Topic: Bitcoin needs to move to POS. Thoughts? (Read 7453 times)

Yeah make it POS and bitcoin will be a pump&dump fest more than ever. It is already too volatile and POS will make it more and more.

That's a big change and the chances of fking bitcoin up are too high. It won't happen.

Isn't POS already available with some sidechains?

the effect of moving to pos will be more negative than positive.. with the current wealth-distribution huge holders, also those temporarily holding big amount, receiving most benefits from a pos transition. not to talk about economical disaster. don't forget pow gives btc more value (electricity, hardware companies, researchers on field of pow/blockchaintech, and so on). in fact most of the value comes from PoW.

It is true that Switching to POS would be problem for Bitcoins as who are holding large amount of bitcoins will be getting benefit without mining as POS concept is like that, so i also think that Mining is good option for Bitcoins as who ever mines will get the benefit of Bitcoins,

POS is good for Altcoins as they are just starting it newly and they have barrier of coins supply.

I might agree here, the 'value' of something is usually related to the supply and demand of that thing.

such thing wouldnt even be possible.. Bitcoin was designed to be mined it was never intended to be POS.. to make it POS your basically saying delete all information on Bitcoin and render Bitcoin in itself useless just to make Bitcoin V2 and hope it picks up as quick as the original. which is unlikely. Bitcoin is fine where it is. if it's not broken don't fix it

What evidence is there that such rules are followed?  Rhetorical question of course, with fiat there can be no such evidence.  There is plenty of evidence however on multiple levels that the so-called rules are NOT followed and tokens are indeed created in a vacuum, though you're right there is certainly a lot of associated costs with this including most obviously decrease of real wages, buying power, and living standard, but also costs of structural inefficiency which are much more difficult to quantify. 


I totally agree!!  With public coins monetary policy is now a real thing which is adhered to rather than a pretend thing which could never be verified.  Now that the thing exists, we need to explore the space and see what works.

Yes, surely this is a very practical question of the actual organization of production, if there are some people that can mine for less, they will use the opportunity when the value drops, but what seems to me almost as important is their share of production, if they have a monopoly it seems that the optimal for them is to keep the profit rates at the level that exclude competition and still give them maximum possible profit, because thats a better situation for them than just temporarily increase profits. The absolute equilibrium of value is just 0, everything else is uncertain, variable and depends on context but that doesn't mean there are no rules in this chaos.

For bitcoins this is true, because it is designed for this to be true (difficulty), however this doesn't mean that its true in general, or that this is the dominant factor, we could for example think of it as a feedback loop of value, that increases the difficulty and difficulty that increases the value.


No, prices could only be determined if we determined prices to be so, prices can be both deterministic and non-deterministic (otherwise either competition or price fixing would be impossible in practice). But its important to distinguish between price (as quantified exchange-value), exchange-value, use-value and value in general, and this is what I mean that we have no adequate theories of value, no valid scientific model of value in general and exchange-value in particular that would show why and how it is subjective/objective and non/deterministic in a way that physics has a adequate model of atom, and because it has it knows that it can't measure spin&location at the same time.

It's not the direction of causality that is the problem, is not a either/or both can determine value more or less in more and less determinate and immediate ways. It seems ironic, because there are many functions done by the same mechanisms in crypto, Bitcoin is a very elegant construct, but elegance is inefficient, its always better to separate functions and optimize them one by one than to bundle them together, except for actual use where they have to be bundeled for ease of use.

You don't create the million in a vacuum, if you do you have a new, probably worthless currency. If you create a million in a monetary system that has rules for its creation the rules have some cost associated with it (buy goverment bonds, lend money/assume risk etc.) and the other type of credit is enforced on the population as the decrease of real wages and general buying power and living standard. I've heard about how Bitcoin is supposed to be apolitical, and it is to a degree, but only because it has its monetary policies fixed, what would have to be determined is if they are in fact good monetary policies, and thats for alts to explore.

This is great, I've always had a problem with Gresham's law, because it was stated in its simple, false form.

Maybe POW for bitcoin can be used as a measurement for a stable economic indicator for central bank interest rate targetting or GDP uses. If bitcoin price skyrockets so would mining efficiency until it cannot, and then a new tech breakthrough would be needed (hence the GDP/economic indicators since every boom bust happens around new tech breakthroughs in the market)... i've always thought thats what POW will amount to way later down.

Bitcoin won't go POS. There are many alternatives which started as POS, if you want a POS coin.

POS is useless anyway. If it happens, It will create a negative effect on the prices.

Thanks for comments   I think this discussion is appropriate and have always been intrigued by the linguistic coincidence of value from proof of work and theory of value from work. 


