Bitcoin Forum

So what's the other "Better Sustainable Currency" aside from bitcoin?

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-moment-better-sustainable-currencies/ (http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-moment-better-sustainable-currencies/)

Well, a lot of people are in to Proof of Stake currencies which use very little energy compared to Bitcoin. Which obviously "wastes"(I use that loosely since it's a loaded term) a ridiculous amount of energy.

This is a hit piece to advocate buying precious metals instead. Of the hit pieces I have read, this may be one of the most poorly written. Really bad.

Let's take a few of the assumptions apart shall we.


Currency, especially the USD, it far and away the dominant way of laundering money. I could post links to articles about major banks being fined for money laundering, but it's not even worth it.


Silk Road is a "beloved marketplace" for online narcotics. Just pitiful, really.


Oohhh...How soon can I place my assets into a currency designed by garbage men?


Even better, an inflationary currency designed by a bank that's only good in my neighborhood. I'm gonna convert my 401k into that!

I'm so sick of goldbugs writing this spam. It makes you look bad, it really does.

Proof of State coin is not a decentralized currency.

This sentence is wrong in so many ways.

"People don't kick dead dogs." These articles are a sign that these people are losing marketshare to bit coin. If it wasn't a threat they would simply ignore it.

It's insufficiently specific, but existing examples which require developer controlled block signing or closed source software don't really pass a sanity check as decentralized tools— though they're often marketed as such.

You may find this enlightening: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

Agreed. But there are also examples which don't require dev controlled block signing, and which are open source.

Can you try to give a real world example of how to perform 'costless simulation' in practice against a PoS currency? It sounds easy in theory, but I've never seen someone perform it in practice.

Gold and silver are great for protecting your wealth but bitcoin is the best currency so far. People say we need to back digital currencies with precious metals but this is false. The reason currencies were backed by gold and silver were to make sure they held their value and were not inflated like crazy. Bitcoin already does this by having a fixed rate of supply. I can also buy gold and silver with it whenever I want.

im not even gonna argue about POS flaws

but those other currencies mentioned in the article are centralised small 'town currencies' only useful in a town meaning population base is small. not decentralised, meaning if the company goes bankrupt or the town hall/ town government changes their policies,, bye bye towncoin.

no matter who uses bitcoin, no matter how many want it. no matter how many companies come and go, the bitcoin protocol WILL continue over 100 years from now.. end of

I never used it but Silk Road is/was "loved" by many people.
It is an amazing example of people using technology to allow the free market to operate.
Not "pitiful", but truly incredible...

I wasn't castigating silk road, which I never had need to use, but how the author throws this tired trope at bitcoin as a whole.

Even though bitcoin is succeeding, it can't/shouldn't succeed because blah blah blah

lol
Another author who didn't understand Bitcoin, and that in 2014

Silk Road got BUSTED. How much usd currency in hand is used to buy drugs ?? Maybe if the guys running Silk Road dealt their drugs in usd cash in hand then maybe they wouldnt have gotten busted. What drug dealer accepts debit card for drug sales ?? A dumbass who is going to get busted is who.

I believe Come-From-Beyond one of the NXT devs devised a solution to the main issue of 'nothing at stake' after a discussion with Vitalik Buterin who wrote an article outlining some problems with PoS.

Once PoS works out all the current issues it's going to be hard to argue against it I think. A lot has been happening this year so far.

I guess a lot of people are thinking that a robust PoS system is not possible at this point, but with the amount of work being done I wouldn't be surprised to see solutions developed by early next year.

"Nothing at stake" is in any case a chimera. It's a hypothetical beast that's never been seen in the real world. The idea makes some sense for currencies with a high block reward, but for a PoS currency that doesn't pay interest, like Nxt, the potential gains from forging on multiple forks are tiny, and not worth the loss of security. Remember that in PoS the forgers with the most to gain from shenanigans are also the ones with the biggest stake to lose if the currency does get broken. Upshot is that no-one forges Nxt on multiple forks today, and they likely never will.

Seems like similar logic to what most people agree is an acceptable amount of risk with Bitcoin(>%50 attacks).

I just do not see the nothing at stake as an issue, its just like merged mining.....

Up to a point. Nothing at Stake is a two stage thing. In the first stage, selfish forgers forge on every chain they see, to avoid losing fees from picking the wrong chain. In the second stage, someone mounts an attack; one which would have failed if forgers only forged on one chain, but succeeds because of the selfish multi-chain forging. Currently we aren't yet at stage one. Stage two, an actual attack, is therefore currently not possible.

