Topic: [Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate - page 11. (Read 3813 times)

First of all, China is a dictatorship so anything can happen, and happen quickly - while in democracies the population must (directly or indirectly) decide about something such as a PoW ban.
Secondly, this ban showed us very nicely how censorship-resistant Bitcoin is. The hashrate dropped a lot and nothing changed. Difficulty adjusted, miners moved around the world, started back up, all working as designed.
Therefore, I'm not concerned a single bit about PoW bans honestly.

Furthermore, bans of industrial mining (how would you stop home mining?) wouldn't even be that bad. Satoshi's original whitepaper intended mining to take place in everybody's home (on CPU back then).
It would be worse for the environment though, since industrial miners tend to have access to cleaner energy than normal households. Industrial miners also put less stress on the grid than if every household suddenly had a 1-3kW miner running 24/7, because they don't have their own power lines.

So, for the sake of the energy grid and the climate, both of which you seem to care a lot about, it would be better to let these mining companies do their thing.
Either way, Bitcoin doesn't care where the hashpower comes from and it can't even be stopped if a country as large as China bans it. That should be proof enough, isn't it?

Common Sense would be listening to repeated warnings and at least preparing a plan of action to protect btc investors.
Bitcoin PoW supporters deny all PoW ban warning as fud, as you can see from the pic by n0nce.

Kind of like the claims that the China PoW mining ban was fud and would never happen, until it did.  

I know; though it's harder to put pressure on a project by going for individual independent developers. A Core dev could just stop working on Bitcoin (it happened already in the past) to stop being harassed from government / politics.
Compared to a project that has a designated 'head' like Vitalik, if one such developer has to stop its engagement with the project due to political pressure, it will have little to no effect on the project and the valuation. That's why I believe projects without 'known founder' and without a very centralized, known team (I don't mean a GitHub contributor list - I mean e.g. a company which is behind some cryptocurrencies), are more resiliant to censorship and political influence.
Since most cryptocurrencies do have a fixed team behind it, it's super easy for politicians to put pressure on those companies / CEOs / founders.

It doesn't mean that all coins without a known founder are definitely good and definitely secure and all that, though. An implication doesn't have to be an equivalence..

What does it sound more "logical", as you say, to you? Rewarding someone with new coins if they prove that they did a costly process or rewarding someone with new coins if they prove they own coins? Honestly, besides the arguments that have been numerous times told, what sounds more rational to you?

If I was a person who didn't know what's a cryptocurrency, I'd suggest that the latter lacks in some parts, even if I couldn't indicate where exactly. My common sense would say that there's something problematic.

Most Bitcoin developers are known; see the bottom "credits" section of [1] for instance.
An unknown founder is not unique to bitcoin either [2].

[1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/22.0/

[2] https://docs.grin.mw/about-grin/story/

Sorry, this had be done...

I think in the future we will look back at this moment either in sorrow or as a moment of change and admitting that pow is like coal and we either change with the times or be left behind, bitcoin holders have a moral responsibility to be aware of the impact mining does to grids.

Amongst other reasons, one of the issues any other cryptocurrency has is that they have known founders and developers, where governments can put pressure. They are at much higher risk, because faces are known. Furthermore, for example in the case of Ethereum, the main motivation for the switch is not the environment or some government bill, but rather the fact that Vitalik and his friends hold a large part of the coins and with PoS that will grant them full control over the network.
Doesn't sound that advanced to me.

With PoS you go actually a step backwards. These people make it sound as if PoS was more advanced, since it came after PoW. That's like saying Litecoin is more advanced than Bitcoin, because it was started after BTC. Nothing indicates me that PoW is a 'more advanced' (this implies 'better') system. We had enough good posts in this thread explaining why.

One last point: a really advanced and smart cryptocurrency shouldn't care about a government bill. The whole sense of cryptocurrencies is that they can't be censored, no matter how much anyone wants it. And that they can't be stopped or shut down, no matter who wants that. This is the power of decentralization. If you think bills like this can / should influence Bitcoin, you haven't understood decentralization.

Your Post is reasonable, but you won't get a logical reply from illogical people that support PoW flawed design.

Just do your crypto trading in preparation for what you see as the conclusion of the folly know as PoW mining.
At some point in the future, a worldwide PoW ban will be in effect, because if they don't, the miners greed will destroy their power grids.
Destruction of a power grid is not fud, it is a massive death toll for the citizens of any country dumb enough to not ban it.

Only BTC & LTC are refusing to evolve , so take that into consideration during your trading.

Ethereum and the rest of the coins will be unaffected by POW Bans, because they are willing to Evolve to a better system.
Even Doge is moving to PoS.
https://www.binance.com/en/news/top/6912062

No offense but your post is very naive.

