Bitcoin Forum

What are the possibilities? advantages/disadvantages...
anything planned?

Some people think PoS is the answer, as it will provide confirmations with no extra energy consumptions.

I would argue that energy consumption is a feature, not a bug. That it is necessary and that if a blockchain isn't PoW, it isn't a blockchain.
Energy consumption required to solve cryptographic puzzles on Bitcoin blockchain is what ties the technology to the real world.
It is what gives people an identity, it is what stops spamming and gives people an incentive to reach a consensus.

If you don't consume extra energy that serves no other purpose, then you don't have physical incentives to reach a consensus.
You don't spend energy on a vote, which means there might be no real person behind such a vote.

Energy consumption is the only reasonable way to tie physical to virtual, but either way, a certain physical consumption is necessary to insure physical beings are controlling a virtual currency.

Yea, many companies are researching how to use less electricity to check "one hash" and have made great strides over the years.

The fact that Bitcoin uses proof of work ("POW") means that finding blocks will be electric intensive, and over time the value of the electricity consumed by the miners will approach the value of the total block reward of the blocks.

If the POW were to be changed to proof of stake (users who hold Bitcoin find blocks), or to proof of something else, then electric consumption may decline.

Am not technically sound when it comes to crypto/Blockchain stuff. But I guess I can relate it to familiar things, as physics methods could be Universal. We need to ask ourselves this question:
Can something of value be created/done without Energy?

 I think the discussion should be how to get Blockchains use Clean Energy rather than  eliminating the use of Energy itself.

The use of Energy is one of the few things that makes Crypto/Blockchain appear less of a Ponzi scheme.

Only pow is blockchain? I doubt it.
The consensus not energy consumption is the essential.
Sx2 told us miners cannot control everything.

And we need avoid centralized mining.

Anything that people give value is valuable. It has more to do with society then physics.
You can have people value a PoS coin as some of them exist and have a value, but the problem is the voting part.
The point is that if you don't need to do real physical work for your vote then you have no reason not to try to cheat the network.
Consensus must be energy consuming, otherwise you open new vectors of attack for little to no benefit.
I agree on Clean Energy, even cash is created from cutting down trees to make paper. Whole world should use Clean Energy, this isn't just a crypto thing.


They are both essential as you can't have a fair consensus without consuming something to stop the spam.
I wouldn't call it a blockchain, because it has no benefit of it being structured as a blockchain, only costs.
It easy to see how a PoS coin doesn't need a blockchain, they just need to vote on the last chain state of the network, the rest is just taking up space and bandwidth. They have no security drawbacks by not using a blockchain, as the history of a chain state is trivial to produce in a PoS coin if you have control of a single chain state. It is just using a blockchain where it is not necessary. It is like banks bundling their transactions in blocks for no reason and calling it a blockchain.

This is an area that is receiving increasing coverage, isn't it (the environmental issue)? Would be interested in learning more with regard to Bitcoin.

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Recently I read the whitepaper about Ripple's consensus mechanism.
Of course, it has slightly other invariants than Bitcoin. For instance, in Ripple, when less than 80% of the network is honest, no honest transactions can be sent so the network grinds to a halt. On the other hand, if less than 20% of the nodes is honest, malicious transactions could be stored permanently. In Bitcoin, 51% is enough to rule the network and there is not a lot of introspection to decide whether the majority is still honest.
Another 'problem' that Ripple has, is that all users need to have a good 'Unique Node List'. If the UNL is not a proper representation of the network as a whole, then it might be possible to game the system earlier.
On the other hand, because being thrown off of the UNL by many nodes is a very valid response to misbehaving that is very bad for the node that tried to cheat (you are now effectively excluded from the network), this seems to keep all nodes 'in check'.

I saw someone describe this this as 'Ripple allows you to shoot yourself in your foot. But it also allows you to react when someone tries to shoot you in the head' (https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10180/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-ripples-consensus-as-compared-with-bitcoins-proo/10202#10202).


At least for me personally, Ripple, at least for financial transactions, seems to have the better method to go from transaction requests to an ordered transactions list.
Keep in mind though that I have not worked with Ripple directly myself, so I am not yet aware of the warts that it might have. (Usually warts of any language, framework, technology or tool are harder to find, because they are not as widely publicized and talked about).

