Bitcoin Forum

Nearly everybody agrees that a Bitcoin-style PoW is I) a huge waste of ressources & esp. energy and leads II) to dangerous centralization of mining.

But, if I scan the forum, I fell like still most pundits prefer PoW.



Sub-questions:
Why not use PoS or PoI?
Are there othere preferable consensus algorithms? What about PoB? (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn))
Can PoW be improved?

I am happy with detailed answers, answers in bullet points or just links or references elsewhere.

Thank you!

PoW/PoS is the best combination imo. My opinion about PoS is that it was created mainly, because such coin can be P&D with less efforts. It's like: "Keep your coins in the wallet while we are making money out of it.". It is also affecting the price and I think that short PoW phase is not the best choice, because people nowadays are impatient and they will follow dumps if the price significantly decline. PoW is huge waste of resources indeed, but it also contributes to the price as well, because people are thinking about what were their expenses for mining X amount of coins before selling them.

I believe that in 1-2 years situation with coins like LTC and some of the others scrypt (+PoS) will be changed, because a lot more ASICs will be involved in the mining process though this are just my toughts.

my concern I expressed on other threads is that pow/alts as far as miners are concerned there are NONE anymore in the works the KNC Titan (in which I have 2) is the last of the big units ..the rest were canceled and no new units data hall ..home miner or in between pow/alt coin machines I know of are in the works

so that confuses the heck out of me....

as to why not pos...well the up front POW to the POS coin...kinda ticks people off that miss such a launch...and straight hey we will give you $$$ for your 'specific' POS coin and hope it works is less secure then POW coin mining at least used to be..in that you put $$ in equip..you don't like the POW coin you point your $$$ in said equipment to another coin...ie you can hedge your bets ..or at least that is how it used to be imho....remember I know zip ...just tossing it out there watching this thread carefully also trying to be 'enlightened' on this

Without beeing directly adressed myself I would nonetheless venture into giving an answer: Data trails left.

If you have your wallet staking 24/7 you will leave behind a huuge backlog of your adresses, funds, IP used to stay connected to the network. Maybe someone more technically inclined can explain to us why a network based on POW, ruled by two or three mining pool cartell chiefs and probably even five to ten top notch miners (who are dependant upon one ASIC manufactorer) is a better place for Joe Sixpack to hide when buying weed online.

I know what you are talking about. I didn't wait for KNC and others like MAT (which bankrupted) and I bought 7 x 60MH A2 Terminator's back in May 2014. They were pretty expensive (like 6,600 euro/miner), but ROI was different. I didn't know what to expect with KNC (delays and such). Otherwise I know about canceled productions not only by KNC, but by several other chinese manufacturers as well. Personally I am looking to buy  about 10 GH scrypt power in the next 2-3 months, but currently there is nothing (as far as I know) interesting on the market.  

I was the same way all of 2013, but converted in early 2014 when I took a deeper, more technical look into PoS

I had two fairly significant mining farms but they are either sold or shut off now

Share the insights you learned, please.

And PoI is..?

Think they mean Proof of Interest.

Here is an example from Magi CPU mining | PoS-II | PoM | Unique BLK reward | [MagiPay] (XMG)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=735170.msg10972627#msg10972627

I think there is nothing wrong with PoW or PoS! But Bitcoin is the first and leading cryptocurrency, which adopt PoW. So ppl bias in favor of PoW. And another reason they are holding BTC or heavily invest in BTC mining!