I'm not sure I understand this point.  If I print a million new Harriet Tubman 20s, where is the mediated labor or credit cost?  If I create a bank account with a trillion USD in it, as Lord Blackwell was recently complaining about, where is the mediated labor or credit cost? 


Hmm.. sounds about right.  Perhaps the topic is more on the psychology side than on the quantitative economics side. 


Neato, thanks!  I'd perhaps never even heard of exergy.  These will take me some time before I can make a decent comment.

You also might be interested in this classic:

http://www.columbia.edu/~ram15/grash.html

I'm not sure we're on the same page. I was specifically arguing against the idea that the amount of energy used to provide a product decides some portion of the market value of that product.
It was put forward that because it takes more energy to produce Bitcoin it must have a value that exceeds PoS. Put another way; because PoS doesn't necessarily cost very much to move and produce, it is a less valuable currency.
Peter Schiff implied the same sort of fallacy when he was insisting that Gold was a good purchase when it fell to $1200/oz because he argued that if it fell any lower than that it would cost more to mine than it was worth. It then fell down to roundabout $1000/oz. The point is that $1200 was clearly not some kind of floor on the price, just because that's presumably the cost of production.

It's putting the cart before the horse. Gold isn't valuable because it costs alot to produce; It costs alot to produce because it's valuable.
Similarly, bitcoin's aren't valuable because they cost a lot to produce, they cost a lot to produce because they're valuable.

It depends on what you meant by "adequate". I took it to mean we don't have a way of even theoretically deterministically arriving at prices. That would be true because value is subjective and non-deterministic.
That doesn't mean we don't have theories that at least show us why it's subjective and non-deterministic.


I can see that the fact that they're valuable, which drove up the cost to produce them, also made it more secure, which may make it more valued by consumers, and so on, but it's important to see the direction of causation here. I know it wouldn't be right to say energy used to produce bitcoin doesn't have anything to do with it's value, that's why I said it's tangential.

I do not see the cost of production as a way to argue in favor of PoW, or to show some failing in PoS. In fact, the whole thing is pretty ironic considering PoS' primary selling point is that it uses less energy to provide it.

You misunderstood, I said that theory of value is relevant for this discussion and not offtopic, of course when creating money and value its useful to know what money and value are.

I don't see how theses on objectivity/subjectivity of value has anything to do with us having an adequate theory of value, yes the ground of value can either be objective or subjective or both, but this isn't sufficient for the basis of a theory of value, mathematics is also invented in the minds of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, that doesn't mean it isn't objective in the epistemic sense, origin isn't function, what theory of value and money must do is to explain the function adequately. I have read some of it, he seems to have some very fundamental misunderstandings about reality and knowledge, and listing unfounded claims without reasons.


Things don't have to be intrinsically tied to have an effect, the expended value in bitcoin used for security affects value, at least as a condition that it can have a non-zero value, it also very likely determines the particular value, how and to what extent is the question, the fact that it is not an isometric or immediate relationship doesn't mean there is is no relationship.

Neat.

If you think it’s offtopic then I’ve successfully made my point. After all, I’m not the one that tried arguing that the value of Bitcoin is somehow protected by the energy expended to make them or, following that, arguing that PoS energy kind of does the same thing.
It was no less off topic here, but notice that wasn’t your response;
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.14806179

Oof! Hit me right in the feels. Excuse me while I dramatically swoon and collapse, sprawling to the floor.
That’s because value is invented in the minds of Homo Sapiens through economic calculation.
“The value of money, as we have seen, depends upon the subjective valuations of the people who hold it. And those valuations do not depend solely on the quantity of it that each person holds. They depend also on the quality of the money.” -Henry Hazlitt

“Every man who, in the course of economic life, takes a choice between the satisfaction of one need as against another, eo ipso makes a judgment of value. Such judgments of value at once include only the very satisfaction of the need itself; and from this they reflect back upon the goods of a lower, and then further upon goods of a higher order.” - Mises
https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth
https://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson

Again, joules expended to provide a good or service is only tangentially related to the value of said good or service. Bitcoin's value isn't intrinsically tied to it, and whether or not PoS has some similar work would also not tell us anything about the value of a PoS coin. All it could tell us is if the value of work required to create said currency exceeds the value of said currency, then the production won't survive very long in the marketplace.

Now, work expended in Bitcoin does contribute to it's security which people tend to value in their currencies... But that's a different subject.

Ok inb4 offtopic: Theory of value is important when considering the basic mechanisms of a currency. The link by DumbFruit is dumb, the author has very little knowledge of what labor theory of value is (or more likely very little knowledge in general), but I guess thats already implied by the context of the whole 'Mises Instutite' austrian economics thing.