Proof of Work is definitely an 'arms race' with no end and we need a replacement. I think we can all agree about that. It does not really matter for the security of the network if 100 nodes mine or 10000 nodes mine, but that the latter takes a whole lot more energy.

I believe there is a lot of research focused in this area right now. Besides Ripple, here is a list of other tech I happen to know of that is being worked on, including some notes about their current progress:

- - Proof of Stake: Still not mathematically proven enough to be acceptable. (Do note that there are multiple different variants of Proof of Stake that each work slightly differently)
- - Proof of Elapsed Time: Greatly hyped by HyperLedger, but it is proprietary technology by Intel that only works if you have a certain Intel chip, and places trust in the Intel company. I don't know enough about how this should work to know why it wouldn't be possible to e.g. make a fake hardware chip.
- - Proof of Burn. Not entirely sure how the progress is on this one.
- - The IOTA Tangle. Seems a very promising method to build a DAG rather than a chain. A problem of which I don't know how they want to solve it, is how it is prevented that new info is added as children of 'old' elements, essentially 'inserting something in the past'.
- - The Hashgraph. Currently closed source (the team does claim that it will be published as FOOS at some point though). Also builds a DAG in a different way than the Tangle does. It is easier to see how the network as a whole prevents 'insertions in the past'. What is not yet known, is how/or even if the Hashgraph can work in a public context; it currently requires a static number of nodes (where all nodes know each other at the start) and where a supermajority of nodes is online at all times. There are some vaguely-described extensions to this, but these do not explain how someone could join and leave at any time as people can do with other ledgers.

This list is by no means complete.

~Wiebe-Marten
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More on Hashgraph:
 Based on Hashgraph concensus. The creators claimed it is 50,000 faster than Bitcoin Blockchain and would also allow Smart Phones to act as Nodes.
Article on Hashgraph:
https://breathepublication.com/blockchain-just-became-obsolete-the-future-is-hashgraph-de4948609cbf

 

To be honest I can't call Ripple "cryptocurrency". It is most like securities united with Paypal. There is no block or decentralized nodes. It's the same to existing bank system.

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What do you mean?

Ripple does have 'blocks', but in Ripple parlance they are called 'ledgers':

- - Transactions compete to be part of the next ledger.
- - Once a majority of nodes agrees on a set of transactions, a new ledger is created and propagated through all of the network.
- - The ledger contains a list of transactions, a reference hash to the previous ledger (building a merkle chain) as well as the changed 'state' of the system, similar to how Ethereum's system changes state. This ensures that all nodes can verify locally that the listed transactions indeed result in the given state change, making forks (near?) impossible.

Nodes are definitely decentralized in Ripple:
- - Everyone can run their own node.
- - Nodes can connect to any other node. In fact, users can configure which other nodes they want to connect to exactly.

Also, I am not really sure what "securities united with Paypal" looks like. Could you give some more information on this?

~Wiebe-Marten

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I am curious, do these ledgers have all the balances of every address on them? Or just the new transactions?
It seems to me like it would have the same security if the ledgers just stored balances instead of transactions which isn't the case for PoW chains.
There would be no need for the old ledgers then. You can just have the most recent one. And poof goes the blockchain.
It is just a SWIFT system now where anyone can be a bank, right?

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The security between these two is not the same because when you do not store the transactions that caused a change, you lose the ability to audit what happened.


Ripple stores both the transactions as well as the effects the transactions had on the global state of the network. (See Ripple Tech Talk: Understanding Consensus (Mar 2015) for an in-depth description, this is covered at 22:34 (https://youtu.be/7abKUs9tYZg?t=22m33s)).

~Wiebe-Marten


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Bram Cohen proposed Proof of Storage scheme vs Proof of Work sometime ago..

Everyone can run their own node in Bitcoin. If he has enough money of course.
The second statement it's not good, 'cause in bitcoin you can choose only numbers of inbound and outbound connections, without knowledge WHO connected to you.
Also, as i know Ripple has private transactions which are not recorded to main "blockchain". It's not good.

interesting
Would it be possible to implement Bitcoin with one or a mix of these? any plan in the future ?
I just find it strange all the talks about fees but so little for the elephant in the room

You haven't explained why energy consumption is such a problem for you.

