The "hate" people express against bitcoin especially here on HN is often towards the implementation. People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness.
Objectively PoW does not scale.
Objectively we have DLTs (blockchains) with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) instead of PoW/PoS that can do everything Bitcoin can and more without the most severe downsides that come with PoW/PoS.
The future will probably bring even better tech and if we learned something from the past then its that better solution always take over the old worse solutions.
Bitcoin ultimately has to fail because its not a system that could be upgraded. Its most fundamental core properties are intentionally not changeable.
As an engineer with twenty years experience in this space and nearly as long studying the economics of it, I have yet to see a replacement for PoW that solves the problem that PoW solves.
Proof of Work is trustless decentralization.
Proof of stake is trusting the dudes who premined the coin and sold you a “fix for bitcoins inherent problem” to hype their ICO.
If you were right, after 10 years one of those PoS currencies would be winning. Can you even remember the proof of stake currencies from 2011?
Why did they fail? After all they had a huge economic advantage over bitcoin mining as they cost effectively zero electricity.
There hasn't been a secure decentralized PoS protocol. Mostly they rely on one or more trusted validators. Cardano's Ouroboros is apparently the first secure decentralized PoS, that is mathematically proven to be as secure as Bitcoin. I don't know if that's true, but that's what they say.[0]
I can't really understand their papers, but they've been published in peer-reviewed journals, so they're at least somewhat legit. And if it's a scam then someone should be able to attack it.
Its right in the message above. FBA is the result of researching how to make a bitcoin like system without PoW.
PoS however is based on the ideas of PoW, it just moves the flaws, its not a solution.
FBA was "invented/discovered" before PoS coins even existed.
Essentially FBA is a distributed voting solution. Instead of let the person who has solved the PoW write the Tx in a block, everyone just votes on Tx order. The threshold is rather arbitrary. Most systems use something around 80%. In practice every valid Tx has near 100% votes anyway because no one listens to dishonest nodes. But nodes can go offline or Tx propagation can be delayed so a Tx could have only reached part of the network and thus not reach 100%
Not a big deal even if a Tx has less than 80%. Nodes just re-vote for the Tx for the next round.
Double spend is solved by the ordering alone. If one Tx is first the second that moves the same funds somewhere else, breaks a fundamental Tx rule so nodes wont vote to include the second. Which one came first is irrelevant. Each node just votes for the one he got first and in a possible second round it votes for what the majority of other nodes said came first. So the distributes system can not reach a state where a Tx is stuck.
This is all very very very much simplified ofc but you can easily lookup systems and dig into details if you are interested. There are real "blocklchains" running with FBA since many many years so it without any doubt works. Although like I said in my original post it can allays be improved.
What you described doesn't even address the reason PoW exists. So, I’m sorry but it sounds like you are repeating something you heard without understanding the issues at hand. I suggest you read “There’s nothing cheaper than proof of work” by Paul Storzc
Enlighten us please? Suggesting to read a book of which the title already suggests some completely irrelevant content about "cost" or PoW surely does not convince me or anyone. I dont care about the energy/cost or the fact that bitcoins may speed up the destruction of this planet by a incredible tiny tiny fraction that has zero effect on my life. I couldn't care less, and it wasn't part of my argument at all.
People can have an argument about that, its fine but mine wasn't so you cant debunk it by telling me to read a book that seems 100% irrelevant.
PoW was simply used to solve the double spending problem in a decentral way. Which is exactly what FBA solutions do without it.
Solving the double spending in a decentral way is the key "invention" of bitcoin NOT PoW. PoW existed way way before, it was just used to create the solution to the problem it was not invested/discovered for bitcoin nor was it the key element.
People came up with different solutions solving the same double spending problem in a decentral way but without using PoW. Some solutions are objectively better regardless of energy consumption and other secondary properties. They are objectively better because they scale to high throughput, allow short block times, have a proper and path forward to improve these properties over time with very limited "risk" of causing forks for every proposed change.
Why would it be the last is the question?
