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I'm down with these concepts!
However the 1% that owns 99% of the network strength will probably not vote for such measures.

The real obstacles are misconceptions about energy consumption and waste.


That changes nothing. Miners are not doing redundant work. Miners are already all working on the same block, except in rare cases.


If you could employ a scheme to pick a miner at random, then you don't even need PoW. This idea is unworkable because it doesn't solve the problems that PoW solves.


Same problem as #2.

Exactly. it's not a matter of proving that Bitcoin isn't more resource heavy than several other arguably non essential industries, its the matter of preventing the propaganda that's being spread by the media. Which, I'll be quite honest I don't have a solution for. Convincing the masses, while they've already been fed this information through mainstream outlets, would probably be an impossible task, since it'll always stick in their mind, and its not exactly like the media is going to change their mind upon discovering the facts. I'm quite sure that a lot have a good idea that Bitcoin isn't as impactful as other industries, they just nitpick what they know will generate them money.

Also, I do think its fairly obvious that news have been bribed or pressured in the past to push a certain agenda, while I can't be sure that the governments of the world have done this, I'm rather suspicious the hostile attitude that every single news source seems to have.

Doesnt helium kind of work like 2 and 3?.  1 person issues a challenge ,another challenges, others witness?. all split rewards accordingly?

I'll skip the mining efficiency proposal. You've got a perfect, summarized answer from odolvlobo.

Come on, seriously? That's an even worse answer than franky's (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5392717.msg59729742#msg59729742), who believes that the main reasons are the block size and the low income. The main obstacles for adoption are clearly political. The problem is outside Bitcoin, cryptography, computer science.

Two are the main reasons; the volatility and the government's brainwashing, which includes misconceptions about the energy waste. Most people have got a false idea of what's Bitcoin, because the media have misinformed them so. They can't understand the benefits they can gain if they do this collectively. Most don't even know how money works.

No, because Proof of Something Else is not better than Proof of Work: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

Go on and do that in backward-compatible way. If you will do it in the right way, then maybe we will have some working example of that conception. But if you will do it in a wrong way, then it is 100% guaranteed that your project will be dumped. As I said in "mining decentralization-related discussions", all you need is collecting all shares and forming a commitment. With Taproot, it is easier than it ever was, so you can base your project on N-of-N multisig with all N miners, then try to make it simpler and cheaper.

This sentence is some kind of definition of Proof of Work. We have pick-a-number scheme. That "number" is called "nonce", defined as "number used once". We cannot do "alone" part, because you cannot prevent other people from using computers, unless you want to shut down power grids and put citizens in ancient times with knights and horses.

That is one of the reasons why the LUCK altcoin was destroyed: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5254068.400

This leads to centralization and depends on network connectivity. Also, it is not resistant to sybil attacks (or it may be, but then you have to turn on the Proof of Work).

It can be attacked more easily, just by informing the network that you had a lot of connections, even if you were sitting alone on localhost. Newcomers will know nothing about the past without any Proof of Work. That is also another reason, why the LUCK altcoin was destroyed.

Aha. That means some part is centralized and some part is not. Using Proof of Work here and not using Proof of Work there is not a good idea, because unprotected parts will be attacked, as they were in many altcoins.

So, to sum up: you can try to create some basic network for concept number one, with collecting shares, with Taproot, with N-of-N multisig, maybe on test network, maybe only with tweaked keys used as commitments, but forming a good concept for decentralized mining is hard. And there are some existing concepts like CoinPool, so maybe joining them is a better idea.

We have a proverb which I'm always reminded of when I hear someone trying to fix "energy waste" that goes like this, "you wanted to fix her eyebrow but ended up blinding her".

You wanted to fix the imaginary "energy waste" but all you did was to introduce a single point of failure by destroying the decentralization that currently exists by adding the single mining pool that would control the entire mining power so it can censor transactions, censor blocks or even reverse transactions (51% attack turns into 100% attack!).

I think just keeping your miners in good condition and maintaining them in between could bring you enough efficiency. At the end of day, efficiency = mining reward - overall electricity cost. I’m mining alts, but whether you do BTC mining or alts, again the output you looking for is $ at the end.