The miners are naturally incentivised to get as many hashes per second for their available watts of electricity as possible, as this means they have a higher chance of solving a block. Don't you think that the miners are aware of the issue also?

because i have a consciousness and many hesitant adopters too

because economically  btc transactions cost way more in electricity than their fees and btc owners pay them all indirectly

sorry I thought all these were obvious

Re: "Consciousness" - It's probably better to leave religious beliefs or politics out of the Development & Technical sub-forum, that would be off-topic.


Re: the costs of producing a block - you've misunderstood the economics.

The fees don't pay for the block reward, the miners are incurring the electricity costs in order to profitably mine the block reward + transaction fees (profiting from transaction fees is in most respects out of the miner's control). The vast majority of the electricity used to solve a block must (at this stage of the block subsidy decrement schedule) be comparable to the market price of the block reward in order for it to be profitable for the miner. The miner cannot continue mining if they pay more to mine the block reward than the block reward can be sold for. The transaction fees are a largely insubstantial part of how a miner evaluates profitable operation, as fees are a small proportion of the block reward's BTC value.

Do you have a different economic model in mind?

There could be several possibilities on how we could solve the energy crisis of miners. I'm guessing you might have taken a hint from China planning to charge premium prices for Bitcoin miners, or to have their power sources cut down. This could be all because of the extreme amount of power being consumed for mining, which could otherwise be used for powering rural households generated by hydroelectricity.

With Proof of Work and current hardware available out there, it's very competitive and only the top performing hardware wins the block mining battle. Hence, it becomes necessary that ASIC chip manufactuters focus on reducing power consumption of these chips while retaining performance if at all we want to reduce power consumption. For instant just one of the T9's and the S9's easily alone draw about 1400 Watts of electricity which is too much. Thus it's all a matter of competition building up for ASIC chip manufacturers for Bitcoin mining, and then we'll see a lot of innovation in this area and soon probably low power consuming miners.

There are other algorithms that most altcoins are planning to switch to or have already been running on, such as Proof of stake which risks centralization and power in the hands of those having the high stake of funds, which would obvious make the rich richer. So I'm honestly not expecting the logical thinkers to be a great fan of this.

you are missing all the points and confuse things
my question was clear and i will remain on the subject

Cheaper and better hashpower will increase block difficulty, you reach an equilibrium between total hashpower, costs, fees etc... that might even not benefits anybody in term of gain and might not decrease total consumption.

Anyway, my question was about possible futur plans or research being  currently done  to implement this PoW 

Hope the energy thing doesn't drive miners into guilt and force them to come up with strange ideas in the name of mining with little or no energy.

I kind of see mining as the engine room of Bitcoin network where difficult problems are solved and new Bitcoins are created. Engine rooms/factories typically require heavy work and consume lots of energy.
Maybe one day someone with lots of time will help calculate the Amount of energy used by Oil Companies, Phone manufacturers, Facebook, Bitcoin Network, in relation to the X amount of profits they make per month. This will help determine the true nature of energy consumption by companies in comparison to the that of Bitcoin Network.

Many of these "hesitant adopters" are being brainwashed by mainstream media. Have they ever considered how much electricity are being used by PayPal or Credit card companies and even Banks, compared to Bitcoin. Here we are not just talking about the electricity to hash or process the transactions.

These companies will quickly respond to media queries and tell them that their mainframes are only using a fraction of the processing power than what BTC is using, but they do not include the hidden "operating" cost. They have several offices and these offices have air-conditioning and lightning and lifts and coffee machines and photo copiers and printers and computers and I can go on and on.  < Compare that to some of these mining farms, where they have one or two buildings with 3 to 5 people running the operation >

If you want to compare, then you have to compare Apples with Apples. ^smile^

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The Bitcoin blockchain currently consumes more energy than the total consumption of the state of Ireland (https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption). The total energy consumption of even a concern-size company, even including energy consumers like airconditioning, heating, lifts, coffee machines and photocopiers, will be FAR below this.

