Topic: Is PoW Outdated? What are the Essential Advantages of PoW Consensus? - page 2. (Read 1059 times)

Then either those coins are worthless to attack, or stakers are already centralized by a cartel of staking-whales.


Misinformation. There are more pools in the Bitcoin network, and miners can always leave a pool anytime they want.


There are none at present, not like some POS coins that regularly checkpoint every some amount of blocks. Plus those checkpoints were from several years ago to avoid DOS attacks on nodes that are doing the initial blockchain download.

Keep trusting in Game Theory (ie:4 pool operators), you better examine the following
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

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https://coin.dance/nodes



 

 

Considering Bitcoin Core is over 97% of the available nodes,
their coded checkpoints are enforcing the checkpoints thru out the network, regardless of the other's inclusion or exclusion.

You are welcome.

The ultimate solution to mining variance is low difficulty (and not forming syndicates/pools  because it is the operator who decides about the block contents) and it is achievable by retiring winner-takes-all philosophy and replacing it by a contributor-takes-share alternative.
Youcan imagine several protocols for this but the one I've become totally fascinated by, is when you combine this idea with a sharding algorithm. Principally it is possible because each shard is responsible for a part of the network and you need to distribute both incentives and costs.

It is what I've mentioned earlier in my previous post, both centralization and scaling problems have roots in the same flaw: winner-takes-all. In my design the whole mining job is divided between tens of thousand of shards, each with very low difficulties, so very low variance for small miners and it is how we get both birds, decentralization and scaling, with just one stone.

As of your speculation about governments engaging in mining, I do agree it will be good news for bitcoin but not for centralization because we are talking about very unreliable actors with high possibility of collusion and worst intentions ever, we need small farms, individual miners, hobbyists, ... all over the world to decide about every single block they mine to resists against such possibilities, otherwise it would be easy for governments to push on pool operators and impose censorship on individuals and even nations. The only force which is able to resist such scenarios is free will of small miners who can directly act and decide.  

No, most PoS coins don't run a checkpoint server.
Peercoin Hybrid PoW/PoS does,

However the following PoS coins don't run a checkpoint server
Blackcoin, Mintcoin, PandaCoin, Zeitcoin

Show us what you know which coins run a checkpoint server dumbo?

Bitcoin is reliant on just 4 individuals (pool operators) , so your btc security is a issue of pure trust, the energy waste is meaningless.

FYI:
While not running a checkpoint server , your beloved bitcoin does still have checkpoints in the client code.
Maybe you should petition the devs to completely remove them.  

Is that really your debate? You need to think about the security trade-offs your Zeitcoin is giving up, besides eating those crayons. But, most POS networks have centralized signers through checkpoints. If you're OK about that, then good luck to you.

Same Incentive as People that only Hold Bitcoins.
In Time Price per coin will go up.

PoS is just as secure a PoW and in some cases more so, many that have a personal interest in PoW don't want to admit it.
I find it amusing so many here defend the energy wasting PoW
and they themselves are unable to participate in PoW mining due to financial restrictions.
You're like poor people arguing how secure the banks are, and you have no control over the security, much like most PoW supporters.

PoS supporters can at least directly help secure their networks.
I stake coins everyday, so when did you last mine a Bitcoin Block  , Wind_FURY?

Thanks for the read, although I wouldn't call pooling a problem. It was rather a solution against centralization, because at some point in the past, small miners would've had to wait years to find a block. By combining computing power (pooling) they were able to lower the variance. The fact that at this moment we have a low amount of big pools could change anytime. For example when some small country governments want to get involved seriously into Bitcoin mining. These could build huge mining operations at the lowest electricity cost possible. Other countries would definitely follow out of FOMO and we would see a new global level of a mining race.

I am still interested in your hard fork proposal esp. the part about how you want to avoid pooling.

Then what are the stakers' incentives for forging blocks? That's a big security trade-off.

Bitcoin simply works because of the incentives, the costs, and the game theory that holds everything together. It keeps everyone in the network honest.