The best way to increase efficiency of your miners is to note down at what price you got rewards and at what price you will be selling your BTC.

This does not even need technicalities.

With respect to technical aspects, you can just wait for higher ASICS hitting the market with some upgrades done claiming this model is more efficient etc etc.

The main problem with this one I think is probably that miners aren't going to like being forced to "register".  Not only that but it sounds way more complicated than normal proof of work. Imagine people trying to explain how it works to their friend. Impossible.

Regarding #2 above, all I can say is if I was a miner, I would configure my bitcoin core to send those "special messages" directly into the recycle bin. Competition eliminated.


Overly complicated.

This is false.

When miners are mining via Bitcoin's PoW protocol, they are generating random numbers, passing each of those random numbers through a hash algorithm, and when the output of the hash algorithm is below a target, the miner will broadcast their found block. The output of the hash algorithm is effectively random, so with a given target, the expected number of "guesses" will be the same regardless of if one person is working on the block, or a billion people are working on the block.

There might be an argument that some work is waisted when two miners find a block at approximately the same time, however reducing the number of miners mining at once will not address this issue as most mining entities are going to be using multiple computers at once to try to find a block. I am not sure of how frequently this happens, but I understand that in the past it had occurred approximately 1% of the time, and this has likely gone down.

So reducing wasted work theoretically has an upper bound potential to reduce the amount of electricity consumed via bitcoin PoW by 1%.

Increasing the nonce effectively produces a random number. What I said is a very simplified explanation of what happens.

Yes, it does. The expected number of hashes required to find a block is the same regardless of if one miner is trying to find a block or a million miners are trying to find a block.

If a nonce, x results in a valid block, nonce x + 1 will not necessarily also find a valid block.

I disagree with your terminology.

When there are two competing blocks, block x, the work spent trying to find block x + 1 is duplicated. However, as I mentioned, this has happened approximately 1% of the time int he past, and is likely lower now. There is no other duplication of work.

wrong. this is a frequent misconception though. and someone else already explained why it is a misconception. bottom line is, no energy is really wasted since the entire network hash rate is needed to find one block every 10 minutes. end of story.

Does #3 have a name? or is that just something you thought could work?

#2 does have a name. So it's nothing new. wonder why it hasn't been adpoted with open arms. well probably because there are good reasons.

That's not what a "soft fork" means. A "soft fork" is a backward compatible change to the protocol. What you are describing is generally called a "fork/branch/split in the chain" and one of the blocks will eventually become a "stale block".

It doesn't happen very often, as you already wrote.

This is terrible idea that only leads to centralization and single point of failure.

I think that miners are selected randomly even now, so there is no need for inventing the wheel yet again.

Announce to whom? Some central authority maybe?
As soon as they are online they are announcing they are ready for mining, no need to add anything extra on top.

I saw one cool project for using all the heat generated from bitcoin asic mining for heating the swimming pool (https://cointelegraph.com/news/water-great-idea-bitcoin-mining-heats-this-swimming-pool), and I think we need to think more like this.
Other people are using heat for heating up their home during winter and cold season, and I am sure there could be other interesting projects like this.
If I remember correctly Intel recently created new energy efficient bitcoin mining chip, so it's possible to have new developments in that field.

They're not selected; after all, who would select them? There is nobody to select something. The very process of mining though, 'selects' one miner (by being the first to extend the chain correctly) whose block candidate is added to the blockchain. So this 'dice roll' is what mining does.

Yeah, it's pretty nice to use the heat since it increases the efficiency. If you could use all the heat, the efficiency could theoretically exceed 100%. I was thinking about putting ASIC chips into boilers for instance, instead of a plain resistance wire; the expended energy would be the same, but you would get heat + Bitcoin instead of just heat.

