Topic: Is PoW Outdated? What are the Essential Advantages of PoW Consensus? - page 3. (Read 1130 times)

Colluding Pool operators for a short term 51% attack is an attack vector.
If you develop a fix for that great , one less thing to worry about, until then however it is still a major attack vector.
Which at the moment the community solution is to just Trust the Pool Operators.  

Government seizure of ASICS is also an attack vector, so denying that is a problem leaves Bitcoin Vulnerable to it.
So if no one is willing to fix the Massive Energy footprint , how exatly do they plan to fight Government seizures.
Because if enough happen, the bitcoin blockchain freezes or hash rate falls so low , 51% attack become common place and bitcoin is destroyed.
It is even possible the World Governments Collude and use Seized ASICS to 51% attack bitcoin to guarantee their fiat monopoly stays the only real choice for finance.  

Sometime in the near future, even countries that are friendly to Bitcoin are going to start charging their miners higher energy fees than the regular public, because bitcoin is requiring those Power Utilities that only planned for a modest 3-5% yearly growth to provide a much greater % yearly growth, of which more capital will be required by the Utilities to finance.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/munis-to-charge-bitcoin-miners-higher-power-prices-in-new-york/519275/
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230

Pooling pressure is a flaw that could be fixed and is not inherent to the whole idea of PoW and pools do not act like central authorities anyways. Actual mining farms and individual miners are far more distributed and they won't stand misbehavior of pools and switch easily to other pools by means of a glance and a distributed nework of full nodes are witnessing every single event in the field. collusion between pools is not economically feasible and have no history in bitcoin and if it had we wouldn't see bitcoin price above 10 grands right now.

As of governments seizing mining farms, it is not a real threat and Iran is not a typical example. I'm from Iran, our government is a mess, they have been trying to regulate mining operations in Iran for like years and they have done nothing in this regard, now we have powerful juridical authorities who are corrupted like hell. They have spotted two wealthy farms somewhere in Yazd province that are not regulated (naturally), probably they've claimed their cut and when the owners resisted to pay them they've asked "a friend" to issue a verdict for temporarily stopping their operations. Iran government and what it does or does not is a chaotic messy pattern and is not a good fact to be used for induction.

No , not enough said,
governments are seizing ASICS because of their disruption potential of the power grid.
Do you plan to stick your head in the ground and ignore that also.

The ASICS miners that power BTC are being seized (because they can't hide because of their insane energy waste footprint),
so does the community have a strategy besides cowering in a corner and waiting for the governments to seize all of their miners.

Answer the question,
when a superior military force seizes your toys,
what do you do?


FYI:
I wait for an answer, but doubtful the ones arguing understand what to do.
So I'll go ahead and answer it.

What you do when a superior military force seizes your ASICS?
IS  ADAPT!
1.  Either modify the PoW to a more energy efficient version , that can hide it's energy footprint
and if that is impossible

2.  Switch to another algorithm that is energy efficient
No one says it has to be PoS , it can be any algo that is energy efficient , Duh!

3.  Move all ASICS to an island in international waters and power them from a Volcano
(Least likely but if their is a super villain here then doable.) 

Pos is always piece of shit.  It is basically a bond with zero backing.  Worse then a junk bond it is a virtual junk bond whose value is based on pure imagination.


Pow is a hard iron gear based or backed coin.

Ie all the warehouses of miners burning power to create the coins.

What you simply don’t understand is the value of burning power to make a coin.

It is real that value and here is a simple example.  Niagra Falls  has USA and Canadian power plants.

When they are at peak capacity due to high river flow they have enough power to supply all the coin mining in the world.  Obviously that is not what happens what happens is many power plants supply many miners all over the world.

I consulted on a 100 mega watt farm built.  It was to use power from five plants that surrounded it.

And it was designed to run from 20 to 100 megawatts. It would run 100 megawatts when the power plant had excess power production and it was to run 20 mega watt when power plants were supplying power to other customers ie lots of ac on a hot day.