With Bitcoin 51% attacks, there are also two stages. The first stage is to acquire 51% of the hashing power. The second stage is to use that power to attack. The difference is that Bitcoin has actually reached the first stage: there have been entities that could have attacked if they wanted to.

You're right in that the reason GHash.io didn't attack is that doing so would have destroyed their own business, and that's also the reason Nxt forgers don't forge on multiple chains.

In an scenareo where a super powerful individual or group wants to destroy a certain currency, POS isn't bulletproof and doesn't solve much. Big stakeholders can be bribed for a lot of money, so an evil individual would be able to buy the big stakeholders and thus being in a position to produce a massive sellout for cheap prices ruining the economy. With POS, they can buy an endless array of hashing power and conquer the network.
This is unfeasible but not technically impossible.

So would you say that in general a Nothing at Stake attack would be significantly less likely than a >50% attack on a PoW network?

Has anyone ever seen any evidence of forgers forging on multiple chains on any network?

If Silk Road 2.0 say it allowed BTC and say Monero... would you buy dodgy stuff with BTC or with Monero? Is BTC anonymous enough for such ends?

Does PoS stand for Piece of Shit?  :D

Close, it's actually Pile of Shit.

http://i646.photobucket.com/albums/uu187/deadeyedick2112/1353985442499_zps3eba0f22.png

Jeff agrees.

Proof of Steak imho gives an un-fair advantage to those with higher financial status, just like fiat systems do.

Old money has all the power.

I personally like Quark, just started using it - so there is confirmation bias on my part, but to me it looks like a good currency that will do well long term.

Time will tell I suppose.

One of the benefits of Quark is I believe their developers really "get it" and understand what this is suppose to be about. Or least they "get" what I think this is suppose to be about.

What's your opinion that you can now mine QRK with GPU? What is the cost/benefit? Doesn't this mean that Quark is being taken seriously and popular or some wouldn't of got it working with GPU? Won't this be a game changer with the rich buying up GPU's and pushing the average Joe out?

Proof of State...lmao.  Was this intentional?

POS is save energy and has no intrinsic value. BTC is mined through expensive mining rigs and consuming a lot of electricity. Its price is over $620 and stable. There are intrinsic value to support its high price.

At the moment, for Nxt, yes. Because we don't have Nxt forgers forging on multiple chains, but we do have mining pools hovering close to 51%.

Not to my knowledge, no.

How would an attack destroy an NXT business if they are anonymous? How would you even know they are attacking?

What a stupid, misinformed and meaningless post.

I think compared to the USD,
BTC isn't THAT reliable.
Of course, you can't really FRAUD BTC. (Not that I know of anyways)

USD is popular for laundering money.
I'm not sure what to say about this.

BTC is still more reliable than the other 'sustainable currencies'

There is no possible way for bitcoin to fail because I am heavily invested into it.  :D

"nor is bitcoin that unique...."


It was designed to be that way and rightfully so, look at the bitcoin foundation and the centralization of mining.


"alternative options...."

what kind of no name off the cuff crapola is this article even suggesting? Who has even heard of these "alternatives"?


the "dark side" is all propaganda. Not dark enough if you ask me. Can we even get an audit of our national currency and no who and where it is going with names. Nope...



Additionally, with regard to commodity money and intrinsic value.

I think perhaps money needs to be classified as money. The innovation that is money.

Start coming up with what makes people value the innovation money...because there are a billion things that could "serve" as money that is also a commodity. The crux with commodity money is that it needs a centralized holder.


What makes money valuable:

easily divisible
easily used electronically
secure and safe
privacy
decentralized
good store of value
not easily replicated



Commodity money could have some of these properties, but would require a centralized holder or insurer. Who keeps track of the centralized holder? Well, history proves time and again that apparently no one.


I think it's hilarious that this currency (bitcoin) is worth as much as it is yet no one was forced to use it. Yet the dollar continually loses values year in and year out and it's backed by big aircraft carriers, oil deals that keep it's velocity high, and a public that's forced by a gun to use it. Yet they can't make it gain value. It's almost like central bankers are the dumbest people alive or that's how they want it to be. I'll go with option two. Because they are little sociopathic human parasites.

I wait for the day when a common working Joe gets up and spends his free time elaborating on how good the dollar is for the world. These people make me sick. Get me a barf bag or Jamie Dimon's lap.

"Bitcoin suffers two other major downsides, neither of them headline-grabbers but important nonetheless. First, the idea of an alternative currency isn't that new. Recent decades have seen waves of other examples, says Leander Bindewald, a currency expert at the New Economics Foundation, a London-based think tank. Think Local Exchange Trading Systems in the 1980s, Time Banking in the 90s, and "transition currencies" such as the Brixton Pound or online community exchange systems more recently."

pfff, well it's the first de-central, working one. So.... there's that.

