Topic: What is the drawback of PoS ? (Read 1010 times)

I disagree, because on public forums (bitcointalk, reddit, even twitter) you and the PoS advocate are not alone, a lot of newbies are reading the misinformation that the PoS advocate is spreading so their lies have to be challenged.
It's the same with SegWit, even today we are seeing people who are confused about how SegWit transactions work if they "remove" the signature just because in 2017 someone gave them wrong information about signatures being removed.

Hello everyone,

Recently, Vitalik Buterin, responded to a tweet against his scheme with a 'pro-tip'  :
This is what they earned with this debate: legitimacy.
True-pro-tip #1: Do not argue with PoS advocates, they abuse the implicit legitimacy credited to them, the honor of being invited to a discussion.

Do not get me wrong, PoS could be a good technique within a PoW ecosystem where it is not used for printing money out of thin air. It is the point: PoS advocates use a feasible technique (which would be useful in transaction processing somehow ) in a very sensitive, irrelevant domain: printing money, and it is sick.  Any single coin printed by virtue of 'stakes' is a scam token with almost zero value, ways worse than fiat money. The latter, fiat, has something to say about its value as a notification of debt, what has a pure PoS born token to say about its value? Nothing!

A government can argue about its credit as a security behind fiat money, what is behind the PoS alternative? Nothing!
Even if the staking tokens were Proof of Work, like what Buterin has fallen in love with, it wouldn't help. The newly-minted tokens would suffer from the same vanity as their pure Pos counterparts.

As of the post-merge Ethereum, unlike what they say, the whole ETH coins are at stake and not a 10% fraction or so, because for any brand new PoS token that is going to be printed after the transition, a tiny portion of each existing coin is vanished as a result  of their fungibility!
 
True-pro-tip #2: Do not hold Ethereum!

There has been, and will always likely be, a limit as to how many miners are produced per unit of time, and there are costs associated with moving existing mining equipment.
Deserts have an abundance of solar energy, but solar energy is expensive to harvest. Costs associated with harvesting solar energy include the depreciation costs of the solar panels.

Little back-of-the-envelope calculation..
Specific heat capacity of water: 4.1813 J/gK or 1 calorie.
So it takes 1,000,000 calories or 4,181,300 Joules to heat 1 cubic meter of water (1 ton) by 1 Kelvin.

We assume 60K of temperature delta, so we need 60 million calories = 250,878,000J = 69.69kWh to heat 1 cubic meter of water from 20°C to 80°C. It means that 1m³ of water at 20°C can provide 69.69kWh of cooling before it gets too hot.
If a miner runs 24/7 at 3kW power draw, it puts out 24 x 3 = 72kWh of heat in a day.

Your math pretty much checks out, to be honest! A cubic meter is not an unreasonable amount of space to provide all-day cooling for a single miner. If it runs through some piping to increase surface area, I'm sure it can be cooled very well at night when the desert gets super cold.

There is actually easier ways to store ice/ provide cooling in the desert with some smart engineering, ancient persia did this. This design could be improved upon with modern methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Ice_storage

https://www.maxfordham.com/research-innovation/the-physics-of-freezing-at-the-iranian-yakhchal/

Not so fast.
It is true that hash rate rises with the price, but there will come the day where there will be no more easy accessible energy anymore. At that point in time, mining in the deserts will actually be the cheapest way for large scale mining(I am talking about hundreds of Giga Watts). So if the price of Bitcoin rises further, new mining competitors will produce their electricity in the same way as existing ones, meaning profit margin will stay just high enough for maintaining a mining facility like this.



Imagine in the morning you have 1m³ of water at 20°C. Now you run your miners and cool them with the water. In that process the temperature gets 80°C. If it reaches that temperature, you store it in a large tank. During the night, I will cool that water with an air to water heat exchanger (Or a Sterling Engine) such that in the next morning it will have a temperature of 20°C again. If during the night I produce additional hot water, I will cool that with additional heat exchanger capacitiy during the night.

Technically speaking since mining is always competitive and hashrate (difficulty) changes after each price change (goes up with price rise) the profit shouldn't really change when price goes up and things balance out again.

But if the water is used for cooling during the ~12 hours of day it has to be constantly cooled because after a short time at the beginning of the day its temperature will increase and you have to wait until nightfall to cool it again or spend additional money for its cooling.

You build the solar panels elevated, like 4 meters or more. This allows for farming below the panels in the half shade. If indeed you the level of sand rises, you would have to remove it.

Yes, it will add to cost but that doesn't mean it can't be profitable. Of course this assumes a very high Bitcoin price. In the mean time you can build facilities near the coast, so you may even cool directly with sea water via a heat exchanger of course.

Within the desert, I can cool the water for free during the night, because in the deserts it usually gets very cold during night time. During the night, I will run a Sterling engine run by hot water and cool air generating electricity and, as a byproduct will cool the water.

It's not so much about the "desert" which would be all about using clean energy of the sun, it is instead all about using the same fossil fuels that pollute the environment already to generate the needed energy. In other words the location is not the real factor here.

Mining BITCOIN in the DESERT:"I just bought 6 Bitmain Antminer S19 Pro 110Th Bitcoin miners which are in a container in the desert of West Texas and powered by flared natural gas. I drove out there with @SPACE DESIGN WAREHOUSE to see the entire operation and set my miners up. In this video, I tell you all about the operation, why I spent this money, what my expectations are, and more. "

What about sandstorms? A single sandstorm could burry the whole mining facility. And they become more and more frequent.