Today I read part of this article which I found really interesting. https://medium.com/@magusperivallon/a-financial-hail-mary-for-the-climate-an-argument-for-bitcoin-adoption-1a695b668529
It appears that according to various studies, the existing banking sector is a big contributor to pollution and climate change in a multitude of ways and the tiny energy footprint of Bitcoin globally is really nothing to be concerned about. Apparently, the articles goes on to show how Bitcoin mining and this high demand for electricity could become a big driver for the expansion of solar plants and other types of renewable energy that so far were unprofitable to build. But I've yet to finish it. :)

So in essence, I'm not at all worried about energy consumption and wasted work.

I know they are not really ''selected'', I just used his words and I forgot to put quotation marks.
Imagine a teacher giving a task to solve math problems in a classroom full of kids, first who solve them are ''selected'' or ''chosen'' one.  :D

It's not a bad idea, but only thing that would be annoying in this case could be noise generated by mining.
This is not unsolvable problem, because I saw some special cases that are made to totally isolate all the noise generated by mining, in your case you would need to better isolate your boiler ;)

Yes, that's pretty much the exact same way that miners are selected, by being fastest - good analogy!

I'm not 100% sure; because what's loud are the fans, but when you heat water with your ASIC, you don't need fans right? Since you transfer all that heat into the water.
I've also seen someone submerge S19's into those special oily non-conductive fluids and exchange the heat from the 'oil circuit' into the 'water circuit'.

Some smaller/hobby/home miners can potentially double their mining equipment as space heaters if they live in a location that is cold at least part of the year. Unfortunately, this is not really something that can scale because at one point, someone will own more than enough miners to keep their home warm.

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When oil companies are mining oil, they will sometimes (always?) encounter natural gas, and often there is no natural gas pipeline nearby. Historically, oil companies have had to burn this natural gas into the atmosphere, however, some oil companies are buying up bitcoin miners, and converting the natural gas into electricity that is used by these bitcoin miners. These miners are still consuming electricity, however the electricity they are using would otherwise literally be burned if not for the miners.

I honestly don't have a slightest idea how this could work in real life, but it's obviously not going to be asic fans running in water like submarines  :D
Fans are used for cooling of the chip and I am not sure how long would chips survive if under higher temperature load for long time.

If we take a look at a bigger picture, most of the energy produced in the world is wasted anyway, and bitcoin mining has just a tiny percentage of total energy productions, but it looks bigger when you zoom in and talk about that on MSM.
Can you only imagine how much energy is wasted for all the wars happening constantly around the world for various reasons...

Not even wars; simply our fiat financial system is already responsible for a big chunk of pollution. Have you read this article yet?
https://medium.com/@magusperivallon/a-financial-hail-mary-for-the-climate-an-argument-for-bitcoin-adoption-1a695b668529
It's stunning what a huge negative impact the current system has on the environment.

I mean think all of the central and commercial banks, ATMs, credit/debit cards, employers, transports, money issuance etc. Now think of bitcoin, wherein more than half of its waste isn't so environmentally damaging as it comes from solar panels and other renewable sources.

There was a report I'd seen from HSBC where they stated their environmental footprint of 2012. The link is surprisingly dead (http://www.hsbc.com/~/media/HSBC-com/citizenship/sustainability/pdf/130521-hsbc-susreport-2012-online-ready-version.ashx), but web archive is always there when you need it: https://blackhatcoiner.com/files/130521-hsbc-susreport-2012-online-ready-version.pdf


And that's just from one bank. But, I guess it's in no media's favor to get involved with it.

The carbon footprint of a single bank, yeah, but I don't think it even includes the damage they are doing by keeping the coal and gas / fossil fuels industry alive.

Substantiating this further:

Which reminds me of how important transparency is. You don't need all this hustle and bustle to calculate the carbon footprint of bitcoin. Difficulty speaks for itself. You may not know the percentage of ASICs, GPUS etc., that is used, but you can calculate the true environmental impact much easier and more accurately.

I think I saw it before when I tried to look  for objective truth and read both sides of the story, before making my own oppinion.

You know that killing this industries you are de facto committing mass suicide and you are not solving any real problems.
This would just mean that some other materials would be used instead of oil or gas, that would be equally bad if not worse, and it would require that most people stay at home all the time.
And of course, fake elite would still use all the ''dirty'' stuff and fly around the world in their nice private jets.