~Wiebe-Marten


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research is being carried out every time and second

keep smiling because you're funny

Remember Bitcoin is the alternative to many companies < PayPal / Banks / Master Card / VISA / Western Union / MoneyGram > so you have to take into account their combined electricity consumption, compared to Bitcoin operations. The idea is to replace them with a improved alternative. <Cheaper & Faster & more secure>

All of these companies have branches in every city and town. <globally>

How much electricity are used to manufacture fiat currencies? < Mining the resources and creating coins & paper money? and how many trees are cut down to manufacture the paper they use in these offices >  ::)

How much surplus electricity are generated globally? <currently going to waste?> Example : https://www.qewc.com/qewc/en/index.php/qewc/77-gulf-times/105-2700mw-of-surplus-electricity-produced

Exactly, Bitcoin mining is commonplace in regions where electricity surpluses (and correspondingly cheap prices) exist.


However, the overriding point here is simple:

Blockchains use energy for hashing. More hashpower is better than less, because it's more secure.



Sorry OP, but that's the end of your thread. If you want to do it a different way, go right ahead, but asserting everyone is wrong without providing any reasoning is a one-way ticket to creating your own cryptocurrency that subscribes to your vision.

Decentralization of mining looks like a promising track for R&D: if heaters become computers and people start mining from home,  part of the energy consumed by hash computation will be recycled.
However, censorship resistance stems from the thermodynamic barrier to update the blockchain.
This kind of optimization would actually weaken censorship resistance.

you have to compare energy per transaction

Perhaps what we need is to make use of the power consumption...by mining with our heaters.

Oh that's not allowed in this thread, you can't use energy to do something useful under any circumstances! Cold people must run on the spot wearing heavy clothes, or move to a warmer region of the world! (energy cannot be used to move there of course, using energy is bad!)

At market equilibrium, the expected benefit (revenue) from Bitcoin and other PoW mining would be roughly equal to the expected cost (including electric power cost).

A downside to proof-of-stake systems is that it is a "rich get richer" system: Only people who already have a lot of the currency have a decent chance of getting a block reward of more currency.  PoW is more egalitarian: Anyone can buy a mining rig, and they don't need to compete proportional to the currency holdings of whales but only proportional to their investment in mining (hardware + electricity).

if it was true then less people would put their coins at stake  and it would become more profitable

The reality is that we are probably stuck with energy-guzzling cryptocurrencies, at least for a while. In the meantime, maybe true believers would be wise to invest their digital coins in renewable electricity sources.

The one in the best position to supplant proof of work is called “proof of stake.” Whereas proof of work rewards participants for spending computational resources, blockchains that use proof of stake would select validators based in part on the size of their respective monetary deposits—their stake. This would be massively more energy efficient, but the concept is still unproven at a large scale and has a number of kinks that need working out.

With "Devour" you mean devour energy, yes? Do you have a link for this number 5,000 times?

It would be interesting to learn how much energy is spent for FIAT, incl. producing bills, transportation to ATM, production of ATMs, heating for offices of banks etc.

The statistic that you are looking for is probably not available, because the energy costs are occurring at too many different levels of
the system. However, the total costs in terms of money are published by the European Central Bank.

According to the ECB the total cost of fiat money production, fiat money storage and fiat money transportation are
roughly 1 % of the total economic output of the European union each year, which equates to roughly 140 billion € at the moment.

However, even if Bitcoin mining is more energy intensive the enormous benefits (an asset that has properties of sound money) are preferable
to our current monetary system.

It's unlikely that you could convince Bitcoiners to fork to PoS.

But even if you could, this is a genuinely free market; some Bitcoiners would reject a proof-of-stake fork regardless of how convincing anyone's PoS rhetoric is. And because this is a market for cryptocurrencies, and because no PoS design has been shown to compete with PoW, we'd be right back where we are now really.

Thank you for this.

So, for this part of FIAT (only for EUR) they (or we?) pay 1.4 bln €

According to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption the global mining costs are $1.433 bln USD.

I know you cannot compare costs with energy directly but if you take into account that we talking about only a part of the FIAT energy costs and this only for EUR, it could turn out that BTC uses less energy than FIAT ...

Why. Does. It. Even. Matter.

It doesn't. BTC hashrate is doing something useful, and innovatively so.


If someone can give some valid reasoning as to why using less energy for a task that depends on energy intensity is a good idea, I'd be genuinely interested to hear it.

