Proof of waste is an interesting way of putting it. I don't disagree. Maybe it would be interesting for power companies and govt to pair up and provide coins that are deflationary, and are only mined by putting power back into the grid. Make those coins useful to pay for car registration, taxes, or whatever. At least some deflationary value could be put to work there.
  - eru 4y ago
    > Maybe it would be interesting for power companies and govt to pair up and provide coins that [...] are only mined by putting power back into the grid. That idea sounds good, but would only be a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. Bitcoin's design solves two problems: (1) only someone who owns a coin should be able to spend it (2) they should only be able to spend it once The first problem had been solved for ages: use digital signatures to authenticate messages of essentially the form "I, Alice, hereby send 3 bitcoins to Bob." Given some initial coin assignment to specific private/public key pairs, you can follow along these messages, keep a tally in a ledger, and know how much everyone has. Solving the second problem is where bitcoin innovates. Without a trusted third party coordinating things, Alice could just show a message to Bob and Charles each 'sending' them the same 3 bitcoins. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work to pick (at most) one of these messages to be part of the consensus reality. The scheme you are suggesting requires some trust in the partnership of government and power companies. But as soon as you have very minimal amounts of trust, you can just solve the double-spending problem directly. And that direct solution involves much less trust than what is required for accepting any statements about the power grid. If you want, I can sketch out a minimum trust system for the direct solution I mentioned.
- eru 4y ago
  > half agree with that. PoW is the most efficient method of converting raw energy into a digitally secure token. It would be much better if the work done was actually useful beyond that. I'd say PoW is not the most efficient method. It's a terrible waste by design. The kind of 'work' that works in PoW has some rather strict requirements, that's why it's almost impossible to shoehorn useful work into a PoW scheme. Wikipedia tells me that eg GridCoin uses proof-of-stake to prevent double-spending attacks; its rewarding people for BOINC work is a totally separate gimmick.

justajot 4y ago

PoS, to my knowledge isn't a viable alternative to PoW. There are too many similarities to the traditional financial system. That's partly (mostly?) why PoW was invented. PoST (Proof of Space and Time) is PoW 2.0 essentially. It addresses the energy consumption of PoW using the same Nakomoto Consensus mechanism that provides true decentralization and the security that comes with it. It does this by doing the work ONCE up-front and saving it to space (generating plot files) rather than doing the work for every block. Lookups are incredibly energy efficient (farming plots). The Time component ensures that a certain amount of time passes between blocks, and is responsible for moving the chain forward. There is also the added benefit of utilizing datacenter drives destined to be scrapped // still perfectly usable for storing plot files.

Geee 4y ago
PoST is a step in the wrong direction. It doesn't address anything, because energy use is not a problem. PoST consumes natural resources and produces e-waste, which is way worse than just consuming clean energy and producing heat, which is what PoW does.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > because energy use is not a problem In what fully decarbonized country do you live? Iceland? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-region?stackMode=absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
  - Geee 4y ago
    Energy production is a problem, if it's produced with fossil fuels.
    - eru 4y ago
      It's also a problem of opportunity costs. Energy is somewhat fungible. Every Joule of electricity used on Bitcoin, can't be used for other purposes (apart from heating the data centre..)