Topic: Replacement for POW - page 3. (Read 1958 times)

Funny thing, the ability of people to survive is
not dependent on strength
not dependent on speed
not even dependent on intellect,

It is dependent on the people ability to adapt to a changing environment.

You are stating as a matter of fact , that BTC network is unable and unwilling to adapt to a world where energy resources are strained.
You're basically predicting BTC death.

Personally , I see PoW as a ridiculous outdated design , that should be thrown out as soon as possible.
Even I would point out , if you wanted to keep the outdated PoW design,
your options are only.
1.  Worldwide Regulation limiting who is allowed to mine and a limit on how much energy they can draw.

Hardly a solution about freedom, but if you wanted freedom BTC would evolve to the superior Proof of Stake design.
Due to BTC supporters desire to keep the old proof of waste design, regulation and control , is BTC network only survival option.
Either that or just wait for the government bans to kill the PoW networks.
 

Let say this as simply as possible.

There is no replacement for pow for btc.

so lock the thread and call it a day.

BTW I would argue that the pressure on energy use caused by pow is yet one more reason we are a step closer to boundless energy in the form of fusion.

Pay attention to this old quote

"necessity is the mother of invention"


POW is one more example of humanity's war on entropy.

So to restrict POW is to sit in the fucking corner with your face to the wall and wait for death.

Get your chatGPT autogenerated post out of this thread.

Your suggestion for an alternative method for distributing new bitcoins is an interesting one. One potential issue with this approach is that it relies on a central list of eligible nodes and a process for selecting them to receive new bitcoins. This could potentially lead to problems such as centralization, where a small group of nodes is disproportionately selected to receive new bitcoins, or manipulation of the selection process by node owners.

Another alternative approach that has been proposed is to use a proof of stake (PoS) system, in which new bitcoins are distributed based on the amount of bitcoin that a user holds, rather than the amount of computing power they contribute to the network. This can potentially be more energy efficient than proof of work, as it does not require miners to perform resource-intensive calculations in order to earn new bitcoins. However, PoS systems can also have their own set of challenges and trade-offs, such as the potential for users with large amounts of bitcoin to dominate the validation process and increase their control over the network.

Ultimately, the choice of which method to use for distributing new bitcoins is a complex one, and there are pros and cons to each approach. It is important to carefully consider the potential impacts and trade-offs of each approach in order to determine which one is the most suitable for a particular cryptocurrency.

there are 210,000 blocks per ~4 years
so 420k=8year
so 525k blocks for 10 years.... b'coz, math

also there are 1765275 coins left.
meaning 3.36 coins per block to share over 10 years


ID registration in a pseudonymous world.. um. not gonna work.
and you cant just use a nodes user agent or IP. as thats just going to get cloned/spoofed.. change over time naturally thus untrackable reliably. unless you use some at worse  ID registration (or at best.. staked address)


removing a cost mechanism for coin creation makes a coin no longer a value asset. but a lottery

if you want random payments based on length of staying in a system. go play the PoS lotto
bitcoin has already forked many PoS variants. so you already have systems that offer what you want.


people can 'pool' stake...
.. just like PoW no longer functions with solo-mining.. just saying

The downside of private sector is that they work like any other capitalist, when global price goes up they increase local price as well and there is not much the government can do about that. See US for example, they increased domestic gas price in accordance with the global price surge without hesitation.

The government makes their profit by exporting energy at ridiculously high prices to others. The downside of that is that they get addicted to easy money and if that export is disrupted for any reason (eg. sanctions or price fall) they have no clue what to do about budget deficits so they print money and increase inflation (hence the terrible exchange rate).

The wages are low if you convert it to $ due to exchange rate but not when it is compared to cost of living. For example the total of all utility bills I paid last month is barely 1% of what minimum wage salary is. The cost of my bimonthly electric bill was the cost of a small bag of chips.

There are a lot of factors affecting that but being "accessible" is not one of them. For example Iranians usually go for altcoin mining with GPU rigs not so much bitcoin mining with ASICs after bitcoin-GPU-mining stopped being possible.