That service supplied by that farm helps each and every power customer using those five power plants.

Most people that say pow waste power do not understand pow farms can be used to help balance the grid loads all over the world.

A power plant like niagra falls does not shut the river off when the river is flowing high and hard. It simply used to make the excess power and shunt it into the grid.

Ie it wasted that excess power.  Pow solves a real problem when used correctly.

Every time I see a thread with people claiming pow wastes power I simply would like to say hammers smash skulls ban them.  

The truth is proper use of a hammer to build a home or a shed is good.

The use of pow to help balance the worlds power grid is good.

So the goal would be to encourage proper use of hammers and pow.  Nuff said.

Central Authorities,  

you do realize that it only takes 4 mining pool operators to collude to double spend with Bitcoin.
And the only thing preventing it , is that the Community Trusts them not too, otherwise they point their miners elsewhere.
I hate to break it to you , but you trusting the pool operators not to abuse their position, is you trusting a central authority.  

So all of that wasted electricity is irrelevant as the trust of 4 individuals is all that stands between bitcoin and a double spend.  

---

So whether you believe the energy waste is a issue or not.
What does the community proposes to do about the problem of governments seizing their ASICS, like Iran just did.
Since hiding their ASICS energy footprint is not possible.

So is the naivety of people like you who do not understand what is the difference between wasting energy and consuming it for a useful purpose, actually one of the most useful cases of energy consumption in the history: setting money free from central authorities.

Really,
Blackcoin is PoS only, I guarantee you can't break it.  

The Governments that are banning the PoW mining , care about electricity.

Find me an article where a government has banned video games, because it compromised their power grid.

The ability or stupidity of those here to completely ignore bitcoin energy waste issue is astounding.  

Sorry to disagree with most of the answers here, but I think that POW is the only relevant answer to the problem of strengthening the blockchain and make it impossible to be reversed, without having a central authority that is controlling the network.

Without mining and all this work generated by the miners, you only need the private key to hack a blockchain. Most coins that are not mined are centralized (Ripple, or Libra). These people want to have a way to reverse the transactions, either because they are big corporations who do not want to have a problem with a government or because they just want to be acting like banks.

Satoshi Nakamoto nailed it and without being peer to peer, or without POW, Bitcoin would never take off. There were many attempts to make cryptocurrencies that failed at this time.

Now, because most people are playing with crypto like in a casino, the relevance of all this work is starting to be forgotten. Scams, and unsafe crypto are popping up from everywhere and nobody seems to care if they are safe or not, if they are centralized or not.

Without POW, a blockchain is not safe. And who cares about the electricity? All our cities are using countless of bulbs all night and nobody complains about the waste. The electric consumption of the miners is just another propaganda against the crypto, built by the fiat resistance.

Playing video games is also costing a lot of electric. All these geeks playing all day on their computers, is this useful?  Save the planet: stop playing games!

No, it is the same as usual. You get as much as you spend on mining. There are issues to be fixed like pooling pressure, true(and I'm working on it), but the fundamentals are solid. Compared to most industries, mining is ways less vulnerable to economics of scale.

As I've reminded in my post, he came to this "realization" when he was a teenager, overnight after a discussion with another clueless PoS enthusiast in his 20s. One needs a minimum level of education to approach economics, it is not about IQ, it is about science.


Your scenario is flawed, it has been 10 years and bitcoin now consumes lots of electricity and nobody has claimed anything about its role in electricity fees and you are trying to fix a problem that does not even exist.

Bitcoin price oscillates around its value which is determined by the amount of socially required work necessary for producing it. With halving in action the amount of bitcoins generated in a year multiplied by the costs determines its value and eventually its price.

The effect of an increased price is primarily justified by halving: Without any increase in difficulty and power consumption one can predict a doubling in value/price every 4 years.

