Topic: Long Live Proof-of-Work, Long Live Mining - "there is no meaningful alternative" - page 8. (Read 15726 times)

It's not about profit or returns, it's about control.
You will get guaranteed food in a zoo too, but you'll be missing something essential, wouldn't you?
ASICs can be challenged with newer ASICs, stakes (once big enough) can never be challenged.

Would you like control of the money flow to be a competition or would you like it to be in hands of a few forever. If you prefer the latter, just stick to fiat and be done with it.

EDIT:

I wouldn't be a crypto geek if I couldn't read hidden messages in random data.
Take a look at this thread, it's a new song about Bitcoin.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/welcome-to-the-blockchain-857195

Here is a Bitcoin address (I added white spaces for readability)
1C4 iVs2E659ksBK8gVEyQw229 ZoESC oyK1

1C4 - apparently Satoshi needed only one C4 to plant at the perimeter of our fiat zoo some 6 years ago. If you play video games you'd know what it means.

iVs2E659ksBK8gVEyQw229 - time it took before the smoke settled.

ZoESC - we now have a hole in the perimeter and can escape our zoo.

oyK1 - everything is gonna be o k !

Good day!

PS: The word "mining" has definitely something to do with perimeter disruption, besides its usual interpretation. Thus "miners" are those who will disrupt every perimeter they encounter on their infinite way out from a zoo within a zoo within a zoo... Hmmm and what if there is no zoo?

difference is your pretty much guaranteed 0.5% annual return with pos with even a trivial investment, you can spend the coins after buying them and they don't have a short life span. You can't spend an asic, they need regular replacement and your pretty much guaranteed a loss unless you invest heavily in mining gear.. And reinvest to keep up with the advancement of technology.

You obviously don't know much about mining. The hashing power is not on the pools. If a pool acts bad, people just go to another one. Losing a pool wouldn't change much.  That's far away from "Bitcoin can be destroyed"
Some people on this forum even state, that this would be good, since people would change to p2p pool and the whole centralization problem, would be solved.

Don't you need to invest in ASICs and invest a lot to get a lot of ASICs or invest a lot into R&D to get more efficient ASICs, and all that with the same purpose - to have a larger impact on the network? What's the difference with PoS then, besides electricity waste and all the inconvenience that comes with all this ASIC work that only a limited number of geeks can enjoy to do?

This is misleading. In order to mine on a PoS coin, you will first need to "invest" in the coin and to have a larger impact on the network you would need to invest in larger amounts of the coins (and mine from multiple computers - likely from something similar to VMs). This is little different from someone investing in ASIC's and running the ASIC's to secure the network

what information are you basing your opinion on?

That was a factual statement of my opinion, I would like to hear your proposal to prove that it wasn't my opinion.

The interesting thing is that trying to explain it to others I actually start to better understand it myself.
I don't know if it's better in a zoo or in the wild, both experiences define and reinforce each other, they are both needed for either one to exist at all.

I find it exciting, though, to discern various models on the market and see what they really offer compared to what they advertise. If you are building a zoo, you don't usually advertise the cage, you advertise the food

EDIT:

The yin-yang symbol comes to mind. In a zoo there is this little positive potential to eventually break-free (white circle in the dark half), in the wild there is this little negative potential to eventually end up in a zoo (black circle in the white half). So there are pluses and minuses to both sides of the circle.

Can you be more technical please? Wild life vs. zoo is picturesque and all, but what makes you think that users care about building all that equipment, dealing with all the troubles, electricity, figuring out mining costs, trying to break even, if they can just turn on their PC, do their normal work or socializing and the PoS wallet will be doing work in the background? Like I said, PoW is for geeks, but geeks don't power wider adoption, and the number of geeks is limited, which leads to issues like centralized network and less actual users of the crypto, it's all revolving around miners in a PoW crypto.

Nobody can take your freedom if you already don't have it.

Yes, it can happen, but the new quality of their product would need to compete with the sheer quantity of the old equipment already available on the market, this will give time for other competitors to come up with their improvements, which might not necessarily be in advanced chip technology, but rather in energy sources or deeper understanding of cryptographic hash functions. The field of competition is fairly diversified and any innovation developed there will eventually find applications in other areas.


The difference is same as with wild-life and those living in a zoo.
The food might be better in a zoo, but you would hardly enjoy it as much as those outside.

Those weren't hints!   

-B-

So can we expect one company to develop super powerful ASICs and totally hijack the PoW network? Wow, that's scary. In PoS anybody can be a miner with their normal computer, I say it's very attractive to users. Users drive the price and adoption, not miners. Crypto should be user-centric, not miner-centric, to be successful. And that's where PoW fails.

Those who develop new equipment might not sell it to those who are currently at the top.
Not everybody sells their share of control for profit.

What's the difference with PoW? You spend more on equipment, you control more. You can collude with other large miners.

EDIT: the only difference like I said is waste and inconvenience. In PoS anybody can be a miner by just leaving their wallet opened, so user = miner -> more decentralized network in the long run. In PoW only geeks can be miners -> more centralized network in the long run.

Control?
There are things in this world you cannot buy, you know.

They won't be getting additional profit by colluding, so what's the purpose of that? It works exactly like miners in a pool: if you solo mine, you will get a block occasionally, if you mine in a pool you get regular profit but it's small, and over the long term it works out to what you'd get if you mined solo.

You didn't refute my argument.
Any one entity approaching or even controlling 50% of the network doesn't become permanently unchallenged.


Why compete, if they can collude, and then nobody outside can ever challenge them?
Wasting energy, having maintenance cost, making decisions to upgrade or skip is what allows other players to regain a share of control from miners.

EDIT:

If you have freedom, you need to fight to keep it,
If you don't, there is nothing to worry about.

Holders of stakes in a PoS model don't compete? It's the same competition: in PoW - who can afford to buy the best and more hardware, in PoS - who can afford to buy more stake. The difference is hardware wastes electricity and other kinds of waste that come with PoW mining.

Bullshit, there isn't anyone controlling more than 10% of all Bitcoin. But there are private miner or cloud mining, that currently or used to control more than 20%, or even 30%, 40% of mining power. At some point, there WILL be a person secretly controlling more than 50% of mining power.

The reason is PoW is cheap, it's easy to buy enough hardware to gain 50%+ control, it is especially easy to do this to control PoW altcoins, there are many PoW altcoin got 51% attacked. PoW is an extremely flawed system.