Wouldn't that add a huge cost on top of everything else? You would have to transfer the water all the way to the desert just for a mining facility. Not to mention that you still have to reduce the water temperature in order to actually cool the equipment in hot environments, this requires additional energy that could negate all the befits of mining in the desert.

Interesting point; I didn't comment, but also initially agreed with your points 2 and 3, while disagreeing on point 1. Just because I thought you hadn't fully understood the concept of decentralizing the network (nodes). It's absolutely crucial for the nodes to be decentralized and plentiful, a thing that is rarely the case in any altcoin. Hence I thought you were confusing things.

But indeed; they neither have decentralized 'backbone' (full nodes), nor decentralized mining. I believe the core issue is that they don't have any tie to real-world resources at all; not to speak of decentralized or not.
Having decentralized hashpower is nice to have (on top of decentralized node infrastructure), and I'm glad that desert mining appears to be a potential future development in the Bitcoin mining industry. I can definitely see watercooling of server racks as a way to deal with the heat; solar panels are insanely efficient in the desert latitudes due to sun angle and long days + no real winters.

Cooling is solved. You place desalination facilities in the coast region, then you build pipelines into the deserts. Because not only do you need cooling, you also need water for all the inhabitants of those new mining oasis. And you need to clean the panels.

That’s how it is, there’s no free money without a catch in most cases. The risks of Bitcoin mining were always clearly communicated by the people i met so far, you even mentioned it in your post, that it’s not a money printing machine.

The PoS crowd keeps selling fairytales on the other hand. Staking isn’t possible for anyone, especially not the poor. And inexperienced newbies also risk their capital while going into staking, have some downtime and get slashed, the poor have to give up self custody, sounds completely riskless. This guy is scared about worldwide energy failures but doesn’t realise if 1/3 of Eth PoS validators are down they can’t finalise Blocks. While 69% of ethereum nodes already run in the cloud. A laptop and a battery is enough preparation for sure.


It is a waste and a dangerous one on top of this, it’s like throwing ever growing nuclear waste into the populations drinking water and thinking nothing can go wrong, because they thought about it long enough and this method consumes less energy and is easier to do. Clean water must’ve been just a spectrum in the first place, we’re smarter now. And this is the best case scenario.

In the average case you’re giving the most wealthy part of the population more and more economic nukes over time, with the legality to use them wherever and whenever they want, while the working class is only allowed to play with sticks, and then thinking power will stay decentralized. Plus using nukes will have an financial incentive by whoever uses them, minus the damage for themselves.


Maybe they could use the cold at night to freeze liquids and then use this to cool the facility during the day to keep their operations running. But this needs to be evaluated in practice.

In this case they can be scheduled to   run exclusively at night and powered by electricity accumulated from energy captured during the day. "The average Sahara Desert temperature during the night is 25 degrees Fahrenheit or -4 degrees Celsius."

That doesn't seem realistic because mining bitcoin is not just about providing the electricity, it also has another very important part which is cooling. ASICs produce a lot of heat and they run all day, so it will quickly become a nightmare to coll all that equipment in the middle of the desert with its natural high temperature.

P.S. I should mention that I've seen at least one person claiming to have done this successfully but never provided proof. So I remain skeptical.

I think you are mistaken. Because even though there might be hot spots of cheap energy that attract alot of miners, guess what happens next... that energy becomes more expensive. Now you have again the situation where new miners have to divert in geografic location.

 And by the way, do you know where there is cheap sustainable energy in most abundance? Exactly, it is the deserts. Soon we will witness miners building large solar plants in the deserts powering their mining plants. Luckily, deserts are all over the globe.

First of all, do you even check your sources? You linked to the wrong device. You also obviously didn't read the thread I sent; where I review the device and say that it doesn't really pay back.

However, there are 2 important points:
[1] You can't say that it's impossible to mine at home, since I just showed that it is possible. You didn't say that it has to be possible to mine profitably at home everywhere in the world.
[2] The Twitter users I linked, don't even have Apollos, but show different creative ways to run industrial miners at home, often at even higher efficiency (e.g. by using the excess heat), which makes them much more profitable than the little Apollos and other silent home miners.

So I don't understand how you think it's 'so stupid' to say that [1] it's 100% possible to mine [at all] at home and [2] in many places, with the right equipment and a little bit of handiwork, you can even do this profitably.

To be honest, I've always been thought that if something's too good to be true, it most probably is.
If someone told me there was a way to mine something, around the world, with a huge amount of profit and little to no outside costs, I would immediately smell 'scam'.

I shall ask you: are you against free-market capitalism? Do you believe governments should decide who is allowed to buy how much power, where and when? It surprises me, because most people around here are against such ideas and believe that if there's demand for more energy, more energy will be provided; if a grid becomes too unstable for industrial mining, miners will move, and all these characteristics of a free market.

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You bring up a good point: 'locked up capital that does nothing', is a type of waste; for anyone who believes PoS creates no waste. If there's such a high incentive not to use your capital (because it gives guaranteed profits - compared to investing in something that can gain or lose value), why would anyone use it? And locked up capital is waste, because if it wasn't locked up, it would circulate in the economy and be 'productive'.