Now suppose the increase rate goes further than 25% a year. Interestingly there is a second mechanism that balances everything: Suppose as a result of increased price the the global power consumption of bitcoin increases to the levels that has a minor impact on electricity fees, it will immediately have a negative feedback on total network hash rate because now less power consumption would suffice for the same level of security.

It is the point: bitcoin does not rely on electricity, it relies on the cost of electricity. So, if in some point of history probably when network generates hundreds of bitcoins in a year which worth 1 million dollars each, the network needs to consume hundreds of millions of dollars, almost nothing compared to the total electricity market cap.

As a simple rule you can estimate the cost (amount * fee) of consumed electricity in the network as being almost equal to the total value (amount * price) of mined bitcoins. It is just wrong to suggest a scenario about an imaginary situation in which we have both electricity fees and consumption amount increased to an unsustainable state that affects human life globally because of bitcoin price surging.

As you can hopefully realize now, it is not that easy for an under-educated 19 years old boy to understand how PoW is sustainable and still I'm deliberately avoiding deeper and more sophisticated topics. it is why I don't give any credit to the move your favorite pop-star, Vitalik made on that night in the lobby of that hotel the move which he describes it as "falling in love with weak subjectivity" (a PoS based on PoW scheme).

PoS was created as a solution to the energy waste back in 2013.
PoS networks will not drain the world's energy supply like PoW network will.

And we don't have to get into a back and forth about PoS verses PoW.
There are other consensus designs they could choose from.

The main point , PoW has a time limit, at some point it either takes all of the electricity or the People have to end it.
That is the problem with it's Winner take all design.

If BTC devs don't like PoS , no one says they have to use it,
but they do need to come up with a consensus that does not make them enemies of the rest of the world.

Current BTC miners are already elitist, with the majority of the global populace shut out of mining,
moving to a new consensus where they still have control but no longer squander the world's energy resources,
would be a win/win, a win for them and a win for the environment and future generations energy usage.
If PoW Miners keep on the present course, something is going to have to break.

*the articles from my earlier post show Countries like China will just outright ban all PoW mining,
Iceland is on the verge of being unable to meet demand , and the Bitcoin Miners are using more electricity than the normal populace.
Something will have to give. Odds are Bitcoin mining just gets outlawed in the majority of countries and possibility the world.

 
It started that way, but that has been over for years.
PoW mining is only for the mega rich as no one else can afford it.

When did you last mine a bitcoin block with one of your warehouses full of ASICS?  



Interesting , how most countries like China, call it energy waste.
The Ethereum founder has realized that PoW is unsustainable, shame so many are blind to it.

I put it to you like this and honestly think on it before you reply.
Bitcoin Mining drives up the price for energy for everyone, say it hits 1 million dollars per 1 BTC,
So now they are buying the majority of the world energy and driving up your personal rates.
This means your usage of energy has to be reduced, so now explain to your girlfriend, why you can't take her to see her family, because travel is now too expensive, explain to her why heating milk for her baby, or even taking a hot shower or running a heater or an air conditioner uses too much energy and you can't afford it. Now ask yourself , how long is she going to stay with you?  

Cryptocurrency is about setting money free from banks, governments, trusts, etc. to have this goal fulfilled, bitcoin encourages both producing and managing money directly by people,

Efficiency does not make sense in the context of money production because money is supposed to be a store of value and you just can't embed value in a unit of commodity efficiently because efficiency means less work and less resource consumption i.e. less value.

You need to have a theoretic approach to the concept of money to be eligible for discussing such a crucial issue otherwise, you follow the path that Vitalik Buterin went, a junior programmer who happened to become a celebrity because of his proposal about a Turing Complete machine for bitcoin and was 'fallen in love' with PoS overnight when he was like 19 years old and had no clue about what money is and what it is not.