Clearly something better has to come or already came. After a large step forward there is usually a tremendous amount of innovation coming. Why would you assume 10 years passed and bitcoin is still the first AND the only good one.
>People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness.
The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.
> The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.
Obviously some people are jealous that they didn’t hold Bitcoin earlier and make a lot of money.
But equally, people who hold Bitcoin now are incentivized to dismiss any critique of Bitcoin, since they stand to profit directly from Bitcoin’s reputation.
Therefore the motivations of all participants must be borne in mind, and no ad hominem carries any special weight since all participants have incentives for motivated reasoning.
This is true, because the vitriol was there prior to anyone complaining about Bitcoin's power usage (i.e. when it was too small to matter).
I remember when I first heard of Bitcoin. I quite frankly found it technically intimidating. It was a totally new concept. I didn't get it. I took my own discomfort as a sort of signal that it was really important; something totally new. So I studied it. I had to put time and effort to read the books, play with the code... Eventually I got it and found it to be one of the most elegant pieces of technology and sociology of my lifetime.
I think a lot of geeks never made that first push past the intimidation. As the value has gone up, the sour grapes have as well. This is a group of people that should have been first on the wagon, but instead many of us found out the hard way we weren't on the cutting edge as much as we liked to think. Myself included, I have some Bitcoin but I'm not a BTC millionaire, like I would have been had I pushed harder through my intimidation faster.
If you do the same kinda research about FBA you will "get it" too and you will know that PoW is useless.
You probably wont make money form that but still I hope you dig into it. I myself saw "the beauty" in bitcoin once and later saw it in FBA again.
After all it solves the same problem just in a very different way.
There are FBA coins out there so people who want can trow money at something an maybe make profit if they gain value. But its not new so who knows how early people who join now really are.
Can't compare it with buying bitcoin at a few bucks that's for sure.
The problem is that there could easily be flaws in Bitcoin that have been there all along. We’ll know the answer to this if it eventually fails.
I too wish I’d made more effort to buy it earlier. Presumably that sentiment applies to the majority of humans on earth, whether you are now a Bitcoin millionaire or not.
Counterexample: when I recently read about its energy consumption (per byte stored), I sold my bitcoins in disgust, at roughly today's prices. I've held almost continuously since 2011, although I trimmed my position a few times.
If I come across something that works without PoW, is safe against quantum computers and somehow eliminates the threat of forks (seems impossible), I'll invest in that.
This will likely be dismissed as shilling of a shitcoin, but on the off-chance anyone is actually willing to take a look, this cryptocurrency meets your criteria (which is exactly why I bought it): https://www.algorand.com/.
The pedigree of the team behind it is ridiculous, most notably its creator: Silvio Micali - one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs as well as other cryptographic primitives.
EDIT: it's not quantum-safe yet, but that's a problem they're actively researching, and given the team they seemed credibly positioned to solve it.
What exactly is the "threat" of forks? Being able to fork the network is often seen as a feature, not a issue. If you're building a decentralized network, you sometimes have to have consensus when doing upgrades globally. This is in reality a fork but everyone agrees to keep with one of them. Those who don't agree, can continue running the other one if they feel like it.
unwanted/unplanned forking is a "threat" in the sense that it causes uncertainty. Idk about this specific project and how they handle this but for example the XRPL has amendments which come with software update but are not enabled they are open to votes. Each amendment must constantly get over 80% positive votes for 2 weeks to be accepted. The validator nodes who voted against it are overruled by this they must install the latest version to be able to vote on the amendment therefore they do have the code and if the consensus is to enable the new code their node will do so. This prevents forking.
Intentional forking as a feature is ofc still possible. Validators owner who disagree with an amendment to the point that if it is accepted they would want to stay on the "old chain" and thus fork it, can simply remove the "yes" votes from their validator list essentially ignoring their votes and thus separate from each other. By the time one cluster enabled an amendment and the separated cluster does not, a fork happens*. This requires some kind of coordination and is unlikely to happen unexpected. A largely unpopular amendment would simply not reach the 80%. And one that reached 80% is unlikely to be consider so bad by the remaining 20% that they would want to fork. But the possibility is there it just never happened in the 8+ years its running.