It's easier to attack Pow than PoS. If anyone offered the bounty I did to attack a Pow coin it would have been done instantly

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=927601.0

Until anyone proves to me it's insecure, I consider it 'safe' for now. A high network stake weight is more secure than a high hash rate network because of coinage

Since they are basically the same in terms of security, I chose to stop paying thousands in electric bills and moved to the more energy efficient system. I'm a firm believer in cutting resource usage. Pow is accounting for a lot of dirty, out-dated energy generation being wasted

With miner prices and competition the way it is, it's also very limiting for new users to get involved in a significant role. PoS makes entry easier and all experienced traders know that the entry point is much more important than the exit

I can go into more detail if you want but this should give you the basic idea

if you find anything let me know...I'm a legal miner in the usa...need a 'toy' miner of some sort.....to keep the revenue stream (tekcoin irs..sure i made 100 usd this month here is my taxable income of 25 bucks...my line for 2017) I'm over the hump on this equip depreciation wise..but may as well run it out for the last 2 years or so as applied towards regular taxes owed..this year i'm also golden..no issues...just enough equip vs what i likely will make vs price......heh lucky again it looks like even if the price pops last 1/2 of the year

by the by because of equip purchases in 2013 (jupiter at end of year Oct) and even at high coin then and also titans (again Nov not till end of year) because bitcoin and ltc tanked
i did ok on this all...got right now 70.1% of all the equip deductions i'm entitled to already i could with 2 yrs to go after this year...so....and again due to what  i mined when i mined in the year (accumulate) vs the price.....well my cpa says I'm a farmer and the crops sucked....so looks like this year also i won' t pay any tax on what i mined and still keep the 25% off equip train going......not bad ..just lucky but the balance has worked so far

would rather have seen 1000 usd btc and 20 buck ltc and just happily paid my taxes and that would have been fine but got lucky i had to file as a biz due to bank error
and to protect self (long story fixed in a day SEC involved...but really really really good i had the legal biz as virtual miner as of IRS guidelines of 2013)

no next year i HOPE btc ltc goes up (holding) so no miners for home use anymore so....not really gonna be an issue on IRS and mining anymore

but a baby miner or two might be nice to show I'm a trying heh :) hey IRS home miner .this is what i can get now .this is what i can mine .notice my home biz aspect and 100 amp service?

so yeah any scrypt miners china or otherwise that actually exist let us know here.....but it seems doubtful ...even if they started such production data hall or otherwise imho it would
be 7 months to get them out the door and into the world....with these titans (see link below) I will look like a genius and will delete all doubtful posts on bitcointalk to back up my boasts at that time :)

my setup below 2 knc titan scrypt miners going to doorstop status the knc Jupiter 550gh on the bottom shelf is 'retired' to holding the mining table to earth....ie paperweight

http://lostgonzo.imgur.com/

Others - worth discussing?:

Delegated Proof of Stake
http://bitshares.org/intro-to-delegated-proof-of-stake/
http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/DPOS
http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/TITAN

Proof of Activity by coblee
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102355.0

Proof-of-Play is based on the human spending time in front of the computer.

CKG (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=966001.msg10560783#msg10560783)has an about $400k market cap, and it would be about #50 in coinmarketcap if it was listed (it has only been listed ingame, for 5 months now).

The experts understand that PoW is exactly what the name says: a proof that a certain amount of work has been done. Just like Gold the vast amount is dug up for no other reason as to be buried again in some vault. If you dig a ditch you can proof your work too and want to get paid.

PoS is nothing new people have been proofing there stake on the stock market for hundreds of years. The issue with PoS coins is that there will be forever new once popping up at no significant disadvantage to existing PoS coins on the market. It will be endlessly diluted. With PoW this is not the case as new once can not compete with existing PoW coins due to inflation and other things.

This issues will sort itself out with time. The more time passes the more understand this, not only the experts.

Fast forward and you will  see: PoW more proven work has been done and with PoS, more coins on the market.
With PoW coins you have to look what the individual coins potential is to do "work", some are handicapped.

Proof of Importance

''POI is short for "Proof-of-Importance". It is a consensus algorithm at the core of the NEM software. The higher your importance, the higher your chance to be allowed to calculate a block (and harvest the fees inside that block). POI adjusts your importance depending on how many transactions you make, with whom you make them and a number of other factors. If you don't do any transactions POI will set your importance based on your balance only (it is then similar to proof-of-stake).''