Bitcoin is not a simple invention to be re-visioned by simple minds and naive people (being a celebrity or not), its success story is based on PoW and a deep understanding of money as a store of value, what money has always been before the invention of fiat which is the cause of every single economic crisis in modern history. Nevertheless fiat currencies are far better than pure PoS generated money because they are backed by law, while PoS money still worthless (just like fiat) is backed by enthusiasm of a small community that eventually loses its stem.


To be more specific and exact: energy cost is the basis of bitcoin value.

PoW is a technical deadend , the majority of new coins all choose more energy efficient designs



The Major problem with PoW is that energy cost is not segmented to ONLY PoW Miners,
The PoW miners draw Energy from the Entire Global System, and while they may reap ever increasing rewards from drawing more energy,
the same can not be said for everyone else.

No one cares about the PoW miners completing with each other,
but they will care when the miners are competing with you , your friends, your family, and your business,
(driving your energy bills higher).

Thinking an exponentially growing drain on the world resources won't eventually cause energy prices to increase for all people to the point ,
that one must de denied.

So then the question becomes, will the PoW miners be denied energy or regular people?

Which is why BTC should start looking at some other form of consensus that won't place them in direct combat with the rest of the world's populace for energy consumption.
(There a reason China is banning PoW mining, in the long run it is unsustainable due to the price increase it will cause on people that have nothing to do with bitcoin.)
https://www.wired.com/story/china-says-bitcoin-wasteful-wants-ban-mining/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/13/cryptocurrency-mining-in-iceland-is-using-so-much-energy-the-electricity-may-run-out/?utm_term=.a1441db5f29f

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48799155

Anyone thinking PoW is a sustainable process, is having a deer in the headlights moment.  

This is a copy paste from https://medium.com/@yeefoundation/is-pow-outdated-what-are-the-essential-advantages-of-pow-consensus-6d12f0851007

It really looks like you may tbe the author. But why don't you include the source? Your account may be banned for that.

Also, try to add some discussion with the knowledged you have, don't just throw a wall of text here..

With various innovative consensus mechanisms such as PoS, DPoS and PBFT emerging in the blockchain world, some people are asking “is PoW outdated?”, “what is the future of PoW?”, “is it still meaningful to do some optimization and innovation work based on PoW?”

After much research and analysis, YeeCo team believes that PoW is still the basis or the kernel of other existing consensus mechanisms and holds an irreplaceable position. Here is our analysis and thoughts on the essential advantages of PoW consensus.

Distributed Consensus

When Satoshi Nakamoto came up with the PoW consensus, he didn’t mean to further the research on distributed consensus done by the scholars. People intend to consider that his PoW consensus provides a solution for distributed consensus in Byzantine environment, giving it an academic perspective, and we start to connect them together.

Speaking of the distributed consensus, we have to include "FLP impossible" theorem in our discussion. "FLP impossible" theorem is come up with and proven by three scientists, Fischer, Lynch and Patterson, in their paper "Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process” in 1985. The theorem concludes that there is no deterministic consensus algorithm that can solve the consistency problem in a minimum asynchronous model system that is reliable in the network but allows node failure (even if there is only one). The revelation of this theorem is that the technically workable distributed consensus must be compromised in some respects.

In fact, there are mainly 2 types of compromise; one is the compromise of asynchrony, and the other is the compromise of finality.

The compromise of asynchrony is to set the timeout mechanism, assuming that the message will not be infinitely delayed. The DLS algorithm (“Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony”) and the PBFT algorithm (“Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance”) are examples in this. Furthermore, the DLS paper reveals two goals of asynchronous consensus in the Byzantine environment: security (consistency) and liveness (availability). Both of the examples make synchronization assumptions to ensure liveness rather than security, which means that if the real environment does not meet the synchronization hypothesis, it will only cause liveness problems rather than consistency problems. That's why we often say that PBFT is a consensus algorithm that prioritizes consistency over availability.