*ofc it would also go the other way around. An amendment that wont reach 80% could also cause a cluster to intentionally separate and enable it there which would also case a fork.
First you bring up something that is neither a cryptocurrency or properly decentralized (XRP and the XRP Ledger [Ripple]) then you simply miss the question as a whole.
The question was: "What exactly is the "threat" of forks?"
Your answer seems to be the answer to the question "How can we prevent forks?"
"Uncertainty" is certainly getting at some sort of answer, but falls short as you're not really explaining what kind of uncertainty and why it's bad in the first place.
>The question was: "What exactly is the "threat" of forks?"
Yes uncertainty was the answer. If a fork happens you dont know which side is going to die or if both keep going on. You dont know which sides coin someone wants if he wants to be paid in the coin named prior to the fork.
You may not even know there is a fork because it happen on accident and is only discovered after it happened.
I would say this is the "threat" the "bad part" and it is bad because it is unwanted by most users of the system but that's just my opinion. There is now way to proof its unwanted by most user nor does that mean its bad for everyone. So this goes nowhere. If you think its good I'm happy to agree that this is purely an opinion.
A controlled/planed intentional fork seems to be what I assume most people would want but that again is "good" solely because its my opinion.
Hence my message pointed out the fact that we can have the "good" part about forks without the "bad" part about forks if the system prevents the "bad kind" of forks to happen. Your message already pointed out the benefit of forking and preventing unintentional forking would not affect these benefits.
Now to the other part which was really just an example how another system managed to prevent unintentional forking without preventing forking itself. I'm sure there are tons of other solutions so the fact that you don't seem to like this one is kinda irrelevant, it was just the example that I know best and was probably the first around.
Still gonna "fact check" this because why not^^ You seem to be confusing stuff. I wont go any further into a discussion about that tho because quite frankly its all out there to read for anyone who cares. It not my goal to shill stuff or prevent people from reading and believing whatever FUD they choose. Everything can be verified, no need to trust what I tell you, its all public since many many years.
First, the XRPL is not a cryptocurrency and I never said it is, its a distributed ledger. XRP is a cryptocurrency/digital asset/token whatever you wanna call it. There is no consent over the definition for these words so its not really debatable.
The XRPL is however definitely "properly decentralized" regardless of what FUD you may have read about it.
Decentralization is rather well defined and whether something is or isn't can be objectively "measured". Although I ofc dont know what _your personal_ definition for "properly decentralized" may be, its decentralized as in no single point of failure or control exists in the system. If you use another definition then it may or may not fit. But this is the most common simplified definition.
For a system that has to "decentralized" reach 80% agreement this means at least 3 independent entities are necessary to make it de-facto decentral. However, 2 colluding would break this already so obviously more than 3 is wanted. 3 would be the theoretical minimum. How many _you personally_ want to have to make it "properly decentralized" _for you_ isn't really a debatable topic, its an opinion. More is objectively better and less than 3 is objectively not decentral anymore.
The XRPL currently has about 30 _legally independent_ validator operators. There is no means to measure independents however. And no means to evaluate what would be needed to make 80% collude. BUT its important to know that colluding would not give them any financial benefit, in fact it would just stop the XRPL from working, which they all voluntary choose to support so that does not make much sense.
There is no double spending or the like possible if someone gains control over 80% of the validators. It could be turned off or they could push an amendment though that does whatever they want but its all public. No honest node can be tricked into breaking its own rules and add any kind of invalid transaction, reverse something or allow double spend. No amount of control can change the code that runs on the other validators. Assuming you dont trust anyone, you have to run your own node and then you can only be fooled if someone takes over your node at which point there is no way to prevent you from being fooled anyway.
If a collusion or take over would happen is would be a situation where a fork would be unavoidable and ofc wanted. Every honest participant would obviously choose the side that didn't push some amendment trough that somehow benefits someone. So there would be a fork with everyone who doesn't wanna play by the rules and the "main chain".