"Nor is Bitcoin actually that unique. Dogecoin, Litecoin, Darkcoin, Namecoin, Peercoin and a myriad of other cryptocurrencies like them are all based on a similar premise and adopt similar technologies. It's just the narrative around Bitcoin – its mysterious founder, its claims to disruption, its decision to set the total issuance of Bitcoins at a fixed amount, and so on – that cause it to stand out, Bindewald claims."

Oh put all your money in Doge, go ahead. It's just as secure and innovative. /s

How would an attack destroy an NXT business if they are anonymous? How would you even know they are attacking?
[/quote]Any attack that reduces the value of NXT reduces the value of the attacker's NXT holdings. If you own 51% of NXT, you are primarily attacking yourself. Even if you only own 1%, you are still devaluing your own holdings.

Aside from that, I don't really understand your question. What does anonymity have to do with it? Is an attack that no-one is aware of even an attack? Did something get garbled when you applied GHash.io's mining business to Nxt forging?

Agreed completely.

A 51% attack is against a specific pseudonymous target. The only sane reason to waste a lot of money attacking a target is to reverse its transactions. That's one reason why nobody in Bitcoin bothers to do a 51% attack, because it costs money even though there are plenty of potential targets that get mentioned frequently, i.e. Satoshi Nakamoto, Mark karpeles, the FBI's SR stash, etc. They are known addresses in the blockchain. If that happened, it would not kill Bitcoin, but would make people realize how powerful mining pools are and that they should be avoided. Once they had the power to do that, they could target anyone, so it must not happen again. This is similar to nuclear war. It happened once and hasn't happened since.

In NXT, there is little cost if everyone wanted to attack a specific person, it would be quite easy. Mob rules. There would be no mining pools to blame. Nobody would know who is innocent and who is guilty because it only takes 51%. This is why anonymity is crucial. Nobody can be targeted if they can't be traced. The same thing goes for attackers, they are also anonymous. If an attack happens, good luck, they are behind 7 proxies. If a target was found out, and a lynch mob of at least 51% was convinced to attack the target, how would anyone know who to blame? If it was a business that managed to aggregate 51%, how would you even know it was an attack and not a normal orphaning since there are no IPs to compare blocks like GHash.io. There is no electricity cost to bring a bunch of miners in, just get a bunch of coin and attack your enemy. Then sell the coin anonymously. Your enemy is defeated and it cost very little compared to the same attack in Bitcoin.

Proof of Stake has one little problem. Stake does not equal exposure once a derivatives market develops. So go long the coin and get the "stake", then go short the derivatives for an equal amount to create zero exposure, while keeping the "stake".

I think the entire debate misses the point:  consensus is based upon users not code.   Code helps people reach a consensus faster, but in reality users would reject a fork that came out of nowhere based upon stake manipulation.

With Delegated Proof of Stake, as used by BitShares X, if the broad user base can mostly agree on 101 delegates then an attacker would have to buy up 51% to gain the right to produce a single block... but they wouldn't be able to change history and of course everyone would know there was a new sharif in town and could choose to hard-fork the attacker out (all balances voting for the attacker as delegate) without anyone suffering any losses.

Bottom line, these networks are social in nature and not based upon technology.  Technology just helps.

Also DPOS allows anyone to earn block rewards regardless of their stake assuming they can convince the shareholders that they provide a valuable service.

With DPOS you cannot even have a delegate producing blocks on two chains at once without it resulting in a provable automatic firing.

BitShares X has built in derivatives (to be enabled in a month) so it should put centralized derivative markets out of business.  This in turn means that an attacker that attempts to leverage against BTSX on chain through buying BitUSD cannot profit from bringing down the network because BitUSD is backed by BTSX.   Now you have a system that is even resistant to derivatives.

lmao.  "proof of state"...that's rich!

Proof of stake is shit, why would I use a currency where an elite can issue and reverse transactions as they please and only they get issued new currency, kind of reminds you of the existing monetary system doesn't it? The whole argument that if the elite would become tyrannical in a PoS system they would hurt themselves the most by devaluing their own assets is incredibly stupid, doesn't nearly every major monetary system create inflation in excess of the "ideal" or "projected" rate and the sheeple still eat it up? The sheeple can put up with a lot of abuse like razor thin safety margins, defaults, uneven distribution and even gambling away their life savings by letting criminal tyrants control them financially as long as you have a couple of clown experts in suits saying that it's all for the best.