Sometimes I have discussions with people thinking that BTC is a waste of energy and we should stick to FIAT instead.
Even if the computation of hashes is useful it is also bad for the ecology.
I think it would be interesting know which of these two systems is wasting more energy - FIAT or BTC?

Probably I (or we) would have (another) argument against FIAT.

Sure it is very different if you actually care for some reason what happened and not just what the current state is. But when it comes to currencies, most people don't care ,and really there is no reason why they should, about who owned how much money in the past. Sure maybe some historians do, but for the purpose of currency, it is useless. In PoW that is necessary, but in PoS it isn't so it shouldn't be there. It is just a cost for the nodes to keep a history.

The history doesn't matter in PoS. It doesn't matter in PoW either, it is just that you can't show the current state in PoW without showing the past.

And that is my point. There is no reason for a blockchain in a PoS currency. It is just a cost. It is a scam to make it sound like it has anything to do with Bitcoin, but it doesn't. The technology used for PoS was used for decades before Bitcoin existed, it is nothing new, just a marketing trick of the banks where they use a new trend to sell their old services in a new package.

You don't have to be running a node from the beginning to know that the blockchain that you are following is the same one as it always was in Bitcoin. In PoS that is not the case. In PoS there are people who can give to chains that are both equally valid and that the nodes can't decide whether they received the coins or not, even tho they see both chains. In PoW that isn't the case.

The point is that PoS coins are just P2P technology. Not that different then using torrents for ledgers. PoW is something new, a different technology, that binds digital to physical in an impressive way.


Bircoin can run on green energy, like the rest of the digital technology. It can be run from solar panels in the dessert where nothing grows.
Cash needs trees to be cut for paper or for plastic to be used that is polluting the world. Either way, the reason that Bitcoin was created for wasn't to be more ecofriendly then fiat, it was to be more decentralized and secure.

I agree with the poster that said POW is an ever escalating arms race but it seems to be safer than POS.   Leading to more power for the richer bigger investors.

I don't know much about computers so if this is dumb, be easy on me!   It's possible to mine BTC on cell phones.   Problem with that is that it is nothing compared to an ASIC.

To prevent high powered ASICs being used would it be possible to check if the miner actually had a living human controlling it.   Something like: only a certain amount of hashes allowed before proof of an operator is required - someone completes a 'captcha'.     Maybe this could decentralise mining and save electricity at the same time

meanwhile if i had invested my money in mining i would really try to troll this post, maybe i would need to be a loser too

This is a partially concerning part, but it may also be comforting. I'd need to do the math on it first to decide.

After halving, Block reward may as well be at zero. So let's ignore it for the moment. Over the long term, electricity consumption will be dictated by fees paid by users. The total fee (# of txs * average fee) will need to at minimum = the cost of electricity.

A couple things can happen with this:

1. Bitcoins price increases dramatically and covers the ever increasing electricity demands
2. We reach an efficiency bottleneck with ASICs and electricity consumption requirements level off (seems unlikely and also you could just manufacture more asics - so I think this ones out)
3. Average fee price increases to meet the increased demand of electricity
4. # of txs increases to increase the total fees paid
5. Bitcoin doesn't increase in value, fees and txs don't increase, miners hit a bottleneck due to the cost of electricity and profitability. Bitcoin becomes less secure.

I think there are various other possibilities:
6. Huge technological advancements in energy extraction, which causes energy prices to plummet
7. Another cryptocurrency comes up with a better consensus algorithm than PoS or PoW and it gets adopted by the Bitcoin developers (unlikely, probably decades away if it ever happens at all)
8. A PoW change that makes Bitcoin mining less energy consuming
...

However, I think #1 and #3 are the most likely outcomes. Coincidentally, these are also the developments that Satoshi set up in the
initial Bitcoin design. We can already see the price increase in the last years and the development of a competitive fee market (with all
the secondary effects like Bitcoin forks that are mainly caused by the fee increase on the mainchain).

These 2 statements are contradictory. If hash mining is doing something useful, how can it simultaneously be a wasteful system?


PoW-denialists: make a coherent argument, I'm begging you

Let me rephrase this:
"I think it would be interesting to know which of these two systems is using more energy - FIAT or BTC?"