Crazy thing is that some people are even calculating carbon footprint  of human beings, and they are saying it's bad to have kids because they produce co2...  
it looks like that same people that don't like Bitcoin with proof of work also don't like humans so much.
btw aren't all beings on earth including human carbon based life forms? :D

The thing about insulating the miner is to divert the noise outside, you can't just make a soundproof box and put the miner inside and that's it, what you will have is one cooked miner in probably the same time as a thanksgiving turkey. You need to have a flow of air and you need tubes, basically redirecting with this the whole noise outside, and if your house is too close to your neighbor he won't be happy hearing a vacuum cleaner noise 24/7.

Oh and yeah, no liquid cooling heat transfer, immersion system uses fans, it would make no sense.
Immersion cooling is obviously the solution but those things don't really work with random heat consumption such as a boiler, you would need to scale it at the exact size to keep the water hot but at the same time to overheat, add more miners and what are you going to do, heat your pool constantly? The other aspect is the cost, is your heat exchanger system for hot water more expensive than what you would pay normally for it in ten years? Paying 10k for a bitcoin boiler with no Asics included? Not really a way to save money.

Anyhow, since both Micro and Bitmain are still betting on over 3kw miners and looking more and more at industrial miners like the mM53 that will come with 6.5kw consumption, the market share of real home miners as in mining in your own home, will probably go down well below 1% in the close future. That is, if we're not already there.

Well for most wars, at least one side is usually fighting for their survival, so they would probably not consider that to be wasted energy.

I think the argument that bitcoin mining is "wasting" electricity is really just part of the PoW vs PoS debate. If you believe that bitcoin PoW is "wasting" electricity, the only solution is to switch to PoS mining. It is really as simple as that. I explained earlier that only less than 1% of bitcoin PoW energy consumption is duplicated.

I am not a PoW maximalist, and am willing to listen to arguments in favor of switching to PoS mining. However I have not heard a compelling argument in favor of switching.

I have to disagree here because there never was any kind of debate about PoW versus PoS. I've said it many times but PoS died in early years when it was introduced and failed to provide security that was even a fraction of what PoW provides. It was only recently that they pulled it out of the grave and started creating a fake debate.

Not at all. There are a lot of solutions and there could be more if the "waste" FUD was real. There is no reason to use a seriously flawed algorithm even if PoW were bad!
The only "solution" is only PoS when the coin has a massive premine and the devs want to make profit on those premined coins without having to sell them ;)

Us electricity consumption (https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/) vs mining growth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cstqDsLXGok) is quiet fascinating. Our usage really hasn't budged in the last 17 years.
This proves nothing really but it is hard to tell what industries effect what, Lightbulbs for example in lumens per watt have gotten incredibly efficient, even mining gear has  s19 was 34J/TH @95TH the new s19 xp hydro gear 20J/TH @ 255TH , but as this gear becomes more efficient they also want more out of it so it doesn't seem like change is happening but it is.
As I said in an earlier post "However the 1% that owns 99% of the network strength will probably not vote for such measures." consensus would have to vote by switching hashpower/staking a node or whatever concept someone conjures up to a new systems idea that promotes efficiency, guys that have spent 20k on a single piece of gear simply would laugh at you and tell you why it cant be done. The guys that where getting 100BTC block rewards on 45watt processors however might could/would.
Bitcoins smarter than me but ETH is incredibly complex in comparison, they also dont really care about the miners the miners dont have a vote if the dev's around telling people they can stake more and earn more this new way. But if ETH and its complexity's can actually pull of PoS, bitcoin could too I think but maybe not , there is a reason Bitcoin is king and all forks have ultimately failed in comparison.     I'm sure if Satoshi where around he would advocate a new system that advocates better decentralization but by his design he wouldn't have much say in it except a voice of reason.

People that have spent 20k on a piece of gear follow the users' demand, though.

Well, miners shouldn't have a greater vote than regulars users generally, but in Ethereum it really doesn't matter. It suffers from far worse centralizing-kind of issues such as the dev team affects a lot as you said, there's a tendency towards PoS; lots of coins are also pre-mined.

