Topic: please delete - page 3. (Read 1052 times)

"Waste" of energy is rather subjective. Depends what you mean, do you mean the energy lost from the heat the miners create, or the energy expended to satisfy the Proof of Work system? If it's the latter, simply put it's an important part of what makes Bitcoin stand out, if you change from a different algorithm, then much of the benefits are lost, without too much to gain.

The problem with this is that a lot of people would rather take that risk, which to be honest isn't exactly common, than pay the increasingly higher electricity rates at home. I'm assuming you mean by home, actually in their house, or even if you're referring to mining within their own country, if you're in the West, then you're very likely paying more for your electricity than you would in the East. So, naturally there's a lot more incentive to have off shore if you will, mining operations.

Also, the other downside, and this only really applies to if you mean mining at their actual home is even the quietest miners, tend to make some sort of audible sound, which not everyone wants in their home. Then you have to think about the dynamics at home, the husband/wife might want to mine, but does their partner want the constant hum of the miners, and the wires sprawled everywhere. Its not like the West have better availability of clean energy, so it doesn't even work in that favour.

The way to go forward likely is creating their own energy, and then hooking the miners up to that. Although, that only appeals to a very select few, and probably more of the type that have hundreds of miners on the go, rather than just a hobbyist.

No SHA256 ASICs didn't exist back then but my point wasn't about their existence but the possibility of their existence. Satoshi surely know that CPU mining won't last long and other methods would replace it soon like GPUs, FPGA and eventually ASICs since they all existed way before bitcoin and were used in computationally intensive work similar to bitcoin mining. Ergo we shouldn't focus on the "1 CPU" 1 Vote quote so much since as I said it was a simplification.

Home miners have mostly CPUs, sometimes GPUs, sometimes some other hardware. But you can safely assume that most users have CPUs. If you want to encourage people to mine more at home, then they should be rewarded for doing so. Mining a block with difficulty equal to one on CPU is still possible, so every miner could start mining on top of the latest block and produce some hash with a much lower difficulty than needed for the network. However, people can use merged mining and be rewarded for doing that. They can for example receive rewards through LN. So: technically it is possible to have a node that will give you a discount on fees if you mine something on your CPU. Some millisatoshis probably, but still, that will be proportional to the work done by that home miner.

Every miner can adjust its own starting difficulty. It is also possible to be connected to N nodes and assign a difficulty for each of them, it could depend on submitted shares and be auto-adjusted. To start with, it is possible to collect just 80-bytes block hashes. That could be the base layer, the bare minimum to mine anything. Then, that system can be extended by adding more and more limits, to make nice blocks, as people will start mining at home. So, when a lot of people will switch to mining 80-byte headers, then it is possible to soft-fork and add a rule that each miner has to show the coinbase transaction. Then, coinbase amount validation (by checking fees) can be added, the system could be extended. It mainly depends on resources, because a stream of 4 MB fully filled blocks, where each miner will mine entirely different block, that would be hard to check. But checking just headers, allocating coins, and unlocking them after full validation, that could be easier.

So, the easiest thing to do is collecting 80-byte headers, checking Proof of Work and doing some basic validation, then preparing reward for each miner. If someone will attack by making random headers, then such coins will be simply burned. That system could work in case where there are a lot of headers. On the other hand, by assigning a difficulty for each connection, we should receive shares in regular intervals, for example every 30 seconds, as it is in many mining pools. Then, it should not be a big deal to fully validate each share, and sending rewards for that (or just a discount on LN fees). So, I can see two options: checking everything and distributing rewards only to honest miners, or checking only basic things, and delaying validation to the moment when someone will claim the reward in LN (optionally, coins can be burned if they will be invalid, to discourage cheating the simplified validation).

Another thing is that people can commit as much data to a single address as they want. So, home CPU miners can just tweak their keys to later prove they mined some blocks, if such proof will be needed. In that way, the network of decentralized shares could be automatically commited to the blockchain, without increasing size of any on-chain transaction, used during opening and closing channels. However, there are some issues with that system. It is a good start, but it still needs clarification on some points, also it may be connected with CoinPool, we will see.