This immediately renders the whole collusion useless as they have full control now but only on their own chain that no one cares about and are excluded from voting on the "main chain".
But overall its a purely theoretical scenario. There is no incentive to gain control if you cant do anything useful with it as the honest participants would just fork and exclude the compromised parties.
Same if they would turn it off. It would just be a matter of time before the non-compromised parties ignore the offline ones so they can reach 80% consent again.
>(XRP and the XRP Ledger [Ripple])
That makes no sense
- XRP is the token in the XRP Ledger
- The XRPL is the whole system, the "blockchain", the DLT
- rippled is the name of the C++ implementation of the XRPL
- Ripple is a company that currently maintains the source code of XRPL reference implementation (rippled), which is open for anyone including for contribution.
They are not controlling the XRPL.
They are not controlling the code.
Just like controlling the bitcoin GitHub repo does not control bitcoins code or the network.
Ripple also runs validators and in the early days they ran all of them so it was not decentralized according to the definition above. Over time more and more validators joined so Ripple no longer has any special power.
So far exactly 1 amendment was accepted with over 80% quorum without ripples positive votes. That means Ripple could not prevent that amendment from being enabled - they got overruled/over-voted.
Ripple also holds a lot of XRPs that however gives them no special rights or control over the XRPL.
Most of these XRPs are in a time escrows.
Hope that clarifies some stuff you may have head. There is always XRPL.org for more in detail information.
And like I said its not the only system that prevents unintentional forking.
> when I recently read about its energy consumption (per byte stored), I sold my bitcoins in disgust
You fell for the meme...
Energy consumption as compared to what? What energy sources? This line of argumentation feels very misleading to me and always has because it is presented with a very specific framing. Here's an alternative framing for example:
As per my original message you should look into FBA.
Its not a coin but some coins do use it.
Whether you want to buy such coins and which one is none of my business, but the tech is there and works since years.
The hair dryer, unlike a blockchain, is not a technology for durable, immutable and highly available storage, so I wouldn't judge it based on energy per byte second.
My take is HN commenters try to typically reason through articles with thought and an open mind. I would wager there are so many bitcoin bros who hype ad nausea that beckons the skepticism you see here.
I believe the distinction is that if you or I are accused of sour-graping Bitcoin, we cry crocodile tears on the internet, but if Bitcoin bros aren't taken as serious thought leaders of the future world economy, they stand to lose a lot of money, potentially leveraged.
It's a sexist term that degrades the countless amounts of female Bitcoin investors as well as those who identify as trans or POC. I'm surprised it's allowed on HN.
You have called lock downs "arrogant and threatening authoritarian movements" and told someone that saying racist hate groups lead to violence is "hyperbole that isn't going to work for you much longer". You also said that "hn is filled with indignant nocoiners".
I think acting offended by 'bitcoin bros' is hypocritical.
My own comments (many of which I don't remember making, it's possible my account was temporarily compromised) shouldn't have any bearing on the offensive remarks made by others.
Funny how there was no "environment" argument in the whole message but someone came alone an made sure to devaluate it anyway.
The argument was that PoW can not not scale. Its an obvious objectively verifiable fact and its completely irrelevant what kind of environmental side effects bitoin has or will have in the future.
For all we know it could run on fusion reactors and biodegradable ASICS only and it still would not scale.
I don’t understand the recent preference for taking assertions and declaring them “obviously objectively verifiable fact”.... but that is a good indicator they are false.
Bitcoin can and has scaled. And that is a fact, from Segwit and Taproot to Lightning the capacity and cost have improved dramatically.
Last time I checked block time was 10 min just like 10 years ago. (obviously objectively verifiable fact)
Last time I checked max TPS was like 7 or something so it has like what doubled in the last years? (obviously objectively verifiable fact)
LN is forever beta (obviously objectively verifiable fact) and does not even address bitcoins scalability problem. It just off loads Tx to reduce on-chain Tx. (obviously objectively verifiable fact) That does not make bitcoin any better. (obviously objectively verifiable fact) Just like Wrapped Bitcoin does not make bitcoin any better but it did reduce load on the chain so thanks to WBTC the chain inst as much fu**ed as in 2017 yet. (obviously objectively verifiable fact)
Compared to FBA solutions with block times in the single digit seconds and TPS way over 1000 These improvements are as irrelevant as its gets. There is no proposed way to make bitcoin scale to any level that would make it useful on a global scale. And the fun part is, even a proposal that could do this would not go trough. It would just lead to another fork.