There has also been a lot of ups and downs over the years. For example when GPU mining was replaced by ASIC mining, many gave up mining altogether. Or two or three years ago when mining started being regulated and many foreigners were kicked out of the country for having illegal mining farms that stole electricity and never paid any taxes; that decreased our total hashrate. Or last year when had a weird electricity crisis for 2-3 months it slowed down the industry's growth.
But the industry is still growing every day, it just takes time for farms to build up.
Additionally the real statistics about Iran's economy is never going to be known, just like nobody knows how much oil we sell and how. Since mined bitcoins are also used officially as one of the currencies for international trades, the official hashrate will definitely not be made public.

My estimate is somewhere around 10% at this point and the mining community is working with the energy ministry to increase their capacity for example by building facilities that could use wasted gas flares for electricity generation, installing more solar panels, etc. and in the next 4-5 years we could easily be looking at a quarter of total hashrate.

Just as proof of waste miners join pools to earn more,
Proof of Stake users join staking pools, where even as little as $50 of ethereum earns.
Right now the ethereum is earning about every ~4 days, with some pools.

No energy fees and no worries of bankruptcy like PoW miners.  

The tradeoff is there are sanctions against Iran. Cheap energy is one thing, but wages are low too.
The fact that Iran doesn't have the most Bitcoin miners shows it's not as accessible as other countries.

Where I live, we've always had high taxes on energy, even when it came from our own soil. Got to love the taxes!
Only a few countries have very cheap energy, but the top 5 (Venezuela, Libya, Iran, Angola, Algeria) all have their own problems.

yeah, it's not like the Avengers haven't landed on this thread yet to take on Loki.

I am surprised. Usually public sector is more inefficient than private. What's the tradeoff?

In that long term things have changed so much that Bitcoin itself may be obsolete because cryptography has significantly changed. Just the cryptography we use today is nothing like what was used during WWI.
What's important is that so far over the past 13 years fees have gone down and despite reward going down from 50BTC to 6.25BTC there was no need for WAY higher fees!

Iran. But don't be surprised, that is what happens when a country has the most amount of resources in the world and the energy sector (basically all utility bills) is owned by the government not the private sector.

So cheap?

Which country is that, if I may ask?

Well, you also addressed 'the prime supporters' as a whole; therefore such broad statements can never be right. And indeed I proved to you that we have 'prime supporters' of PoW that do mine themselves, and even at home.

That's absolutely wrong. Me and every other reasonable miner would switch pool immediately if we knew something was off with our pool operator. It's an easy and quick thing to do, literally doable in a few minutes. That's one of the reasons for pool operators not to do sketchy stuff like colluding to censor transactions and the like.
They are financially incentivized; they have to play by the rules, because it's so easy for people to switch that they could go bankrupt literally overnight if everyone left their pool. Miners have no obligation whatsoever to stick with their current pool if there's something cooking.

Exactly. Because there's no buyer for excess energy in the day / summertime, they can't overbuild infrastructure to a point where there's enough energy in winter and at night, when the sun shines weaker and the wind doesn't blow.
Bitcoin mining is the only use case for periodic excess energy and the only business that can use it whenever it's available; buying off the 'peaks' of otherwise wasted electricity.
Large-scale mining operations in Europe would massively aid the energy transition.

It's not true though, that 'they all move to Texas'. Some miners did, sure, but the hashrate is definitely spread out. And again, I don't know why you don't understand that increasing demand for something drives development of that something to meet those demands, which is always a good thing. Why do you want to stop development and improvement of infrastructure, in this case?

It's as if you are a supporter of governmental crackdowns on cryptocurrency (that's what it is, by the way - PoW is only an excuse; they will find other reasons to go after Ethereum et al.) and freedom of using your electricity however you want.
Pretty anti-Bitcoin, pro-totalitarianism and kind of weird to see in such a forum.

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Oh you're so wrong about this, though!
In Ethereum PoS at least, you first of all need 32ETH and be approved by the current group of stakers. They can just decide not to let new people stake if they want.
Also: 32ETH is roughly $35,000 USD; if you can afford that, you can also afford 10 (!) latest-gen Bitcoin ASICs.

