Topic: It's about time to turn off PoW mining - page 29. (Read 39732 times)

In Nxt, anyone can forge (possibly through leasing). It's not something reserved to the rich and powerful. The percentage returns are the same.

In Nxt, forging is something done to help secure the network. It's not done to make money. The income from forging is currently around 0.2%/year, which is trivial. It's expected to become lower once we reduce the fees. Validating transactions is so cheap in PoS,  it leads to a different mentality to PoW, because there aren't millions of dollars involved every day. (That's part of why "nothing at stake" doesn't apply. The increased income you'd get from forging on multiple forks isn't worth the loss of security. NaS is a criticism only someone from the PoW world would make.)

No. For example, I have two Nxt accounts. One I use for forging; it has a zero balance so it doesn't need to be secure. The other stores the coins and leases to the forging account; it doesn't need to be public.

PS I try to restrict my comments to Nxt because that's the PoS I know best. Other PoS may have other solutions and/or problems.

So 36 million isn't enough to motivate hackers? Of course it is. Nxt is under continual attack, eg from hackers scanning for weak passwords. If the core system was weak, it'd be broken.

The first of those was about an exchange getting hacked, not the currency itself. The second was about a transaction getting accepted and then orphaned, which is something that can happen in any distributed crypto-currency and again does not mean the currency's security is weak. It's happened in Bitcoin, for example. Neither have anything to do with "nothing at stake".

Bugs can arise in any software. There's no reason to think they will take longer to fix in PoS than in PoS. If anything, it's the opposite. Bitcoin has shown itself notoriously slow to fix flaws. Transaction mutability is still not fixed, for example.

Not really a dedicated computer, it can be run in a VM if you want. Just a properly secured computer. Of course PoS still needs some hardware, nothing operates out of a vacuum. The difference is efficiency.

PoS does still use some resource, but it's maybe 0.00001% of what Bitcoin PoW uses. Also the resource usage doesn't have to increase when the eco-system grows in value. It's basically a static amount of resource needed. These resources are needed to have full nodes anyway, so they are not really wasted.

I agree POW is doomed.
See here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/2f94tu/large_savvy_investor_the_coin_that_will_win_the/#ck97gpi
POS is stronger and it doesn't waste resources.

So you need a dedicated computer and internet connection to mine in a PoS schema?  Isn't that trending back towards the whole "wasteful resources" thing?  Certainly not using gobs of electricity, but it does dictate a hardware requirement of sorts.

Bitcoin is a company (at least more than a currency, currencies are issued by the state who forces ppl to use its currency and requires taxes to be paid with it, there is no such state force with Bitcoin, the role of the state is the only thing that makes the term currency different from the term money. Bitcoin can fairly be described as money but not as a currency. Other than gold or sea shells though Bitcoin needs transaction verification work which makes the company analogy interesting since Bitcoin and a company has employees (miners in case of Bitcoin). It is all just analogies. But one or the other analogy makes more sense with respect to analyzing Bitcoin. BitShares is conceptually based on this company analogy / framework https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT9ICMfUDjk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mwmlJICyRA

PoS is just centralization (The term "share holder" says it all), it against the very basic fundation of bitcoin, we will see,  after 4 years, which PoS coins are still around 

Not really, you will only get constantly attacked if you are running a website with the hot wallet.

If your PC is not running any service, not install any trojan/virus, and the network is properly firewalled, the chances of getting hacked, is practically zero. If it were that easy to hack someone, no one would be using Bitcoin anymore, since majority of the Bitcoin users are not using cold wallets neither, and the average Bitcoin user is much less security minded than a PoS miner, who probably has taken the correct security measures to keep his PoS mining PC safe. Plus the hacker would only be able to obtain an encrypted wallet, that he then have to try to crack, probably a fruitless effort.

Usually a Bitcoin user gets hacked due to 1. unencrypted wallet, 2. backs up wallet + password in the sameplace (ie dropbox), and account gets hacked. 3. installed wallet stealing malware, and password got keylogged.

Non of these will happen to a correctly set up PoS miner.