The energy wastage argument isn't "environmental concern". If bitcoin were to scale up enough to combat Visa, it would twice as much energy as all the generators in the world put together can produce, just to do what Visa already does, but without fraud detection, ID verification, or reversibility.
I'm not confident that it would. There doesn't seem to be a clear connection between the transaction rate and the power use. That's not to say that the power use is or isn't "worth it" or whatever.
But, I think that one way the "energy per transaction" framing is misleading, is for exactly the "if you scaled up the transactions, the power use would scale proportionally" idea.
First, it isn't clear to me that it is even possible to scale up the transaction rate without either making the security worse or substantially modifying the design (or possibly both), but if you did manage increase the transaction rate, it isn't clear to me that this would impact the total energy use rate at all.
Well, ok, it might influence the power used by influencing the price or the issuance rate.
But, aside from that, I expect that the power use would be determined by whether someone profits by increasing the amount that they spend on power in order to mine bitcoin. This doesn't depend on the transaction rate.
Err, ok, I suppose technically if the transaction rate were higher, miners might get more transaction fees, and really the relevant thing is issuance rate + transaction fee rate,
but I suspect that the average transaction fee would decrease if the number of transactions were increased, so that impact should be small I think, because those two should largely cancel out.
Hm, ok, so if the transaction fees are determined essentially as an auction, what is the effect on the average fee per transaction, of multiplying the number of items (slots in the block) available per amount of time? I think this depends on the demand curve for transactions. I don't know what that curve looks like.
If we pretend that it is linear (just pulling that out of a hat. Though I guess if we zoom in far enough it should look locally linear, unless we zoom in too far and then it will look piecewise constant due to discrete numbers of people... whatever.), then, --- I should get back to work, shouldn't be doing this calculation right now.
But did you really include Lightning Network in your mental calculations? If so, care to elaborate on what exactly would stop it from working? (I mean it already works now, there is nothing technical that is going to stop it from scaling)?
Exactly. Lightning was anticipated from the very first email group conversation on Bitcoin. It is not ready for primetime usage, but it is rapidly approaching that point as Lightning improves.
The "killer app" of Bitcoin is the shared CPU power / consensus, not necessarily the plain layer-1 transactions.
No clue where you got that from but satoshi expressed in his emails that he was under the impression that bitcoin would scale on its own in the early days.
Just like he tough that millions of people would us their desktop to mine and therefore decentralization would only ever increase over time.
"Most transactions cancel out at the account
level. The binks demand bitcoins of each other only
because they don't want to hold account money for too
long. So a relatively small amount of bitcoins
infrequently transacted can support a somewhat larger
amount of account money frequently transacted."
This is simply not possible on bitcoin unless you have wallets holding money from many people. At which point you no longer own your wallet.
There is no way Tx of average humans would significantly cancel out within the time of a block.
Thats why LN just makes the time to settlement "infinite" and that's why it partially increases centralization again to cancel out more Tx. If that was the goal it could have been implemented in layer 1.
Anyway all that aside, lets just assume LN would work as perfectly as the devs hope it will do one day. Its sill way worse than existing FBA solutions that can handle most of this on layer 1 directly and already have fully working second layer (payment channels) implemented. Even if bitcoin and LN could eventually provide a similar good solution, whats the point if it already exists and why would anyone assume the existing solutions stop evolving while bitcoin and LN slowly catches up?
If we assume LN has reached all its goals in 10 years it also means the goals are outdated by 10 years.
We can arguing about what LN may be capable of doing one day but its never gonna be a valid argument against solution that deliver today.
Lightning network is just a brand name for the cryptography that was needed to make Satoshi’s payment channels work.
