Topic: Long Live Proof-of-Work, Long Live Mining - "there is no meaningful alternative" - page 3. (Read 15726 times)

GPUs were more efficient than CPUs. ASICs more so.

I am all for people having to work to get something, but I also want to see it be efficient. 

That's it! But I disagree with your viewpoint here. Competition is the essence of commerce and capitalism. It gives the edge to innovation. PoS is simply a numbers game that is solvable. Once you have a certain level of stake, nobody can take it away. At least with Bitcoin, if someone manages to get control, it can be taken away competitively.

Alphabet altcoins - copy/pasta from >1000 altcoins.
NXT - I'll wait for the next NXT. It's just another altcoin.
NEM - Claims to not be  coin, yet claims to be coin. Does that ripple a familiar vibe?

Bitcoin requires work. Why do so many people have a problem with work?

If I found a way to mine Bitcoin for very cheap, I would mine the hell out of it. :-)  To some extent this is a flaw of the Bitcoin network because sometimes things like this come along; somebody develops a new tech and keeps it to themselves.  This to some extent happened when Bitcoin went from CPU to GPU and then again to ASICs.   The first ASICs were hoarded.  If there is another leap, it will happen again.  

The great thing about PoS is you can't really do this.  For instance with NXT, you can't just come across a bunch of NXT for close to 0.  If it was possible it would have been done by now. (but again things like this do and have happened in the world of mining)

With the ICO coins nobody can find a way to get a bunch of new coins for cheap like can be done with Bitcoin.  All the coins are created at once in the beginning.  The people that maintain the blockchain aren't getting subsidized at $29.96 per transaction.  The people that maintain the blockchain work for a very small transaction fee and these aren't new coins being created but the recycling of old ones.  In systems like PoS or PoI, you can't really make a substantial profit forging because there is no $29.96 subsidy.  

With these next generation coins, you don't get rich maintaining the blockchain, but at the same time it is super easy and light to do so.  You can just leave the program running in the background when using the computer (it doesn't use a lot of resources) or even set up a raspi if you so like and are an enthusiast.  Basically blockchain maintenance is transferred from the likes of greedy miners to cryto believers and enthusiasts.    

In the case that the person that found the new hypothetical hardware was a bad actor, it would be really bad. One of the scary things about Bitcoin is that if somebody amounts a big enough amount of hardware, they can take over the network. (this would be hard to do as things are right now, but a new device for mining maybe could make it happen)

And for NXT a person would need to buy up a ton of NXT.  In doing so the price would shoot up, and then if the person did attack then network then their investment would be destroyed.  It would take something like a cyrpto kamikazi.  

But for NEM a person would have to get a lot of coins like in NXT, and then get a lot of hardware, and then would have to make a lot of transactions with people outside of their network (the key is with people outside of their network).  At this point it becomes really difficult to take over the network.  

Maybe with a special torrent file.

You would ruin the whole internet with that. That's like a global DOS-attack.

Maybe. I don't know.

Must be from Korea (Stupid high bandwidth connections available compared to most of rest of world)

Anyway, ultimate consequence is, that as much bandwidth will be deployed as energy available for it. Proof of whatever, as much will be deployed as energy available. Memory intensive? Storage intensive? Same shit, different name. Per unit kilowatt, anyone inclined to mine, will run about a terahash of bitcoin ASIC, or half a terabyte of RAM, or ~200 terabytes of disk, or a hundred 10W nodes, VMed to 4 instances each or something.

The fact that POW now REQUIRES specialist hardware is a huge security advantage. Anything that ran on commodity hardware, whether it needs more nodes, more memory or more complex general purpose CPU, is suceptible to botnet, or buying, stealing or subpoenaing of amazon aws or digital ocean cloud datacenters for a period of time.

If the giant US Utah facility, had top end low power i7s, and every milliwatt of power available to them went into bitcoin mining, they'd probably only make the top 10 users list in a 1% of network pool.

lol
What?
How is that supposed to work? Miners are uploading and downloading random data?

Mining with calculations is not a good idea. Must be invented a new method. For example, mining with bandwidth is a better idea and eco friendly.

Yes, but we discuss what the price depends upon, not what the cost to produce depends upon.

Only miners would be interested in the latter, whereas investors and users are interested to learn what drives the price.

Cost to produce depends on the price, that's correct.

But price depends on supply (supply (increase rate) is predictably stable in cryptos) and demand only.

Price doesn't depend on the cost to produce.

Mining doesn't deplete resources. Your argument is nonsense.

LOL, so we should support resource depletion and wasting resources by "mining" cryptocurrencies when it is not mathematically necessary to do so? That isn't going to help the starving children very much.

There is no causal relation between the two. If prices fall miners leave and difficulty goes down, it doesn't happen the other way.

Let me rephrase the question since you seemed to just dismiss it. If you invented a miner that uses almost no electricity and is fairly cheap to produce and nobody else had anything close, what would you do?

Right.   Until the stake holders start generating chains to earn more rewards.

The cost to produce a coin is a function of it's price, as if the price declines, the difficulty will decline causing the cost of producing (mining) the coin to decline.

With PoS coins on the other hand, the cost of mining is simply the cost of holding the coins

Partially true.  Actually there is a connection, but it is the opposite: price causes the cost because of competition.  That was one of the main points of the article in the OP.  Competition will always rise to spend as much resources as possible while still making a profit.  Maybe that is not the intention if the design of the poS coins, and maybe that isn't happening right now, but so far no one has been able to say why that wouldn't happen if there was a serious Bitcoin contender with a widely distributed stake.

@Jabo38, you are correct that the transaction volume needs to grow by orders of magnitude to maintain the same level of security with no block subsidies.  However, we have decades to get there, and even if the hashing power dropped by a full order of magnitude Bitcoin would still be secure.

You seem to be implying, that there is a way to achieve security without spending any energy/money on it.

It's like going to Russia and China and saying - hey guys all your expenses on army and firearms are futile and not sustainable. It's just cheaper to give it all up already and get your orders from Washington for free

There is no connection between the cost to produce a crypto coin and the price, hence your conclusion is a fantasy.

Price is a function of supply and demand only.

If supply of a PoS is fixed or inflates at a predictable rate comparable to a PoW coin inflation rate, there is no reason for the market cap (and price too if total caps are the same) of a PoS coin to be below the market cap (price) of a PoW coin (Bitcoin has a first mover advantage vs all others, PoW and PoS coins, it shouldn't really be compared here for the purity of this experiment as it clearly wins now just based on the adoption numbers).