The compromise of finality is based on the concept introduced by Nakamoto, which is that finality is probabilistic. A probabilistically secure consensus is jointly constructed by peer-to-peer networks  through the proof of work and block rewards. It seems that on the map, the Nakamoto consensus is only one of the 2 compromise solutions of the asynchronous Byzantine consensus problem defined by consensus researchers, but the introduction of probability finality not only solves the traditional asynchronous Byzantine problem, but also solves a bigger problem. : Allows any number of nodes to participate in the system in an open manner, and they don’t have to know the complete set of the participants. It is very remarkable because this is the reality that the public chains face. In practice, the Nakamoto consensus that makes compromise on finality has achieved great success.

In essence, the innovative consensuses are also based on the 2 types of compromises.

The Compromises Made by Various Consensuses

PoS

PoS is essentially a PoW and it is a kind of compromise of finality. Staking can be regarded as a threshold. By introducing the threshold, the number of the participants is reduced. The smaller participant set size has two advantages: 1. The total workload of the entire system will be reduced, so is the energy consumption; 2. Asynchronous communication networks are smaller in scale and a fork is less likely to happen due to the delay, and block intervals can be smaller. This is why PoS says it has higher TPS and is more efficient.

DPoS+PBFT

DPoS+PBFT is PBFT in nature and it’s a kind of compromise of asynchrony. The purpose of DPoS is to select a set of participants that can apply the PBFT algorithm. This set has to meet three conditions: 1. The scale is small enough, otherwise the traffic is huge; 2. The total number of the participants is a certain figure, so it is an asynchronous consensus problem that PBFT can solve; 3. The number of malicious participants (Byzantine nodes) is less than 1/3. The Staking mechanism plays two roles in it: 1. Screening users as a threshold; 2. As an incentive mechanism to reduce the proportion of malicious nodes.

Tetris

Tetris is a knowledge inference based consensus algorithm innovated by YeeCo. It is essentially BFT and a kind of compromise of asynchrony. Tetris itself is a solution to the standard Byzantine problem, with a focus on its high performance and proven security. The BFT participants are selected through a pluggable upper layer protocol, which is workable in PoW, DPoS, VRF, etc.

Algorand

Algorand is essentially a BFT, a kind of compromise of asynchrony. Algorand chooses a set of participants that can apply the BFT algorithm in a very special and ingenious way, using VRF (verifiable random function), similar to each participant owning a lottery ticket and the participant can know if he/she is selected or not without communicating with other participants. It seems to be very efficient, but there are a few limits: 1. Need to set a threshold for the participants, because the cost of creating a private key to participate in the network is very low, and in fact Algorand takes the participant’s balance into consideration; 2. As there should be a winning rate for the lottery, and the system needs to know the total number of participants whic is a consensus problem in itself. In order to infer the total number of participants, Algorand tries to make sure that the online balance is about the same as the total balance in the network by rewarding the online nodes. This is in fact a Byzantine fault tolerant system that requires that the total balance of the online and honest nodes is  over 2/3.

DAG

DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), adopted by IOTA and Conflux, is essentially PoW, and a compromise of finality. If the previous consensuses aim to avoid forks, then DAG’s aim is to control the fork to a certain level, thereby improving the system’s TPS. The essence of DAG is proof of work, but the principle of the longest chain has been changed to the principle of  the most difficult graph structure.

PoW Being the Kernel or Basis

The difference in the various consensus mechanisms is actually the difference in the path from “an open set of network participants” to “consensus”. For example, if the path is from “an open set of network participants” directly to “consensus”, then it is PoW; if the path is from “an open set of network participants” to “an open set of ledger keepers” first and then to "consensus", then it is PoS; if the path is from “an open set of network participants” to “a closed set of ledger keepers” first and then to “consensus”, then it is X+BFT, and X may be DPoS or VRF.