So I will still keep this sentence, "Even if the computation of hashes is useful it is also bad for the ecology."

Yes, computation of hashes is useful but it's high energy consumption is also bad for the ecology.
So, could we have a cryotocurrency which is more energy effiecient to be more sustainable? Or is FIAT the better way in terms of sustainability?

Why is using energy "bad for the ecology" in and of itself. Or "bad for sustainability". Sustaining what?


Is this some kind of malthusian scientific case for genocide you're presenting? (all human activity, eating and breathing especially, consumes energy, it's called being alive)

Why are you presenting these vague, unscientific assumptions to be in any way relevant to Bitcoin's hashing security

You are missing an important parameter: total hashpower (or hash difficulty beause they are linked) that can flucuate depending on how profitable mining is

To sum up all parameters for a simple model you have: average fee, number of transactions per block (can be taken constant), block reward, total hash power, electricity cost
The difficulty is set so the total haspower mines a block every 10minutes  

Do the math doc

What you will be missing then is how the total hashpower increases or decreases depending on the average profit (some miners will quit if their profits are to low and more miners come if profits are high). You can make your own model and find a nice equilibrium.

Assume, for a moment, that you/I/They forked a bTN and a BTR. These stand for Bitcoin generated only by Nuclear power, and only by Renewable (solar/wind/geothermal/hydro), respectively.

The free market then quickly establishes if anyone cares. I think they don't...

That over simplify the whole debate, because a lot of energy that are used for operating cost are not taken into consideration. ATM's and Mainframes used by Banks runs 24/7 <even when they are not used> That <idle> energy should be added to the total electricity used for each transaction. <And the energy that are spend to support it>

You cannot simply ignore the operating cost, because you want to focus on single transactions cost. Who are paying for that electricity? ^blablablablabla^

^SMILE^

Too many miners quitting due to loss of profitability = bitcoin security degraded = attacks more likely and bitcoin weaker.

Bad scenario - miner profits drop significantly, miners cannot continue mining, miners sell mining equipment at a discount en masse, a malicious party/government buy up surplus mining equipment, and mine as an attack, not for profit.

That's the danger of the above.

You're right that mining finds an equilibrium, but if that equilibrium is, for example, 50% of previous hash power, that's a HUGE problem.

If this is true, BTC uses way more energy than fiat. You have to remember that there are more euro transactions than btc. I don't have numbers here but I believe the difference is huge. For me, its obvious that btc uses more energy and that is bit of a problem to the environment.

It's possible that in coming decades we will see more environment friendly ways to produce electricity (fusion? Better fission technics? Ocean waves? Better ways to collect energy from the sun?)

(For speculation, if energy becomes too cheap, wouldn't it mean that pow loses its meaning, too)

Here in Northern Europe you are considered as "bad person" if you use energy without a cause. It's been a trend for a while now. And if such fork existed, some people would by it just because saving environment is cool. My guess is that "green fork" could be 10%-20% of BTC's value.

Why mention that at all? There is a cause for using hash mining to secure a blockchain.

The only evidence is that Bitcoin mining is both useful and efficient. But that doesn't seem to stop uneducated people waving their hands on the internet about "using too much energy". I feel tempted to retort that such people are using too much oxygen.

I think there are miners here who are scared to lose their profits and so they try to mess up the discussion or any evolution. But maybe they are just idiots. Whatever, don't mind.

You don't have to be from Nothern Europe to realize the crazyness about this limitless voracious PoW. 

I believe it can be implemented to be more energy efficient with no major change for anxious miners


not at all

but it won't solve the problem because cheap mining will attract more miners

that's why we should restrict the mining industry ASAP

Thats bitcoin then lol. It wont be much different then other currencies if we were able to restrict it

I think there are researchs about this problem too but till now there are not much results .

sorry for the confusion and not being explicit enough. Let me explain:

1) It is very easy to imagine mining dystopian scenarios. Cheap electricity , cheap hardware... -> everybody mine, why working, why going to school, ecological catastrophe

2) So we need to prevent these (with consensus and in decentralized way). And that's what i meant.

3) If we do it too late, after letting the world hashpower developp too much then there could be the danger Doctor-s was talking about (i think). Part of this leftover hashpower could turn against the blockchain as it would be more lucrative