Topic: Probably scaling may not be a big issue for bitcoin in the future but POW... (Read 166 times)

That's a common misconception. Efficiency has no effect on the cost of mining because of the economics of mining. The cost of mining a block approaches the value of the block reward, regardless of the efficiency. Increasing efficiency only increases the difficulty.

There haven't really been any great arguments in this thread about PoS vs PoW. The centralization argument of PoS about whales having all the stake is no different than mining farms and the miner manufacturers themselves having the highest stake.

A sufficiently well distributed coin like, say Ethereum, once it switches to PoS will not have this problem. One can say that the whales can always buy and gain larger stake. Still, what wrong could the whale do?

Attack the chain. Obviously they won't as it makes no economic sense.
Corner all the fees and reward. Don't the big miners do the same?

When it comes to running the hardware, these PoS coins do need certain nodes that can at least manage the basic work of allocating space, proposing transactions and having sufficient throughput for uploads and downloads. So it is not like they just have them staked with zero work. It needs to be staked on a hardware platform or a cloud node that needs to be updated constantly. (obviously, much of this can be off-loaded or automated).

So, theoretically, there is nothing that can go wrong with a PoS chain which has sufficiently wide distribution. Why just PoS though? In this bullrun, you will come across a lot of well researched solutions that others have been proposing. Right now, nobody from the PoW camp has sought to debunk these. The problem is that this sort of technical discussions have all but ceased. Nobody with sufficient insight and knowledge has the time to prove that why PoW is technically better than all of these other innovations. All you will hear is "those are vaporware".

I am trying to be the devil's advocate here. So, in a future where, say, Elon Musk declares that he has found the perfect cryptocurrency with <1% of bitcoin's transaction cost in terms of energy; two things will happen:

1. That coin will pump like crazy.
2. Bitcoin will dump.

This is where then the next battle of perceptions as well as wits will be fought. If the technical community can prove that the proposed solution will not work and why PoW is still superior, Bitcoin will continue to reign supreme. If the research community finds that alternate solutions can indeed work then PoW and by extension, Bitcoin, will have lost the battle for perception and market dominance. Unfortunately, the world will have found a new figurehead for crypto, like Elon, who would be laughing his way to the bank with an obvious enormous pre-stake in such a coin. This, by the way, seems to be his intention with all these recent ploys. He wants to financially secure his expenses for his inter-planetary ambitions. For him, becoming the Satoshi with a stash of 1 Million is probably just one of the potential ways he can do this.

One thing is quite clear though, he is out with full force to attack Bitcoin and has all the sheep behind him. As Bitcoiners, we need to debunk these arguments much more strongly.

I have always been ready to wait 10+ minutes on average,,, though even from the pattern of my spending I am willing to wait 20-30+ mins in high times and this itself is very rare. And for the price of far far less than if I use anything else other than a direct same country bank network (which is free and instant). You are right,,, those who whine are not ready to use it.

Not necessarily. The cost of mining is bound to decrease with time due to increase in the efficiency of ASICs and possibly a decrease in cost of mining. The electrical usage as it is currently is of some concern, given the limited utility of Bitcoin in it's day to day usage. You cannot argue that the electrical consumption will not increase or will decrease to a sustainable level; if you want adoption, that simply won't happen. However, if you can scale Bitcoin to become something that is capable of replacing the financial systems around the world, then there is quite a bit of benefits as compared to the cost.
It is not.

Regardless, you will face significant opposition from the miners.

Bitcoin's energy use is not necessary going to keep growing at a fast rate, after a few more halvings more and more block reward would be coming from fees rather than new coins. Right now Bitcoin's energy consumption strongly depends on Bitcoin's price, in the future it will depend on on-chain transaction volume.

If it will ever be proved that PoS is 100% secure and not worse than PoW in any way, then maybe Bitcoin community will start considering switching to it, but it's still unclear whether it's true or not.

