Comment by deft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deft | Hacker News Reader

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There's been a lot of FUD against PoW and some of it is warranted. The problem is saying "PoW is a bad solution to the problem" doesn't provide any path forward. PoS is not a solution, and neither is so called dPoS where block producers are nominated by or purchased from the development team. Lots of smart people are working on better PoW algorithms, more resistant to centralization and hopefully at least one succeeds. Otherwise a new model for trustless p2p exchange of money will need to be developed.

It seems to me a lot of so called "decentralized currencies" are moving away from the model that brought billions of dollars into the market, in favour of recreating shitty versions of what already exists. To do this they dance around terms and attempt to claim they're actually MORE decentralized for reasons blah blah blah. I have a feeling the anti-PoW is orchestrated FUD from teams building decentralized-in-name-only platforms like EOS and NEO. Yelling about electricity costs and how "trust is needed!" is getting old. People like the trustless idea, even if so far it hasn't turned out well. A platform that lets you run "unstoppable dApps" when stopping them only requires shutting down 21 known nodes isn't unstoppable at all and is frankly worthless.

> Yelling about electricity costs and how "trust is needed!" is getting old

It's still a valid concern, Pow has currently lots of difficulty to scale because of that, not to mention that the electricity needed is enormous to sustain the system.

You have your causal chain reversed: enormous amounts of electricity are spent on proof-of-work because it is profitable. There is no minimum amount of work required to "sustain" the system. Of course you lose security with less work performed, but the system can be sustained.

Yeah of course but if you want Bitcoin to be used by everybody (that's the goal of a currency after all), it becomes thus very profitable to mine and therefore an enormous amount of electricity is used. That's what I meant by a scaling issue, it works as long as there's not too many users.

The energy cost of mining gold is proportional to the price of gold.

When discussing environmental damage, I’m not sure gold is the thing you want to be comparing to.

Just making a point about the economics. The environmental destruction is caused by the energy production in the case of Bitcoin mining. In the case of gold mining, it is done by the mining.

PoW is a way to use computation as a substitute for human-based methods of generating truth.

I wonder how much electricity, energy, and emissions are represented by salaries for the lawyers and judges that are the current implementation of distributed social trust?

> Otherwise a new model for trustless p2p exchange of money will need to be developed.

That's the biggest assumption of all. The idea that there's a need for trustless p2p money, or that existing money doesn't work seems like nonsense to me.

You don't need it at all until you need it. Then you really, really need it. It kind of works like a seat belt. To this day I think I have only actually used my seat belt once in my entire lifetime! My family has literally never used theirs.

People think it's cool. I wasn't commenting on whether it's needed for society. But the people developing it would need a better way to achieve their goals if PoW really should be abandoned.

Why do you say PoS is not a solution? I agree with you about dPoS being a poor substitute.

Because the name is totally false. You aren't putting anything at stake and it ends up being traditional social trust. "Oh that guy he has a lot of ETH and is a trusted member, he wouldn't attack the network as its in his own best interest!"

Beyond that, it's simply a rich-get-richer scheme. Why are staked nodes rewarded? What is their sacrifice and what are they spending to get that reward? Nothing.

You fundamentally misunderstand PoS. There is no social trust involved. It will work entirely through economic incentivization, including 'group penalization' when enough validators are offline/byzantine at the same time in the case of Casper. Read more here and try to fully understand this document before you make blanket statements like 'PoS won't work': https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

Their sacrifice is opportunity cost. Which is what TFA describes as the necessary ingredient for a consensus protocol.

> Practical impossibility can be reframed in terms of "opportunity cost": there are limited physical resources and those should have been largely allocated to X than to Y so we can see that X sucked in all resources from any alternatives.

There are a limited number of coins that can be staked at any time.

You lose ethers if you misbehave or stop supporting the network. Amount lost depends on what you did and whether your fault was correlated with faults of other validators.

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