The narrative that you can stake your little $50 investment meanwhile Bitcoin mining has such a high barrier to entry, is completely backwards.
You can get home miners for $200-$600, meanwhile staking costs much more and you can even be refused access. Meanwhile nobody can stop your submitted valid blocks.

It's 3 entities, but indeed, that's a reasonable concern. My answer to this is that decisions proposed by a pool need to be approved by each of their miners individually. If pool wants to double-spend, miners must disapprove it. There have been decentralized proposals, such as P2Pool, but perhaps they weren't recognized enough due to better offers from centralized pools? In the end, it's a free market, and miners' goal is to maximize profit.

If you think that a Proof-of-Stake algorithm gives solution to this problem you're gravely mistaken. Not only does it not, but it makes things worse. Can you imagine what can an exchange do with all that liquidity? Or, what a hacker can do if they rip them off (which is a usual phenomenon, see FTX)? Preminers, billionaires, exchanges. You suddenly have to trust their technical competence, otherwise your network's integrity is in question. On the other hand, you can't realistically steal a billion dollars worth of ASICs.

If you can't tax users with block subsidy, you can't force them pay transaction fees. Their activity is what determines low and high transaction fees. Yes, there might be security traded, but transaction fees are determined exclusively by supply and demand.

Bitcoin, by design of its disappearing block subsidy, will eventually require WAY higher fees than that in order to remain the least bit secure.

So long term, low bitcoin fees are just wishful thinking. It was not designed for that.

How do you stay so clueless?
Ethereum current transaction fee is 63 cents ~ ½ of the current btc fee, according to Ycharts.  
Also while ethereum processes ~4x the transaction volume of btc on a daily basis.  

But even that is still to high for mass adoption in Poor Countries,
using a Proof of Stake design opens the potential to remove or reduce transaction fees in a PoS network to 1 penny or less,
Plus in a PoS design anyone can stake to cover the fees. 
Proof of Waste Bitcoin network can never achieve transaction fees that is needed for mass adoption due to it's inferior design.
Bitcoin PoW miners are going bankrupt all over the place right now, because of PoW defective design.
Anyone on a grid where a btc miners goes bankrupt sees an increase in their energy bills to cover the electric utility losses to the asshat btc miners.

https://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/files/energy_bomb_bitcoin_white_paper_101322.pdf

Altcoins have always been an experimentation ground for bitcoin. A shitcoin that has copied majority of its protocol from bitcoin changed part of it to a different algorithm. It is a valid discussion to talk about that change.

You still haven't learned that bitcoin is not for one or two countries or a region. It is a global currency and for every country that has some issues or bans bitcoin there are dozens that don't.
For example we have no blackouts here and the electricity price is about $0.002 per KWH. Geographically speaking most EU countries are only as big as one of our average size cities and the whole country is as big as more than half of Europe combined. So even if half of EU were dark (which it isn't since there are only small number of blackouts) it is negated by one country alone. There are a lot of other cases like this.

Bitcoin "transactions" don't go through exchanges. Bitcoin trades to! There is already a hefty tax on trades which has nothing to do with mining algorithm of the coins.

Bitcoin's Proof of Work is the most energy efficient algorithm that exists and it is taken seriously which is evident from the adoption around the world with multiple countries adopting it as legal tender, more as legal currency and the billions of dollars of businesses that are built on top of bitcoin and millions of dollars that is transferred using bitcoin on daily basis.

This is why a centralized shitcoin like ETH that is using PoS and has fees that are above $5 is not useful while bitcoin that has a transaction fee of less than $0.10 is.

Because he told me.  

I was referring to the person (NotATether), I was talking too.
Did you forget your meds today, as you are slower than normal.


But it does mean only 3 people are securing the network, or don't you know how pools work.
The dangers of pooling :
https://modernconsensus.com/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/report-mining-pool-consolidation-threatens-bitcoin-security/

And here is where you prove you don't understand energy infrastructure.
The real reason Europe is short on energy now is trying to move to carbon free energy,
Carbon Free Energy like solar, wind, & hydro are proving to be unreliable for 24x7 baseload needs.
Nuclear Fusion is 50 to 70 years away from commercial utility.
No one needs to change your mind, you can be clueless forever and it won't change the inevitable outcome.