Hahaha. Stop eating those crayons. The costs in mining Bitcoin is the energy expended in hashing. POS coins have no such costs.

Not so. PoW is far from being meaningless in this instance, it simply has a secondary 'useful' output.

There is 'no waste', not 'less waste', you are correct in this regard i.e. 2 x commodity outputs, being 'coins' and prime gaps with every block ...

Also, not an 'idea', it actually functions as intended, on-chain and has done so since 2014.

...

"So the difficulty will simply be the length of the prime gap?

Not exactly. The average length of a prime gap with the starting prime p, is log(p), which means that the average prime gap size increases with larger primes. Then, instead of the pure length, we use the merit of the prime gap, which is the ratio of the gap's size to the average gap size.

Let p be the prime starting a prime gap, then m = gapsize/log(p) will be the merit of this prime gap.

Also a pseudo random number is calculated from p to provide finer difficulty adjustment.

Let rand(p) be a pseudo random function with 0 less than rand(p) less than 1. Then, for a prime gap starting at prime p with size s, the difficulty will be s/log(p) + 2/log(p) * rand(p), where 2/log(p) is the average distance between a gap of size s and s + 2 (the next greater gap) in the proximity of p.

When it actually comes to mining, there are two additional fields added to the Blockheader, named “shift” and “adder”. We will calculate the prime p as sha256(Blockheader) * 2^shift + adder. As an additional criterion the adder has to be smaller than 2^shift to avoid that the PoW could be reused."

For Prime Gaps see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_gap

HINT: We could use some more PoW, much more actually!

...


Correct.  

I'm not ok with this idea.

Look, when your work is useful for any purpose other than blockchain integrity, you can just sell it as a service and be rewarded somehow for it. Now your incentive for behaving properly in the blockchain ecosystem remains unknown.

The way you look at PoW, accepting it as being a meaningless work and a waste of resources and trying to 'fix' it, is flawed from the first beginning. There is no waste, resource consumption is necessary to produce any commodity, bitcoin is no exception.

Is PoW Outdated?

Yes and No.  

What are the Essential Advantages of PoW Consensus?

Useful-Proof-of-Work can be used for solving 'problems', not only consensus, on-chain i.e. ...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_mathematics

See my sig. and no that's not an advertisement, it's a Proof-of-Useful-Proof-of-Work.

One for the Bitcoin Maximalist's and long live the 'Jedi's of Pi'.

Well, I've been investigating this issue for a while. In this article posted in bitcointalk, I've mathematically proven that both mining variance and proximity premium flaws, the two most important factors behind pooling pressure (the force which pushes miners to somehow "collude" by means of forming pools), are direct results of Satoshi's choice of a winner-takes-all approach to mining reward distribution.

Briefly speaking, winner-takes-all approach to PoW, leads to a Bernoulli distribution of chances and for small shares of total hash power, and by small I mean shares less than 0.001 which for current bitcoin network it is about a farm with like 4500 S9s installed, mining is no longer an industry but a gambling business (fair gambling tho) in which you have definite chance not to hit a block for days because of variance.

Also, I've proposed a framework for solving this problem earlier and I'm busy developing it by extending the idea to another BIG problem: on-chain scaling! The idea is to shot both birds by one and only one bullet and prove one point: Cryptocurrency is not doomed unlike what Vitalik Buterin have suggested almost directly by his ridiculous claim about the existence of a trilemma.

From a pure technical point of view I'm personally convinced that both problems: centralization of mining through pools and on-chain scaling have common roots in winner-takes-all model and I'll publish my work asap, but technology is not the main challenge, community is, imao.

I'm not ready for fighting with people who are so insistent on not upgrading bitcoin and keeping it as is: a secure store of value and nothing else.

It has been months since when I've finished every single design issue and I'm just hesitating to say a word because I'm not optimistic about what happens when you come with a hard fork proposal, I want bitcoin to improve and it should happen in a friendly environment with cooperation and friendship, it is what bitcoin is or supposed to be, a campus for good people, isn't it? But things don't work like this in bitcoin nowadays, unfortunately.

No dum dum , it does not.