You propose that fiat contradicts the law of value, I think this is false. "Under fiat feudalism, the yardstick of value is explicitly no longer tied to labor." It is true that it isn't tied to labor, but the problem is that it never was immediately tied to labor. Labor theory of value does not imply an immediate relation of prices and value, only that value regulates prices in the long term. Fiat could be considered in the same way, its costs are not immediate labor, but mediated labor, because to issue new money the costs a goverment pays is credit. My point isn't that theory of value is correct (I think it is partially but not as a general theory of value) or that fiat is good, but that theory of value is not an empirical theory, it can not be tested and falsified, its a speculative theory and its critique must be conceptual. Although both marginalism and labor theory are partially useful for theory of value, neither is sufficient for it, both lack in a historic analysis of value in general and epistemology required for it. It is my opinion that we currently don't have any viable theories of value, we have some great starting points and new data to base it on, and even great ideas (see Ayres), but no viable theory.

Here are some relevant links:

Ayres: http://sites.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=46744

some history:

https://www.academia.edu/9262850/MONEY_AND_RUSSIAN_REVOLUTION_Why_Cultural_HIstory_Needs_Its_Own_Theory_of_Money

https://www.academia.edu/11718405/Neolithic_versus_Bronze_Age_Social_Formations_A_Political_Economy_Approach

Thanks for the link.  I'm still struggling to come to terms with theory of value and transformation problem and what relevance they have to current conditions.
Why don't they mention the author of the theory of value by name do you think?  Seems odd. 

"In a situation where value is measured almost strictly in dollars (i.e., as in the case of profits measured by a large company) an employee that brings in the most revenue or a manager that oversees a profitable division will be rewarded, regardless of how many hours he works."

Yes, well, if value is measured in dollars the theory of value is specifically refuted, as I point out in this poorly written post (sorry): 

http://frass.woodcoin.org/fiat-feudalism-a-primer-for-marxists/

The economic value of a good or service is not equivalent to the joules required to provide said good or service. They are only tangentially related.

https://mises.org/blog/labor-theory-value-refuted-nobody-cares-how-hard-you-work

Hey, thanks for actually hashing out (no pun intended) the negative entropy thing which I had just thrown the term out there.  I first heard of tying negative entropy to currency in a book by Frank Meno called "Cats, Aether, Gyrons, and the Universe:  Something for Everyone".  He didn't go into even as much detail as you did in that paragraph in specifics. 

Anyway I don't have much to add but as far as "improvement in regard to existing financial institutions" you might like this post:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.14807275

And on the energy analysis topic you might like this one:

http://frass.woodcoin.org/msats-per-joule/

Cheers  
 

My layman's understanding is that POS in general has at least one big theoretical exploit just waiting to happen, and it probably will once there is sufficient value on a POS chain for a blackhat to bother coding up the exploit.

So ethereum switching to POS seems like a nice test case of that possibility.    :-)

Anyway, the short answer to bitcoin moving to POS is:  never gonna happen.  too controversial.  changes to bitcoin protocol require consensus.   end of story.

As a physicist you know energy is plentiful, so you at least have to talk about electric power or specifically hashrate (the relevant work done for blockchain security), the latter is what is rewarded with newly issued coins. I agree that expenditure works well for value, but its the expenditure of value, not electricity that works (if we abstract other factors, the logic is that miner pays X for electricity and won't sell for less) this expenditure of value is the almost same in PoS, it just has another from (staker pays X for coins and won't sell for less), the difference is that for mining electricity is spent, and for staking only liquidity of value is spent (and so nothing is really spent as the process of reversing it costs very little relative to electrical power), this benefit brings its problems on the value side, the ease of reversing the process also means it is less effective for determining value and consequently works worse for adoption.

Interesting point about proof-of-negative-entropy, negentropy is a very useful concept for thinking about systems, however because its as general concept as entropy, I think it describes all existing proofs. Every type of cryptographic proof is a proof-of-negative-entropy, the work done to validate transactions in a blockchain exports entropy from the system because it verifies transactions and proves that the data is the same, so no new information for this specific transaction is possible. A blockchain is order that exports disorder by organizing representation of data, to optimize this entropy-export, the least ammount of value should be required for verification. Right now PoS seems to me as an improvement as it 'recycles' value for different functions, but of course there is still much room for improvement. If crypto is to be an improvement in regard to existing financial institutions, it has to deliver what the banks lack, efficient and fair risk/uncertainty/entropy managment.

The ecological issues are the same, we need more efficient ways of exporting entropy, not a decrease in energy consumption, trying to decrease consumption only potentiates the inefficiencies of the systems.