Sure, you can trade memory / storage for computation and as always, an ASIC is the most efficient way to accomplish such a thing (like with any other task, ASICs are obviously the most efficient chip to solve said task). I believe in the end, it comes down to a simple equation where you'll be trading various sorts of energy (used for producing hard drive storage) for electrical energy (for doing more compute work on a CPU or ASIC). By the laws of physics, the energy should equal out and the most efficient (cheapest to operate) solution will prevail.

It's important though, that energy will be expended in one way or another - be it in production of spinning platters or in powering highly optimized electrical circuits.

Sure, but did SHA256 ASICs exist before 2009? I imagine if not, it was a pretty large bet starting SHA256-ASIC production back then, because if the Bitcoin project would have failed, all the R&D work and the cost for the chip production masks and whatnot (in the millions) would have been for nothing. I'm pretty sure when Bitcoin ASICs first came out, BTC actually still suffered from a few, but very severe bugs, so it was not yet as 'set in stone' as today's 'immutable, secure L1'. I remember early versions of the codebase didn't even have tests and little structure in it.
But if SHA256 chips existed for some other purpose already, then I'm wondering why Satoshi and the early Bitcoin developer community didn't think those would be going to be used in the future for Bitcoin mining and driving out CPU miners rather quickly.

I totally agree! ASIC farms or even large mining pools are often used as an argument to claim Bitcoin mining is centralized, while it's not; especially since pools can be switched at any time.

I do still believe people should mine more at home. Did you guys read about the recent 'Compass Mining incident'? Users' gear was suddenly shut down and they had to sell their gear within 48 hours notice, because the company had issues with the Russian hosting provider. No chance of getting the gear home. I'm not against people building mining farms for themselves, but I'd try to have full control of my hardware at all times and not rent it to someone who might not let me have it back. But I digress, sorry for the off-topic.

I think people are looking for solutions for a problem that are very exaggerated and not properly researched. We can come up with any solution to reduce energy consumption and the (paid) media will still push the misinformation to the public. We cannot introduce anything that will centralize Bitcoin mining into a single Pool... so #1 is a definite NO for me. 

Also, if you want to win the argument against the Bitcoin&Energy myth, then you should have a better researched counter argument. So.. How many people have actually did the math to find out what percentage of Bitcoin mining is done with "Clean/Renewable" energy? (If it is even possible....)

Do not change the PoW into something that will destroy decentralization and also the strong security that the hashing power provides. 

This is a simplification of explanation not a promise. It is not like ASICs were invented after bitcoin invention. They existed ever since 1967. Not to mention that having ASICs or even a ASIC farm doesn't centralized mining as long as these farms are distributed around the world which they are.
What centralized mining (even if you can only mine it using CPU) is when majority of hashrate is controlled by a handful of people. This has never happened in bitcoin (ignoring day 1 of course when it was only Satoshi and a couple of others mining blocks).

That part is tricky, because Proof of Capacity (also called space and time) can be faked (also, it is not the first coin with this consensus, there were other failed attempts before, for example Burstcoin). There were fake plots on Chia. Like someone said on Discord, it is like selling a car and assembling it at the same time, when you are trying to pay for it. If you have 1 TB plotted hard drive, then you can play by the rules and get some coins, equivalent to this 1 TB. But if you can plot things in memory, and then save only every second piece, then you need only 500 GB, you will still have some chance to hit something, and you could recompute things when needed. In general, as in ECDSA: you don't need real signature, you need a signature that can pass verification. The same with Chia: you don't need to plot 1 TB, you need to produce a proof that you did it, even if you plotted only a part of that and splitted your work between plotting and on-the-fly computation. So, I guess it could be possible to mount an attack that would plot nothing and focus on mining. For well-designed ASIC, that could be more profitable than buying large disks and plotting everything, also because your read/write to disk also takes time, when RAM operations or some assembly code based on registers could do some parts much faster, so there is no point in storing them permanently on your disk (also because you only need to verify things, not to plot exabytes by yourself to check that it was plotted correctly).

I remember some discussions, where people reached nice results for yespower on FPGAs. And also I remember that some people complained about yespower in early days, even before the coin was released. They were saying that this algorithm can be optimized for non-CPUs, and judging by historical blocks and network difficulty, I guess at least some of them were right (or they had a lot of CPUs, definitely warehouse-level, not home-miner-level).