We can see that there are not much innovation in these consensus mechanisms. As long as a consensus is reached from an “an open set of network participants" (nodes can join and leave freely), only one model can be adopted, Nakamoto consensus: nodes are motivated to continue to reach a consensus result based on a consensus result with probabilistic finality.

The meaning of PoW to other consensuses lies in 2 points:

If the consensus is constructed from “an open set of network participants” (nodes can join and leave freely), then it is essentially Nakamoto consensus, so PoW consensus is regarded as the kernel of such consensuses.
If the consensus is changing “an open set of network participants” to “a closed set of network participants”, then mechanism is still required in this case. Where does the consensus on the value of staking come from? The first crypto currency and the Nakamoto consensus play important roles in it. So PoW consensus plays as the basis of such consensuses.

The Essential Advantages of PoW

PoW supporters has listed a number of its merits, such as reliability, purity. When it comes to energy consumption, some people regard it as a flaw, while some people disagree and believe that energy cost is the basis of security.

From my point of view, the essential advantages of PoW are as follows:

Ultimate Openness

PoW is designed for an open set of participants. This openness (the participants are unstable) is always a challenge for them to reach a consensus, whether it is during the earliest cold start, or during the mining stage when the crypto price and mining difficulty are fluctuating.

PoW has adopted an extremely simple mechanism to solve the openness problem. PoW does not need to make any patches for any of the scenarios or conduct any governance. Relying on its core mechanism to drive the entire system, it has withstood the test of time. PoW consensus design is ingenious, simple and adaptable, making it outstanding among a number of consensuses.

PoW is an absolute permissionless system. New hashrate can join the competition at any time and at the same starting line with existing hashrate. Although Staking investments seem similar to the hashrate investments, but different initial factors lead to quite different situations. If the blockchain system is a system that is easy to fall into the "Matthew effect", then in PoW the requirement of hashrate investments (external and physical) is an important factor to resist this effect. On the one hand, the lagging adjustment mechanism makes it difficult for the system to enter a steady state. On the other hand, the external and physical hashrate investments are more independent than stakings. For PoW, the positive feedback of the consensus advantage of influencing the consensus result to the business advantage is one-way, but for staking, the positive feedback is two-way.

Ultimate Security

The frequently discussed security issues, such as 51% attack, over 1/3 Byzantine nodes, are all issues that may arise due to the consensus rules. However, the blockchain system is ultimately a system running on a physical network, so, compared with the attack that takes advantage of the consensus rules, the attack at the physical network level would be a catastrophe to the blockchain system.

PoW believes that the power of a node should not be determined by the virtual resource it holds(Staking), but should be determined by the physical resource (hashrate).

In the case of Staking, it is easy to fall into a situation where the size of the network nodes doesn’t grow with the continuous investment of virtual resources due to the lack of driving force. The economic scale of the system and its resistance to threats from the network are not matched, and there is no internal mechanism to promote that.

In the case of PoW, the resource investments correspond to the investments to power of influence in the network. At the initial stage, the hashrate investment is to invest more nodes. Later, with the emergence of professional mining machines and mining pools,  the hashrate and the node count do not match exactly. But since the hashrate is invested, the investors will definitely take measures to get the power of influence in the network, and the economic scale of the system and its resistance to threats from the network are matched. If virtual resources are attached more importance to when weighting the node, the difference between the power of influence in the system and that in the physical network for the nodes will be greater. As for the PoW that doesn’t take the virtual resources into consideration at all, the power of influence in the system and that in the physical network for the nodes are the same. The security of PoW is reflected here: energy cost being the basis of security is resulted from the physical network environment.

Openness and security are exactly the two angles in the “blockchain impossible triangle” (in the triangle that’s formed by Scalability, Decentralization, and Security, there are only two angels can be achieved).

The essential advantages of PoW is that it provides a highly decentralized and secure consensus mechanism. And the one that’s left, scalability, is exactly the development and innovation direction of the PoW consensus.

This article is written by YeeCo CTO. Please feel free to share your thoughts below.

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