Keeping your wallet "hot" by definition is going to make your funds vulnerable. If any PoS coin ever had any meaningful market cap then the miners would be under constant attack, likely to the point they would choose to no longer mine and exit ownership of the coin.

I don't know... I really haven't seen a definitive reason why PoS is inherently better than PoW. PoW also is self-regulating, since people will turn off their gear when it becomes unprofitable! There can't be an infinite limit to the amount of SHA256 miners running around the world.

No problem!  My number was a complete guess anyway, based on the fact that OP said it would cost "hundreds of millions" to gain enough hashpower for 51% attack.  You did the math, and it seems like $300M is almost spot-on.

Pffft, of course. Sorry to waste your time with that!

My bad.

You need 101% of the current network hashrate to beat the current network hashrate.

Yes, tx per block is what I was considering in the spreadsheet.

All valid concerns and criticisms (additionally, environmental concerns) which can be addressed and will naturally be addressed through market forces by these means:

1) PoW mining is so competitive that it will only remain profitable with free electricity. This can be addressed by solar, wind and microhydro with initial investment sunk costs and than using part of that energy to perform tasks that need to be done by everyone anyways : heating water, heating food , heating air in cold environments with near 100% efficiency.

2) p2p decentralized mining pools can eventually become stable and large enough where fees are cheaper and we can even adjust the bitcoin protocol to incentivize or encourage p2p.

3) Mining hardware vendors have large costs and have to constantly reinvest , but I would love having one or multiple non-profit ASIC manufactures controlled by a large group of bitcoin users. Kickstarter/indigogo anyone? With a multisig wallet we can even vote on the companies behaviors in a decentralized manner without the risk of a ceo or accountant committing fraud.

Your concerns are all valid and perhaps a certain version of POS could exist that is secure. DPOS and POSV are all patches of POS that don't quite address the flaws within POS completely. POW has a huge advantage and disadvantage with attaching its security to hardware and electricity. Perhaps a hybrid of POSV/POW would be a good thing for bitcoin in the future.

Only the negatives of Bitcoin mining are focused upon without weighing the positive effects. The competition between ASIC manufactures will eventually influence and push new technology of faster micro-circuitry instead of the recent stagnant progress made by AMD and Intel. The competition has already spurred improvements in datacenter designs where more efficient heat extraction and density layouts are being implemented. The Mining race is driving the need for free and cheaper electrcity which will have to come from cheap and renewable energy sources. (You are already seeing mining companies moving to locations that use geothermal energy as one example) . Mining races will eventually spur heating appliances to secure the network and heat food/water/air so will make dumb appliance smart and serve more than one purpose.

P2pool is a good alternative, but hacking is actually far from my biggest concern. My biggest concern with PoW is that continuous non-stop transfer of wealth from the Bitcoin community into the pockets of mining hardware vendors and electric company. This I believe is the biggest reason we are seeing the strange price action this year, with massive amount of good news and adoption, the price keeps dropping. I think this is due to the inflow of capital can not keep up with the insane mining cost (and wealth transfer rate out of the Bitcoin eco-system into the pockets of hardware/electric companies).

Can you imagine, if these hundreds of millions of dollars, instead of spent on pointless PoW mining, profiting the hardware/electric companies, if these money are directly invested in the Bitcoin eco-system, what it would do for Bitcoin?

Yes - that is going to happen (although I am not going to promote it as an "alt-coin" due to the bad rep that those have).

Being more security minded is not good enough. Good security is both difficult to achieve and hard to maintain even with security experts. What we need is a protocol that is secure intrinsically by several different methods by its innate design and not dependent upon how careful the users are.



This is a valid concern and why I suggested that your proposals are 1 step forward and 2 steps back. Mining centralization should be addresses by incentivinzing p2p pools and gettig more involved in mining, and a greater adoption of full nodes.

That sounds great, but you'll need to first implement your concept in an altcoin, so that it becomes a "proven" concept, otherwise I doubt it can be considered as a choice.

You put forward some good arguments and I think that it is inevitable that we'll have to move from PoW to something more efficient down the track. I guess the next thing is to work out "which kind of low-power proof is best" (btw - I have a new one that is neither PoW nor PoS but is as energy efficient as PoS - you'll have to PM me to discuss that).