For starters the point of bitcoin was to create a decentralized, censorship resistant currency. If such bills in such a small part of the world were to be able to stop bitcoin, that would have meant bitcoin's failure regardless of its mining protocol.

Secondly you think the issue that EU has with bitcoin is energy related. It is not, not even a little bit. They are using it because the FUD works and it is easier to make people believe that than telling them they hate bitcoin. Their issue with bitcoin is a decentralized related one. To put simply, they can't control bitcoin so they want to ban it. It has been like this ever since bitcoin started gaining traction.

When it comes to Proof of Stake, there are some networks where we have "validators", so that only some selected nodes can mine. So, my question is: why those developers create their own coins out of thin air, instead of creating two way peg-in with BTC? Because it is possible to have a federation, a "signet sidechain", just some Bitcoin address that can represent the whole status of their chain, and then it is possible to convert between BTC and ALT in 1:1 ratio, just by creating a Bitcoin transaction!

Taproot even make things easier, because Schnorr signatures can reduce any N-of-N multisig into a single key. So, if there are some "validators", then they can join their keys, create a Taproot address, and mine by moving coins to and from Bitcoin, creating any altcoin blocks by merged mining (or rather: merged signing in this case). Users are going to trade that altcoins for Bitcoin anyway, so why not batch all of those transactions as a part of the protocol?

I need to find a wall somewhere to hang this quote on. 

I mean, it's not a bad idea, but if the concern is power consumption, in many cases in the end the lower-power devices cost less so you can buy more of them and end up consuming the same amount. Pretty sure it's also the case with GPUs and other mining techniques that are supposedly better than Bitcoin ASICs.

Yes, of course, ASICs are the most energy efficient electronic device you can make to solve a task.

That's a good point. For a new algo to get widely adopted, there has to be a resource surplus that can be used. With PoW it used to be various ASIC models and electricity supplies.

You wouldn't want to utilize an already scarce resource such as GPUs, because that will cause vendor backlash (nvidia crypto mining throttling comes to mind).

Nobody has a need for old CPUs and servers so there's a surplus of them, and that's the only reason why I suggested them.

For something like this to work, there would have to be a new system design where all the parts use less power. But this drifts into ASIC-like territory, and particularly with things such as CPU dies, are hard to manufacture because foundries such as TSMC impose quotas on how much you can order (built-in scarcity => less adoption). The last thing a new algo would need are its custom miners getting delivered after 3-6 months, this doesn't make them any better than PoW ASICS in that regard.

But then didn't I even give more optimistic numbers than what you're suggesting? Sure, old chips might draw a bit less, but not by a lot. By them being significantly cheaper than the latest and greatest Ryzen, you can get a ton more of them at the same cost of a specific ASIC, so even if they draw a tiny bit less, in total the consumption will go even higher than the 600W/$1k I suggested.

This page suggests a Xeon E5-2620 pulls over 50W in idle and it only has 6c/12t. But of course significantly cheaper than a 5950X.
https://www.servethehome.com/dual-intel-xeon-e5-2620-v1-v2-v3-compared/intel-xeon-e5-2620-v1-v2-v3-power-consumption/

It's on Amazon for $80. So instead of paying around $1k for 16 cores, the same money here would get you 7 chips (with hardware needed) with each 50W, in total 350W. Multiply by ten to reach $10, it's 3.5kW.
Nothing gained compared to ASIC? Not sure...

Seems to me like getting lots of old multicore chips would be the best strategy to make money here; but it would push energy consumption since you can get many and less efficient ones (32nm and other limitations).

In Proof of Sleep/Time/Idle (I really want to use Sleep but I resigned to the fact that the acronym would get confused with Proof of Stake) we don't need CPUs that fast because the cores will be asleep the vast majority of the time, even when you take into account the dozens of containers running in the background - ultimately, make the sleep time long enough and they will collectively yield some processor time to idleness (there's a memory limit to max #containers).

So instead of a Ryzen or a Threadripper, old Opterons and Xeons that draw less power would be more favored. Clock speed doesn't matter at all here, just the number of threads - which you can quickly multiply by accumulating several cheap processors. There will be no motherboard or PSU shortage because there are several vendors who make generic parts for servers & server CPUs. Theoretically you could design a chassis that squishes together multiple machines in the same chassis, but that would suck up too much money in R&D - It would be far better for manufacturers to simply use horizontal 1U/2U/3U etc. racks instead.

So as long as the servers stacked vertically (or horizontally) on each other draw less than 1/3 the power of ASICS, energy is saved, assuming three of these take as much space as a single ASIC. This should be the case in practice considering the enormous power that popular modern miners such as Antminer S17 draw (over 2kW in the case of S17).