-http://nem.io/faq.html (http://nem.io/faq.html)

Non-PoW consensus schemes are not inherently less "wasteful" than PoW at all.

For example, consider someone staking to get the seigniorage from a block on PoS. That person wins the block reward with essentially zero or trivial cost (compared to PoW).

Now that person takes those profits to demand goods and services bounded by the value of that block reward.

Are we supposed to somehow believe that the marginally-increased economic power of the PoS staker in question has zero environmental footprint and will consume no additional energy and/or resources?

The PoW miner on the other hand, in a competitive mining environment, should converge on making a standard economic rate of return in profit, having consumed energy and capital to achieve the seigniorage. Those fixed and variable costs diminish the PoW miner's ability to consume additional resources as a result of achieving the block reward.

We could certainly drill down deeper into analyzing and modeling the particulars of how these profit incentives work out vis-a-vis increased marginal consumption, but it's pretty apparent that there really isn't any significant difference in kind between these two scenarios from a ecological / resource-consumption point of view. And if you want to expand this view to fiat currencies, the reality is far bleaker than anything a PoW system could ever dream of with respect to driving increased marginal consumption of resources.

I'm a miner at heart, but having said that I am currently using Peercoin [PPC] as an experiment to see what is my best coarse of action moving forward.

Of coarse my circumstances will vary from others, but in my case I think both POW and POS with this particular coin can be beneficial to me in  financial gains.

It is fairly hard to mine with its current difficulty but the block reward payouts equate to around $27 to make that in POS you would need to hold around 9000 [PPC] that figure is just a guess based on watching the rewards of POS on their block exchange, so that would mean investing just under $3000 to get the same value of a minted block via POW of coarse these amounts could vary A LOT depending on luck and difficulty changes.

So it seems to me that rather than invest $3000 in PPC and hold for POS which starts after a 30 day period and can run up to 90 days, I may as well invest some of my $3000 in more mining hardware either by way of purchase or rent, and go fishing for the 82+[PPC] block rewards via POW mining.

To complement me in my undertaking here I have created a mining pool, and a dice site for [PPC] to see what is right and what is wrong.

I shall update when I have a definitive answer, my end game through out this experiment is to eventually have both running I will re-invest some of my mined POW rewards back into hardware, and the rest leave in my wallet minting under POS.

That's the plan but as we know in the world of crypto the plans never work out as they should.

Market does not accept meaningfull work that actually does some worthy results, that was exactly the goal of utilising BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is an open source middleware system for volunteer and grid computing) in GRC Gridcoin. Daily trade volume like thirty bucks, rejected.

success depends on many more factors than just how the reward is calculated. i still think that a pow system which calculates something useful can succeed.

but:
 - primecoin seems useless (primenumbers? why)
 - boinc / seti@home: i would not base a currency on another project as i think it would just mean that the success of the currency depends on the other project.

POS/POI: i mainly dont like it because i dont believe in its security model. with pow i understand that work has to be done. this cant be faked. if pos proofes itself (bigger marketcap for a longer timeframe) i change my mind. i dont understand mony well, so i cant say much about the pos implications for its value. though i have read one good post about it in this thread.

dpos: i think it may work from a security point of view. but i dont want centralzation and atm DPOS is nothing more that marketing folks which get paid by the blockchain. so i dislike it.

Mintcoin was full pow then a hybrid and now full pos.  Seems to be doing great.

I'm interested in this, but I don't see how BOINC has the properties needed to secure a cryptocurrency.  I think a lot of people saw possible problems with it and stayed away.  How did Gridcoin manage the problems involved? 

First, a lot of BOINC problems are linear (fastest computer wins ALL the time, rather than in proportion to speed).

Second, it doesn't usually happen, as I understand it, that everybody is working on the SAME problem - some get easier and some get harder. 