That makes sense; then I would tell PrimeNumber7 that there are absolutely ways to reduce energy consumption, while staying within PoW, by possibly using hard drives to prove space in time (even though that's just another type of work), since keeping a platter running doesn't take much energy.

It does, though. For instance (I'm not very familiar with altcoins in general), I believe to remember Ethereum (or another coin) needs a ton of fast memory since it needs to do lookups in large data sets as part of the mining process. There also is the attempt of some currencies trying to simply change the algorithm or some non-predictable parameters in regular intervals for instance. Honestly, even pretty unpopular coins have such high prices these days that the incentive to build ASICs for them should be pretty high. Especially as we saw SHA256 ASICs very early on, when the dollar-price for 1BTC wasn't very high and the longevity of the project wasn't yet certain. Still Bitmain et al started making these chips. But I need more knowledge about altcoins to really be able to judge whether they do succeed in making their hashing algorithms ASIC-proof.

As said in Paul Sztorc's article, it is still obscured Proof of Work. There are many other options to choose from, for example Proof of Burn. But they are still just some obscured Proof of Work. It is better to split Proof of Work between miners in a decentralized way than to invent a new consensus.

There is a way to make it literally true, but it could kill the whole network. I mean: every miner could produce a new block from scratch. Then, instead of sharing just 80 bytes of block header, every miner will send all shares (expressed as the whole blocks) to all other miners. Then, it is possible to collect everything, produced by all miners, and execute any coinbase-splitting algorithm that is based on all blocks produced by all miners. But it is overkill, unless it will be sufficiently optimized. If many transactions are the same, then only transaction hashes are broadcasted. If merkle tree is created in some order-independent way or if there are rules to always have it somehow sorted, or swapped in some predefined way, then it is possible to broadcast only merkle branches. If it is merge-mined and included as a commitment to the coinbase transaction, it is even better compressed, because then no additional on-chain bytes are needed. If the coinbase transaction is some kind of N-of-N Taproot multisig, that could be even a payment channel shared by N people, that could be also CoinPool or something like that, there are many ways. But still, there are only ideas, they have to be collected and combined to form some BIP.

The algorithm does not matter that much. We should assume that ASICs will be designed even for CPU-mineable yespower, when it will be profitable. The only thing that matters is splitting the coinbase transaction.

It is even worse, because it increases work that you need to verify things. Just try to download some CPU-mineable coins, it will take a lot more time than initial block download for the same blocks on SHA-256 mined chain, you can even re-mine that on regtest and compare downloading and verification time. Even if both nodes will be running on localhost, it will have far worse performance for CPU-mineable coins than for SHA-256-based coins.

It's actually a pretty big topic in legit altcoin projects, which try to implement Satoshi's original '1 CPU, 1 vote' idea as stated in the whitepaper:
That's wrong though. There are other algorithms, exactly like pooya is saying.
One concept that I found cryptographically interesting is Chia-Network; particularly because there is something 'wasted': storage space (and also the drives themselves whose lifespan is limited - while staked coins don't 'wear') and also some computation.

Technically it can, but I don't think it will. And if someone will do that without reaching consensus, that could easily become just another altcoin, if not done correctly and without having backward-compatibility and soft-forks in mind.

No, it will not. Here is some economical point of view: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

Will bitcoin ever move to prove of stake? I’m sure all these waste of energy will be solved

You are contradicting yourself here.
Even if we agree that PoW should be replaced, the replacement is never going to be a weaker algorithm such as PoS that has many flaws. You see when you are trying to solve one problem you should do it in a way that it doesn't introduce 50 new issues.

I have explained above, that I don't believe it is possible to reduce electricity consumed as long as bitcoin is using PoW to mine. If miners become more efficient, electricity consumption will not decline because people will just buy more of them, or the difficultly will increase. Over the long term, the electricity consumed will be a function of the cost of electricity, the value of the total mining revenue, and a rate of return that miners want for the risk of buying the miners.