I'm not sure how many old xeons I could buy with 1 grand (including associated memory sticks, HDDs and racks) but I'm pretty confident it's going to assemble more than 10 servers. If we get mobos with extra sockets that pushes the core count up even more.

I'll run the numbers; just ballpark calculations.
A single general-purpose motherboard with a single extremely multithreaded CPU and a PSU costs a whole lot less than a 2kW miner, right? A Ryzen 5950X costs around 600€, so with motherboard and PSU under one grand. Instead of a $10k S19, you could get 10 of these, then. They have 16 cores and 32 threads, so they should be well suited. In idle, it pulls just 54W, so at the wall, with RAM and everything, it will be 60W. Ten of these will be 600 watts, instead of 1 or 2 kW.
Definitely an improvement, but not the order of magnitude type improvements that one might wish for when thinking about 'idle mining', am I right?

Edit: It's also not about physical size really; if you're concerned that 10 miners take up more space than 1, they will probably put them closer together (less heat issues with low-power miners) and / or build more facilities.

Yeah right; I just wanted to show another existing example of a mining technology that at first, on paper, the cryptography looks good and it seems it should barely consume any electricity, but ends up pulling lots of power in the end anyway.

Not really. CPUs have a significantly lower clock frequency they step into when they are idle, turning off things like turbo boost as well. A single ASIC uses somewhere in the ballpark of 1-2kW. A low-power desktop PSU draws around 300-500W. As higher-wattage PSUs are more expensive than lower watt ones, and the devices manufactured are just going to be used for "sleep-mining" with no peripherals connected to the PCI board other than CPU, Ethernet, and perhaps a serial port. So they will save money on parts by using low-power items that don't draw that many watts. The form factor of these "sleep-miners" shouldn't be too much smaller than an ASIC, so datacenters can be filled with slightly more of these miners than ASICs and ultimately the datacenter draws less megawatts of power - which make all the difference.


Chia is actually getting people kicked off of datacenters because it's taking a toll on their hard disks. So that's not exactly how you want to introduce an energy-efficient mining algo.

If they really cared about the environment, they (Ethereum guys etc) should build mining plants that run on renewables or maybe even develop something that ordinary people can buy and run their miners off-grid. Or something else entirely; what I'm trying to say is that there are much better ways to work on a PoW cryptocurrency to make it impact climate less.

To me, this just seems like a cash grab. The founders know exactly that they have a large amount of coins, while probably not running a single miner. With their greed increasing, they want more coins, so now they're trying to convince people to sell their mining rigs and pump more money into founders' pockets by acquiring large amounts of coin and 'staking' it.

In ETH you do, if you don't have enough coin to stake by yourself (which many don't, I suspect).

To be honest; it's great for Bitcoin that when ETH switches to PoS, it will be the only remaining, relevant PoW coin. It will have no competition at all at that point.
The move to switch ETH to PoS is kind of a way to admit they lost, that a 'flippening' that they so so wished for for years, is not going to happen and that they will just compete with the lot of PoS coins since they're easier rivals.

You're very worried about governments, aren't ya? This, my friends, is PoS mindset. PoW people don't care about 'probable' 'worldwide' 'bans'. Yes, I put everything in quotes since you and I know it will not happen. Besides the fact that there will always be countries not banning it; the power of decentralization is that governments simply can't know if you're running a miner in your basement.
While they can ban large mining plants, that will be great for Bitcoin, since the gear will be sold to ordinary people at low prices (demand < supply) and decentralization of hash power will reach all time highs!

Essentially, and that's a point I don't hear often, PoS coins are 'money printing machines'. You put in a certain amount and you're guaranteed to get out a larger amount.
As always, when someone proposes a money printing machine, you should be cautious. Especially asking: 'if you have a money printing machine, why are you selling it to me and not using it yourself?'.
In PoS, that's exactly what happens though. Sure, the developers allow you to print money as well (limited though; certain minimum of stake etc), but due to them holding the majority, they basically have the largest amount of 'money printers' out of the box. Because why wouldn't they.

This is hilarious and simultaneously the biggest red flag I've ever seen for anyone investing in cryptocurrencies. If your new system doesn't meet the security requirements, you do not change the security requirements! What is wrong with people?

That's an interesting idea; however, ASICs also already push for efficiency for obvious reasons. If the algorithm works, you will get people (companies) building specialized computers with the bare minimum required computing power to run a shitton of VMs, which again run extremely stripped-down and minimal OSes which will do nothing else than running your mining program; since they consume so little electricity, people will just fill warehouses with them, and... well, energy consumption will add up and you kind of get to the same point you're at now.

I spent a bit of time looking into Chia mining (proof of space and time) and while the cryptographic idea is that 'computation is free', in reality it's not. In practice, Chia mining rigs are computing new shares all the time on tons of threads and cores, which eats a lot of energy.