Wouldn't the PoS algorithm allow the whales to control the market? So far this has been one of the biggest concerns related to crypto. People always tend to say "The whales control the market, Elon controls the market", while in reality they actually can't. Only influence, but not control. And the PoW is what keeps it that way.
The PoS will destroy Bitcoin as it is, there will be more volatility, people will only use it for profit, there will be no trust.
But I see your point and I think there's a perfect solution called AuxPOW, which allows merged mining. In short: less power (therefore, less energy consumption) and more coins at a time. This will allow to save the benefits of PoW and make the process less damaging to the environment.
Though, maybe there are some cons in this algorithm I'm not familiar with.

Scaling is a far greater concern and would be easier to solve first. The problem right now is really not the power consumption; most banking systems, and fiat does incur quite a bit of environmental costs when compared to Bitcoin, perhaps more as every country has their own system. The actual problem is the utility of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin's transaction volume increases exponentially, then there is really no reason why you can justify having a lower power consumption. The ASICs and indirectly their power consumption secures Bitcoin and makes it far harder for any single entity to be able to attack Bitcoin as it'll be difficult to have that much resources.

If renewable energy gets even cheaper, then I foresee even more miners to be shifting to them. Problem with PoS and other algorithms is that it isn't secure by itself, you're not risking anything or incurring any costs by building on a fork. Given how the current distribution is skewed, can't see how it'll help at all and only serves to monopolize mining even more.

I think it should be pointed out , that the rich get richer no matter what happens.

Do you have a warehouse full of ASICS so you can mine BTC, I don't
But I do own some BTC that I could pool with others to stake, if BTC evolved to PoS.

So PoS would actually allow poor people to take part in BTC mining and earning transaction fees,
something that only the rich can afford to do right now.

It monopolizes the system.

Yes, it's the “rich get richer” argument again and yes, it's different with PoW. There is an actual procedure being done in PoW that requires computational work. You're essentially working for something to be proved. Being rich obviously allows you to buy/afford hardware and start mining, but it's not the same as sitting on your coins and getting even richer by doin' so. On a PoS cryptocurrency, it doesn't benefit you to spend your coins, but rather keep them.

You should understand how this mechanism rewards its users. Why would one be rewarded for proving that he owns an important amount of the coins? What did he do to be rewarded?

Mining bitcoins isn't the first thing that comes into my mind when I think what really damages this planet. Roughly 0.6% of the energy waste is what Bitcoin does. Then, there are the renewable sources that are already used to a great extent.

There's lot of propaganda spread across the world about Bitcoin mining these days. Along with that here it comes the FUD.

So far I was assuming like bitcoin is having 2 issues to solve in long run: scaling problem and instant tx.

But these 2 will not be having any more significance when bitcoin will be treated like an asset; it means bitcoin will value in millions and I may not need to transact it for everyday. When more people worship bitcoin as a sacred thing, then probably 1,000,000 bytes blocks will be more than enough forever.

When you transact bitcoins once in month or once in year, you will be ready to wait for 10+ minutes for your first confirmation hence instant tx will be no more a demand.

But the 3rd issue, we may start facing in near future would be POW algorithm.

Today Tesla, and who knows when Greta Thunberg will start shouting against bitcoins.

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I am not a geek but POS is seeming like not having 51% attack problems and many POS coins are surviving till date without any major issues.

Miners are spending thousands to millions of dollars in ASICs; if BTC adopts POS then those money will be used to buy bitcoins which means all the money needed to mine bitcoins will not go out of bitcoin ecosystem.

Bitcoin may not necessarily to adopt POS algorithm but may innovate and adopt something similar or superior to POS will help this earth remain greener. I read Mr. Satoshi was into a gentleman agreement for not using GPU for mining in 2009/2010 for fairer mining experiences for all the people but now we ran too far away from that and I am sure bitcoin mining is dominated by few group of people these days. Something new which is fairer and decentralized will help all bitcoiners and our environment as well.