The Reason China banned PoW, is that while BTC may only use a small % of the entire world energy.
No single grid has access to all the world energy, and your miners for greed's sake like to suck up as much as possible in as few locations as possible.
So when they all move to Texas , they cause grid instability , which causes blackouts, until the miners are banned.
You don't have to believe any of it, the PoW bans are coming whether you grasp it or not.  

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosemariemiller/2022/12/07/crypto-mining-ban-makes-new-york-potential-model-for-other-states/?sh=4e47794940e1
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/white-house-condemns-energy-use-of-mining-bitcoin

Who are you referring to and how do you know which country they live in? And how do you get from 'there are energy blackouts' to 'we have to stop PoW' and not 'we have to build better infrastructure'?
To my knowledge, societies fared much better if they improved infrastructure to meet new demands instead of reducing demands to meet old infrastructure.

Imagine: the industrial revolution is starting, and countries refuse to build railroad infrastructure. They instead reduce demands and production to be able to handle it with horse-drawn carriages and such antiquated means of transport. Such a country would have failed completely, economically speaking, and have been crushed by all the other countries, which all adapted to new demand.

Again: who are you referring to? Some people in these threads mine at home, some rent hashrate and some don't mine. You can't give such broad, generalized statements and expect to be taken seriously, because generalized statements are always wrong. There is always at least one exception, automatically destroying arguments like 'no Bitcoin supporter mines'.

Even if that were the case, it doesn't mean that there are only 3 miners. We explained this to you multiple times. A pool could theoretically consist of thousands of individual Bitcointalk home miners and achieve 1/3 of global hashrate. That would be the complete opposite of 'centralization' that you seem to suggest.

Cool; so facilitating mining in Europe would increase the demand for carbon-free electricity, flooding more money into the carbon-free electricity business, allowing the field to evolve faster, carbon-free energy to become more popular, cheaper and more stable. Net profit for everyone.
Bitcoin mining would massively help the transition to 100% renewable electricity. Change my mind.

'Switching to PoS' is because of 3 reasons:
(1) Bigger profits for project creators (main reason): basically the equivalent to giving satoshi a huge ASIC mining installation for free, and updating it (for free) every year to the latest gear, with free electricity, forever. ^{[that would be hilarious, right]}
(2) Easy to sell to gullible newbies who've already been half-brainwashed by PoW FUD (e.g. from Greenpeace)
(3) Don't have to compete with Bitcoin, just with the other shitcoins.

Are you aware that Bitcoin mining is the least of your worries if you believe energy usage is too high? Look around you; wasted energy everywhere. Focus on the important stuff, don't let FUDsters distract you from the bigger picture.
Bitcoin is a smaaaall fish my dude.

You also still experience Energy Blackouts on a daily basis in your country.
So how many bitcoins do you mine per year?   None.  
* When the prime supporters of a product , can't afford to actually mine it, proves you have no decentralization.*
* Currently only 3 mining pool operators control over 51% of btc PoW hashrate daily. *

Since you mention Europe, they are starting a carbon tax.
Since according to BTC supporters their is not yet a viable replacement to PoW.  (Everyone one else just evolves to PoS)

How long before they place that carbon tax on btc transactions in Europe BTC exchanges.
This could end all PoW mining in Europe, and cause all Europe Exchange to drop all PoW coins to avoid the added carbon taxes.

BTC needs an energy efficient alternative to current PoW, if it wants to be taken seriously.
Also any new alternative needs to be able to survive with none or extremely low onchain transaction fees.
The reason btc is failing in El Salvador, is the average daily wage is ~$13 US, so a $1.82 transaction fee eats up 14% of a day wages.
In the US , it would be like someone earning $200 US daily would have to spend $28 as a transaction fee, no one is stupid enough to waste 14% of their daily wages on transaction fee, when cash has a 0% transaction fee. Now you know why bitcoin PoW will fail at adoption in poor countries.
So transaction fees also need to be fixed in any PoW alternative.