Topic: It's about time to turn off PoW mining (Read 39732 times)

I don't believe the mine will be closed now, which is a bit ridiculous.
Although China has introduced some policies to close some mines to protect the environment, although this has affected the price of bitcoin for a certain period of time, the impact is short-term.
I believe that mines will gradually decrease only when BTC is no longer produced.

I'm not talking about how hard it is to convert from a PoW crypto into a PoS crypto, I know it's hard, especially in a extremely complex system like Ethereum. I'm talking about WHY they are still going ahead and doing it, despite such big development risk and effort.

Also, your point about "almost all the top crypto use PoW" is not accurate, out of top 5, only Bitcoin is sticking with PoW. #3 BNB, #4 XRP and #5 Cardano are not PoW, #2 ETH is moving away from PoW into PoS, so that's actually only 1 out of top 5 still sticking with PoW.

You have no idea about the issues that are present in PoS coins. There is a reason why almost all the top cryptocurrencies use the PoW algorithm. PoS is vulnerable to manipulation and those who enjoy the majority stake can gang up and do whatever they want, ignoring the requests from the community. With PoW, doing so is near impossible. And also, try to find why Ethereum delayed the shift from PoW to PoS repeatedly. They had to postpone it indefinitely, because the best developers still don't have the confidence to make the PoS algorithm risk-free, despite working on it for many years.

I think Elon Musk is right, and I agree with him. PoW is the cancer of Bitcoin, and it needs to go away, or Bitcoin will die with it.

Proof of Stake is the way to go for the future. There's a reason why Ethereum is undertaking huge amount of development risk and pow miner backlash to move away from PoW into PoS.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1301298086027821056

PoW is horrible, except to burn seigniorage.

The problem is that in bitcoin, PoW is used for many different purposes at the same time:

1) the competition to create new coins at a pre-programmed rate (there, PoW can be useful, if it is deemed useful to create new coins)

2) the consensus resolution

3) the cryptographic securing of the consensus history.

For 2) and 3), PoW is a very bad idea.   Even though PoW can be used to do consensus resolution (there's a clear winner that is designated, he gets the new coins, but he can also dictate what new transactions are now part of the consensus), this gives a significant power to a limited group of the eco-system, the miners, who are no stake holders in the transactions themselves.  Finally, as a cryptographic security, you can hardly think of a WORSE system: the cryptographic security is no hair better than the effort you put into it yourself !  Hardly seen a worse cryptographic system.  Normally, the "good guys" do an easy calculation, and the "bad guys" must do horrendously complicated calculations, so complicated that they are not feasible.  Then your cryptographic system is secure.  With "PoW security", the effort for the bad guy is exactly the same as the effort the good guy put in !

Keeping PoW to make new coins is not a bad idea.  But consensus resolution and cryptographic securing of the system should be done with digital signatures, not with PoW.  A PoS variant is much more secure and much less wasteful.

The error in bitcoin is that one has mixed up these 3 totally different aspects into one single task.

For good or bad we are likely stuck with at least partially securing bitcoin with mining. We may as well try and find solutions to decentralize mining more.

POS does ZERO to stop greed
you just have people trying to gain control another way
once you buy enough staking power, you have it , it is done
pow attack must be maintained

Changes in the Bitcoin protocol are voted through by miners.  The only scenario in which they would vote to basically directly lower their profit through lower transaction fees is if they thought that Bitcoin was going to completely collapse.

The Bitcoin price isn't actually going to collapse though, only its principle is going to fail (in that it will end up being a digital store of value rather than a full blown currency but its price will rise).  Therefore miners won't vote through a change to the PoW protocol, especially since they have thousands of dollars invested into machines that would become pretty much worthless since that was their only purpose.

It's great to have ideals but I don't see where they're going.

I think that bitcoin needs POS instead of POW so that we can empower bitcoin holders instead of feeding the greedy miners and pools who are always in conflict to control bitcoin.  If we have the access to POS then even holding bitcoins at our bitcoin wallet we are being empowered to do some staking. That way the bitcoin holders are contributing to the bitcoin network instead of the greedy miners.

Doesnt change much, just buy and sell cryptographic fingerprints, biometric spoofs ect.

I think eventually, once the technology evolves enough, using biometrics to create cryptographic fingerprints could be leveraged to prevent centralization and to make the system more fair. That is probably a decade or two away from being a realistic possibility though.

the only reason people want to get rid of PoW is because they are the gys that only have a little bit of fiat to their name and think they can get rich quick if mining changed.

the thing is.
give it just a couple months and whatever distributed mechanism replaced it would get gamed by those that can.

EG if it became a thing related to proof of node. then people would synicate loads of nodes (likea sybil attack) to get an advantage
EG if it became a thing related to proof of stake. then people would would stake alot and spread the stake over many keys to increase their chances
EG if it became a thing related to proof of IP. then people will load up proxies and remote services to increase how many ip addresses they control

so within a couple months the game would be back in the hands of the big players.
so forget changing PoW based purely on distribting the rewards, because that will never happen how people think.. even LN wont make every LN node 'get rich quick' the LN DNS seed will make sure only a chosen few get listed as the main routed hubs.

what people need to think about is the actual SECURITY of the chains and the risks of outsiders trying to break the security of the chain. and PoW has shown to be the best way to offset risks of outsider takeover

I am interested why you think dPoS was a massive failure? It has worked fine for about 3 years, and many new alts have forked it as well.

Yes, its the best we have at the moment(Bitshares and DPOS was a massive failure) ... perhaps it is normal for the economic majority to occasionally need to revolt against the tyranny of a mining cartel with a new PoW algo.... perhaps Jihan is merely bluffing and the fear of the nuclear option will prevent him from attacking... we will see in time

Anyone still think full PoW mining is great?

pow can't be turned off like you turn off a light of your room, the hash is distrubuted among several big farms, if one of these shut down the others will replace it with more equipments, i believe those machines are ready to be powered up, they are just waiting for a better price

also because of the diff retarget the diff won't come down so fast, thus the price will remain the same for two week at least

There hasn't been a single system that it's worth replacing PoW with since the invention of Bitcoin. All those other alternative such as PoS, and the hybrid ones are just try hard ones. PoW is still the most solid self regulating system, satoshi was a true genius and it shows as time goes by and no one can come up with a better idea to secure a blockchain.

if POW is turned off then there will no investment in mining so price can drop more, atleast now we have a minimum price of mining cost