So, while Satoshi’s opinion isnt really relevant to bitcoin’s future, since you brought it up, Satoshi clearly didn't think layer one was the inly way yo go.
That right, its not relevant. He was wrong on many tings and right on many others.
Still what LN may or may not be able to deliver is also not relevant as an argument against existing solutions that deliver today.
LN fundamentally changes nothing. Its still uses bitcoin Tx it just combines many Tx and does the on-chain settlement at a later point thus reducing the number of on-chain Tx increases speed and reduces fees. But if we reduce Tx on the chain we dont solve scalability we just bump into the limits a little later. LN on a global scale would still need orders or magnitude more on-chain Tx then possible.
And if LN would actually reduce on chain Tx to a level where we would no longer need to worry about on-chain limits then we rendered bitcoin useless because we literally reduced the need for Tx to basically zero. Whos gonna pay for mining if block rewards vanish and LN makes on-chain Tx vanish as well?
Bitcoins "goal" is that on-chain Tx should always be near the max so the fee per Tx is the lowest possible and reward are the highest While LNs "goal" would be to reduce the on-chain Tx to near zero because every on-chain Tx is extremely expensive.
It probably meets somewhere in the middle. which means its still gets worse and worse the more Tx are made even if they are made over LN. Thats the definition of "not scaling well".
LN and bitcoin are supposed to by a symbiosis but LN is the parasite that works best when it almost kills is own host.
You can see it though the actions of large miners. They are not supporting LN. They could pour millions in the development and advertisement of LN but they dont want it, it reduces their profit.
Its just very very deeply flawed overly complex system that only exist because some people would not accept that the layer 1 has deep flaws. Is rather obvious that building on top is not the right way forward. An since changing layer 1 is not possible in any meaningful way the only way forward is to abandon it. Which wont happen as long as people make money with it.
>what exactly would stop it from working?
The absolute end state is that hashrate drops or stops increasing due to the fact that it isn't profitable anymore which leads to double spend and essentially destroys any trust in the system and renders it useless.
No one know at which point hashing will no longer be profitable for a long enough time to cause this cascading effect. But once it started the price crashes > pushes more miners out of businesses > further reducing hash rate > panic > price drop more > repeat
All while mining hardware becomes cheap because demand goes to zero and supply increases, which makes a double spending attack cheaper.
Then once a double spend has been observed its game over. There inst even a theoretical plan how to move on at that point. In simple words it would move the requirement for block conformations to infinite so there is no point in doing any Tx anymore. Everyone just has to wait which further reduces any rewards for miners.
“ LN fundamentally changes nothing. Its still uses bitcoin Tx it just combines many Tx and does the on-chain settlement at a later point thus reducing the number of on-chain Tx increases speed and reduces fees.”
Ever other system could (and does) use this as well to boost throughput by reducing speed. Or like LN does by looking up funds in advance to increase speed again. Its always gonna be way less efficient than having order of magnitude faster layer 1. and only offload micro Tx to the second layer.
Also increases cost because you add additional parties in the system who wants to get paid for providing the service and liquidity. It simply can not provide a better service in the end.
The difficulty adjusts yes, but the total hashrate has to increase forever. It can decrease for a while but long term it has to increase or the risk for double spend increases too.
The difficultly adjusting does not prevent the network form attacks at all.
If 80% of miners go out of business someone can buy the hardware from them wait for the 80% difficulty adjustment and then start the attack. He could mine blocks faster than anyone else so even if someone mines a block his chain will eventually be longer. There is no know way to recover from something like that.
What if it "was"?
The "hate" people express against bitcoin especially here on HN is often towards the implementation. People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness.
Objectively PoW does not scale. Objectively we have DLTs (blockchains) with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) instead of PoW/PoS that can do everything Bitcoin can and more without the most severe downsides that come with PoW/PoS. The future will probably bring even better tech and if we learned something from the past then its that better solution always take over the old worse solutions. Bitcoin ultimately has to fail because its not a system that could be upgraded. Its most fundamental core properties are intentionally not changeable.