Third, it makes their servers a bottleneck and a vulnerability - people have to contact these servers to get a new problem every round, the block chain dies if the servers ever go down, and somebody could arrange to get "easy" problems if the operators collude or can be bribed. 

I'm not saying there's no way for it to work; I just don't know how to engineer around these issues.

what ever it is you take it must be damn good shit.
mintcoin 24h volume a whopping $ 207 of worldwide trade (not only the local corner store)
=dead!

Just replied to a similar question in another thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.msg10981889#msg10981889

Basically because not that many people stake their coins, they leave them on an exchange or the leave them offline. So, if a major exchange gets hacked and 5 or 10% of the available coin supply gets stolen, this can be more than enough coins to do a 51% attack, since not everyone/most people don't leave their wallets staking all the time. This vulnerability (related to centralized exchanges) just doesn't exist for PoW coins. The fairly recent hacks and thefts of Mintpal/Vericoin and Bter/NXT are real world examples of this.

Pure POS only for the coin. POW mining comes on top for reward distribution. They are inside the transition process, was pure SCRYTP mining before, POW to secure the blockchain.

Many altcoin scams have burned the POW-to-POS transition by doing a week of mining, a week of pumping, some more days of dumping and then folding down all operations. That has caused some serious trust deficits in the markets.

At least if Bitcoin goes POS one day, nobody can say that mining periode was to short.

See ur other post. Once we have determined reality, we can talk more  :D

NXT example is wrong.  At most they only had 5% of the total supply on BTER and the hacker returned most of them.

It's at lot easier to get 51% of hash power than it is to buy / steal 51% of a PoS coin.   Most people in cryptos are holding to the moon, so for you to get 51% of a coin you would have to create thousands of millionaires (spend $billions of dollars).   Whereas some mining pools, before they split up, had essentially came close to attaining 51% - if you can get 51% with computers in basements, all you probably need is a $50 million compound to get 51% of Bitcoin's hash.   ;D  :D

It seems what they call is not a way to secure the network, it's just some crazy experiment with loans or something like that.

I think in this topic this should be intended as proof-of-importance, which is used at NEM.


Interesting, what I know about proof-of-activity is more like this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zDlGZn7sICIA8bUPhe6jPPzGOxA4YgTgi6J4XilFpgs/edit

What coblee described it sounds to me like the proof-of-transaction (Fluttercoin) and proof-of-importance (NEM) schemes. I dislike these two.

Will respons short on this. The Magi Proof of Interest is not an experiment with loans or for securing the network.
Its a nice campaign for giving back some extra coins to the great community.
Made possible by generous donation from somebody who wants to remain anonymous.
This anonymous person appreciates the process of the young digital currency (Magi)
Magi team works very hard and has respect for all other currencies.

The Proof of Mining campaign, which will be launched shortly has more to do with securing the network.
I dont want to go off topic here but had to respond briefly to clarify.
Thanks for reading.
(Nice topic Dewdeded)

What that payment is for, in the long run, is securing the network.  

The miners contribute directly to security in a PoW network, but the network still isn't secured if there aren't a meaningfully large number of full nodes available.  

And so far, both PoW and PoS schemes have failed to broadly reward people for keeping a full node up.  Somebody who does that, deserves a full share of that payment regardless of their hashing power or capital invested.  

So, if you want a protocol to survive in the long run, I think it's vital to find a way to provide an incentive for people to keep nodes up - reliably, not just if they win some hugely biased lottery (that they have no chance at without million-dollar investments) and get a chance to form a block.  

I think a coinbase transaction every block with fifty outputs - one fairly-big one of maybe half the award for the miner, and forty-nine others distributed semi-randomly to full nodes that happen to be up at that very minute - would be a good idea regardless of whether you determine block formation via PoW or PoS.

Hmmmm....  Now that I think of it, I have an idea .....  

+1
this is my idea: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=975447.msg10660505#msg10660505

hope it helps ;)