Since they don't receive excessive interest, and they don't receive transaction fees,
for them to earn anything else such as fiat, they have to sell from their principle amount.
(Your confusion between high interest bearing PoS coins and very low interest bearing PoS coins, only shows your ignorance.)

They also have node costs, which have greater hardware requirements than those useless non-mining btc nodes of yours.
Unlike your non-mining bitcoin nodes that do nothing but relay data,
Staking nodes actually secure their network while competing with other nodes,
totally replacing the energy wasteful warehouses full of ASICS and your non-mining nodes.  

Let me guess, Zeitcoin? Hahaha! OK.

The problem with POS is distribution, and that there are no costs in generating income, and in forging a block by staking. It's much easier for stakers to bribe other stakers to censor transactions.


But there's still no costs for stakers, which makes them perpetually the whales of the network for free.

The Altcoin , I mentioned already exists.
It has suffered no successful 51% attack , definitely secured by more than 4 individuals running pools, and runs on PoS only.
None of the N@S bogeymen myths have been able to harm it.

There are manipulators in the markets that primary goal is to assure alts don't do better than bitcoin.
They use trading tactics to keep most coins low, while using those other tactics to keep their primary coin stable or high.
It is a temporary inconvenience that will one day be overcome.  

Instead of 'believing', you could provide a proof by creating an altcoin with the 'well designed' specs of your choice. If you are right, it should go up the roof and in a few years people would trust the security of your coin so much, that Bitcoin will be forgotten in a week.

I could be wrong, but I think that Bitcoin had no such value, that it has now, if it was cheap and easy to mine.

Ok , we all know you're slow.

But see if you can grasp the following,
a PoS coin designed with extremely low inflation and all transaction fees destroyed.
The rich don't get richer and if they sell, they lose their staking capacity with every coin sold.

Where in that confused brain of yours, does that seem to be a perpetual motion machine.  
Realize their is a major difference between high inflation coins and low inflation coins.

FYI:
Clarification : I said Bitcoin did not have to choose PoS,
but I personally believe a well designed PoS is more secure than bitcoin current PoW.
Look at this way I can pay off or coerce just 4 pool operators and I can 51% attack bitcoin, it be a lot harder to 90% attack a PoS coin.
Because you need 90% of a PoS coin to sustain an 51% PoW style attack on a PoS coin, due to dormancy after staking.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.51666688

FYI2: Even Theymos was concerned of centralization of PoW Mining in Oct 2016 and proposed a possible hybrid design including PoS

Mind to get into more details about this? Sounds interesting.

Good, you have accepted the fact that the POS perpetual motion machine will never make a blockchain as secure as POW. Good luck looking for that energy-efficient hashing algorithm.

But POS is "OK", if you can accept the trade-offs.

The same community that was too frighten of a hard fork , that they soft fork in segwit.
The same community that ignore the energy waste and potential of government seizures on a daily basis.
The same community that trusts a mere 4 individuals to safeguard the entire bitcoin network from 51% attack.

The point is, they need to start exploring the backup plan now,
before the energy waste debacle gives the governments the needed pretense to destroy bitcoin,
because bitcoin is losing the PR front with the general public and
the continued refusal not to begin addressing the energy waste problem is going to be a major blow against it.

FYI: I'll even tell you how it will play out.
Random Government Leader
Bitcoin miners are stealing energy & money from the Young & Old & weakest among us ,
so they can profit from the most unfortunate of us, and raping the environment and destroying our children's future.
So as of today, This Great Nation will Ban all Bitcoin Mining, to protect our Nation and call on all of the other nations of the world to do the same, We will protect this Nation , We will protect our children and their future.

*A few backdoor trade deals and any country not agreeing originally , will soon after.
Any small country that refuses to agree will get invaded because of their corrupt dictator.
Or suffer an EMP that fries all of their ASICS and local power grids. *

By the time that speech is made,
Bitcoin will be the great satan, and no one will care about any possible algo change to fix the energy waste,
it will be too late and bitcoin will have lost the PR war and real war forever.
Time is running short, before the above fable becomes reality.