"sustainable"  ::)

So the ones they listed are a bunch of no name altcoins
Well if I get owned by them it's a fair point that I would not see those three coming.
That said one is the leader and one needs to be proven and that is going to be Bitcoin.

Don't assume that POS means that an elite can issue and reverse transactions or get issued new currency.   Sure that may be the case with Peercoin, but it isn't the case with Nxt or BitShares.        

In fact, I would argue that POW means an elite can issue and reverse transactions because they can control the POW with their access to the latest manufacturing and economies of scale.   Regular users get debased with all POW systems.   So sheeple will tolerate POW based upon the bogus cost-theory-of-value economics.  

You see it isn't technology that rules, but the people using the technology the define what is "valid" or "legitimate".   So POS and POW are protected against inflation and arbitrary rule by the same social process.  POW just consumes 100's of millions in resources every year that make us all poorer while creating barriers to entry that protect the bitcoin elite.

So what are the barriers? Intellectual barriers? Perhaps you'd be better off siding with the commie bastards that claim that bitcoin is too complex for the average joe thus distribution is not fair.

How can we know for certain that someone will not buy out Bitshares or Nxt to gain 51% or that the distribution was fair to begin with, you do get issued more currency the more you have after all. The current banking system is wasting such significant resources that if they all switched to Bitcoin it would cost less than 1% of the resources that the banking system is wasting currently, it's nothing more than propaganda aiming to harm BTC that the whole system "wastes" anything.

All that energy is allocated towards securing a monetary system in a decentralized manner and it does so in an extremely secure way requiring a fraction of the energy that centralized monetary systems use and I would rather have it take up 100,000 times as much energy as PoS and have it secure rather than based on words of tyrants.

Barriers to entry for proof of work?  Can you design and manufacture ASICs using the latest manufacturing techniques?  Can you get economies of scale necessary to do the work profitably?   Proof of work is all about who ever is willing to do the most work for least gain and no one is more effective at that than government.

If someone bought up 51% of the BitShares then you thank them for their money and start a new chain without them.  Without the barriers to entry represented by Proof of Work you can easily start a new chain.  With proof of work however, there is nothing you can do to start a new chain.   

It doesn't matter what POW algorithm you use, economies of scale will always favor government.

There are many kinds of 51% attacks, but I gather that is the kind you want to talk about.

As an aside, I think the most likely kind of Bitcoin 51% attack is one that rejects transactions with low fees. Since that would benefit miners in the long run, they might see no need to avoid mining pools. I'll be mildly surprised if this doesn't become a real concern in 2 or 6 years, when the block-reward halves.

As far as I can tell, what you have in mind is like 50% of Americans deciding to boycott Walmart. It's not likely. I'm not sure where you get "only 51%" from. 51% is a lot.

You seem to be saying anonymity is a two-edged sword.

In Nxt, the blocks are signed by the accounts that forged them, so we'd know which accounts to blame. There's not much anonymity in Nxt. If a single entity gains 51% of NXT, then its true Nxt has a huge problem. I think an attack like you describe would destroy all confidence in the currency, so the entity would lose the value of their coins. It'd be very expensive for them.

Trying to buy 51% of NXT will be very expensive and will push the price up. Dumping 51% of NXT will crash the price, so they won't be sold at the price they were bought for. The attacker will lose a lot of money. The price crash would be a problem, even without the attack.

I think you are underestimating how difficult it is to get 51% of NXT. It's not like in Bitcoin, where entities have got that much hashpower almost by accident. In Bitcoin, you can get it almost unilaterally, by buying from ASIC manufacturers who have no stake in the currency. To get 51% of NXT, you have to persuade people who own NXT to sell to you. Likewise, to sell afterwards you'd have to persuade someone else to buy. Nxt has been running for 8 or 9 months now, and has had the third highest market cap for much of that time, but no-one has done the attack you describe.

Actually I thing energy consumption wont be any deal breaker regarding future world currencies. PoS will never make it big, if they would they would have done it already.

Why do you think the huge energy waste wont be a deal breaker? What will happen when all BTC are mined?


The conclusion of your second sentence doesn't follow from the premise, because your first premise is wrong imo:

P1: If a "Proof of X" currency hasn't already made it big, it never will.
P2: Proof of Stake has not made it big.

C: PoS will never make it big.


P1 was proven wrong in the past, when PoW made it big. Would you have said the same about bitcoin before it was big?

The idea is that by the time Bitcoin is mined out there would be more transactions going from a > b to sustain the amount of miners that would be staying in the game. Difficulty adjusts itself as miners leave making it more profitable

The question is: How high will the transaction rate have to be to incentivise enough miners to keep the network secure?