IMO, the only way to reduce the electricity consumed below the above is to switch from PoW to PoS. I noted above that it remains my belief that PoW remains superior to PoS.
Well I guess this depends on one's definition of "waste". I noted above that very little "work" that consumes electricity is actually duplicated, as orphaned blocks are very rare.

Three are plenty of people willing to pay for the cost of electricity consumed by the bitcoin miners via paying transaction fees, and allowing the price to not decline as more bitcoin is mined.

I don't think it is reasonable to say that electricity is "wasted" when mining bitcoin. One may argue that too much electricity is consumed by the bitcoin miners, and I would refer those people to my above points.

Ah, I didn't realise you were talking about prospective miners rather than the retailers selling the rigs. Anyhow, again I don't think we necessarily need them to know much about Bitcoin. It's just like how investors aren't always clued up, they just see the opportunity to make some money. That isn't a problem really, not every adopter is going to be a believer in Bitcoin in the long term. Doesn't really effect us much in the long term, and probably does improve the amount of money short term investors make.

I don't see a problem with it personally. There's plenty of people getting into other markets that don't understand it, without actually being detrimental to it, and in similar vein I don't think the retail investors as you put it, will be detrimental to Bitcoin. Although, going back to the original point, I think it still stands, they aren't going to have the majority of their friends mining.

A retail investor is an average user. Not a retailer. But I hope intel's new chip opens up some good door for us! It would be nice to see decent quiet units again like the R4

Whoah now thats not where I was going with that !   I have to clean coffee out of my nose now. Poor choice of words on my part no pun intended.

I'm just thinking out loud here 7 years ago I wouldn't have thought we would need 3 Phase for the newest stuff.

I guess your right , just because the wheel was invented doesnt mean it was made with the best materials.
 


 

You shouldn't read anybody's posts out of context least of which Satoshi's.
In short the discussion there is about whether the miners connecting to a pool need to run their own software (whether the original or modified or whatever else).
@ribuck explains why in a mining pool (the first of) only the pool runs the client and there is no need for others (the miners connecting to it) run their own Bitcoin clients. @grondilu is arguing that others can run their own [modified] software, connect to the pool and both mine the block to receive the block reward and receive the pool's reward at the same time.
To this Satoshi states that it is not possible due to the way pool is designed and continues to say users don't even have to run the software to use a pool, they can use a shitty centralized exchange to get an address and receive the funds. He isn't saying they should!

Because he and his friends aren't the 99% of the population of the network. They may have much power, but they don't get to dictate what the users will do. If 99% of the users want a change, see SegWit, the miners ought to follow the crowd. Otherwise, they'll spend energy for a currency that has little demand.

Please, let's stop this Satoshi's vision nonsense; that's how BSV, that I know how we all hate, began. It doesn't matter what he might have thought of it.

Lol. This didn't age well.

Asics were not yet out when Satoshi left but since the first GPU miner everyone should have seen the writings on the wall, it was clear that if the reward will prove to be enough incentive miners designed for this would appear, and they did so as early FPGA.
As for his own vision on decentralization, it puzzles me sometimes, he once talked about a gentleman's agreement when it comes to the hashrate race to have coins distributed equally but at the same time he talked about server node farms to take the burden of the network.
I think that he knew there was never going to be some sort of democracy in this and in the long run the ones affording better gear will prevail, even with CPU mining the threat as there.

Besides, he had some other ideas too, with which not so many will agree these days:

In reality they don't though, and ideally that situation never arises. Although, retailers might be entering due to fear of missing out, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It should bring in competition, and prices should actually lower due to that competition, which should be seen as a good thing, as it reduces the amount of centralisation at least partly.

We don't need the retailers to know every intrigue detail, we just need them to create efficient machines, that's all. Which, they definitely know how to do as they've been doing it before Bitcoin was around.

Ideally, we should all have a say, regardless of how much Bitcoin you have or what sort of equipment you have. If you have a good idea, I'd like to think it would be taken into consideration. Obviously, there are people with more power for a lack of a better word, but I don't think that's avoidable. There's always going to be some sort of pull in a certain direction, and usually the people making the changes are the ones to do it, but at least with Bitcoin being mostly decentralised it's easier to upset the apple cart. If you wanted changes to be made, you could put them forward, and see if they're adopted.