Or: How low can the difficulty fall for the network to be considered secure?

There is no law that says Bitcoin must be the singular currency. There is no proof that it's even possible for a global singular currency to function. There's also no reason it cannot.

It won't be a problem because the number of minors won't change suddenly. While a drop of 50% in the block reward seems like a lot, it really isn't, because it's the some order of magnitude. It would be a big drop if it happened without warning, but minors plan their purchases will in advance.

A 50% drop in block reward means a 50% drop in mining revenue, assuming everything else stays the same (transactions fees and the BTC exchange rate), which in theory could mean a 50% drop in the number of minors. At that number, the network would still be considered secure, based on the current numbers.

Today, the block reward is half what is was 4 years ago. The BTC exchange rate, however, is much more that twice what it was. I believe that statement will be true for decades to come. Thus, there will always be enough minors.

For all we know BTC could be dead in a few years and another coin could be worth MORE than what bitcoin's price is now, maybe even higher than BTC highest, who knows?

That's quite possible. But I highly doubt BTC will be ever be dead.

Even as cryptocurrency evolves beyond Bitcoin, since Bitcoin was the original and scarce crypto so it will probably end up considered something like gold. Scarce and valuable, not as good as alternatives for use as a daily currency, but a good store of value.

BTCBTCBTCBTCBTC http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/f4/87/22/f48722a513a02c871e508bf5399e49ec.jpg

SEAT BELTS ON - STRAPPED IN!

Nope, for these reasons:

1) All other open source block-chain currencies depend upon the success of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin fails than doubt of long term survivability will be cast upon them as well.

2) The network effect is strong within protocols that have developers and hardware designed around them. The same reason other technologies are scaffold-ed around IPv4 and HTML despite any weaknesses and flaws in them is the same reason Bitcoin will succeed.

3) Bitcoin has many ardent supporters , some would suggest are "religiously" devoted to Bitcoin. Because of this Bitcoin will never go to 0 and always hold value even as a collector item.

Can you stop copying articles word for word from other sites? Post the original you clickbaiter.

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/bitcoin-crypto-currency-sustainable-alternatives


Any way to stop this guy from posting his links to his personal metal site here?

The energy used needn't increase as the network is used more, so the current situation needn't get worse. As the block reward halves, it will become easier to manage the total cost of mining by controlling transaction fees.

(I think the opposite will happen. The energy cost of Bitcoin will likely reduce over time, for the reason given below.)

The hope is that the total transaction fees per block will rise to compensate. Partly by the number of transactions increasing, but if necessary the fee per transaction can be increased. In the short term, the real-world value of Bitcoin may increase, too. If Bitcoin doubles in value every 4 years, that will nicely counter-act the block reward halving every 4 years, even if transaction fees and number of transactions stays the same. (I say this is a short-term effect because I don't believe any economy can sustain that growth indefinitely.)

Alternatively, the number of miners will reduce until it balances.

Another way of putting it is that no-one really knows. It may end up in a downward spiral of higher fees, hence fewer transactions, hence lower mining income, hence fewer miners, hence network less secure, hence less trust in the currency, hence less demand for Bitcoins, hence lower real-world value. One reason I think Nxt is important is that I think Bitcoin may (slowly) die in this way. Not "will", but it's a high enough risk to be worth hedging against.

It won't be a problem for the miners because they can drop out in good time. However, that doesn't answer the question. As the miners stop investing, the network becomes less secure.

The security of the network against an outside attack is roughly what it would cost to mount such an attack, which is roughly what it would cost to acquire 51% of the hashing power, which for reasons of economics is directly proportional to the real-world value that miners get paid for mining one block. So if the block reward halves, and Bitcoin value, transaction volume and fee-per-transaction stay the same, then the security of the network halves. So it's really a question of how low can it get before it matters.

That's a matter of opinion, and your threat model. Some say the network is already vulnerable. Some say Bitcoin it is actually over-secured now.

Personally I am in the former group. An attack might cost someone like a bank $100m. HSBC got fined $1.9bn for money laundering. UBS got fined $1.5bn for rigging Libor. If those guys felt seriously threatened by Bitcoin, $100m is easily affordable to them. Since a lot of ASICs are made in China, the Chinese government could probably do it with a phone call. A terrorist might manage it by kidnapping the ASIC manufacturer's daughter. Not to mention we've already seen hash pools hovering around 51%, that we're basically just trusting not to mount an attack. Many people in the Bitcoin community are complacent, in my view.