What's wrong with the current system? I'm sure the reason he left was to avoid having a central point of Vitalik.

1. Maybe but if that guy and his friends make up the 99% of the network (In theory) Why would they listen to the 1% of little guys running 2 or 3 units at home or a handful in a DC?
Majority of retail investors I'm learning have no clue at all how this works and are entering based on fomo or trusting the guy that does understand.

2. Eth to me is a way to get my bitcoin without running crazy loud gear and an expanding mining operation out of my control, no limits on how much eth there is ,is concerning considering the value, I've read an article a while back of a guy exploiting it and basically fabricating it out of thin air. Pretty unfair you have to stake 32eth to have a say so with the new standard.(last I checked I haven't been keeping up as much these days)

3. I've personally wondered if he left around when asics came out, the point of no return if you will. Asics essentially centralized BTC in a way , starting with suppliers in particular , bitmain. Lately I've felt the only clear winners in BTC are the guys that where in early or asic sellers. I personally don't think that was Satoshi's vision. What good is a decentralized currency if majority of it's owned by the elites already?

To be clear I'm a little guy, even with a pretty good understanding how bitcoin works I don't feel like I'd have any say so where it goes, because I'm not running 1PH or even have 1BTC to stake.
I run a few nodes though :)  in 2022 that's not saying much.

In reality they don't though, and ideally that situation never arises. Although, retailers might be entering due to fear of missing out, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It should bring in competition, and prices should actually lower due to that competition, which should be seen as a good thing, as it reduces the amount of centralisation at least partly.

We don't need the retailers to know every intrigue detail, we just need them to create efficient machines, that's all. Which, they definitely know how to do as they've been doing it before Bitcoin was around.

Ideally, we should all have a say, regardless of how much Bitcoin you have or what sort of equipment you have. If you have a good idea, I'd like to think it would be taken into consideration. Obviously, there are people with more power for a lack of a better word, but I don't think that's avoidable. There's always going to be some sort of pull in a certain direction, and usually the people making the changes are the ones to do it, but at least with Bitcoin being mostly decentralised it's easier to upset the apple cart. If you wanted changes to be made, you could put them forward, and see if they're adopted.

Asics were not yet out when Satoshi left but since the first GPU miner everyone should have seen the writings on the wall, it was clear that if the reward will prove to be enough incentive miners designed for this would appear, and they did so as early FPGA.
As for his own vision on decentralization, it puzzles me sometimes, he once talked about a gentleman's agreement (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54) when it comes to the hashrate race to have coins distributed equally but at the same time he talked about (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306) server node farms to take the burden of the network.
I think that he knew there was never going to be some sort of democracy in this and in the long run the ones affording better gear will prevail, even with CPU mining the threat as there.

Besides, he had some other ideas too, with which not so many will agree these days:

Because he and his friends aren't the 99% of the population of the network. They may have much power, but they don't get to dictate what the users will do. If 99% of the users want a change, see SegWit, the miners ought to follow the crowd. Otherwise, they'll spend energy for a currency that has little demand.

Please, let's stop this Satoshi's vision nonsense; that's how BSV, that I know how we all hate, began. It doesn't matter what he might have thought of it.

Lol. This didn't age well.

You shouldn't read anybody's posts out of context least of which Satoshi's.
In short the discussion there is about whether the miners connecting to a pool need to run their own software (whether the original or modified or whatever else).
@ribuck explains why in a mining pool (the first of) only the pool runs the client and there is no need for others (the miners connecting to it) run their own Bitcoin clients. @grondilu is arguing that others can run their own [modified] software, connect to the pool and both mine the block to receive the block reward and receive the pool's reward at the same time.
To this Satoshi states that it is not possible due to the way pool is designed and continues to say users don't even have to run the software to use a pool, they can use a shitty centralized exchange to get an address and receive the funds. He isn't saying they should!

A retail investor is an average user. Not a retailer. But I hope intel's new chip opens up some good door for us! It would be nice to see decent quiet units again like the R4

Whoah now thats not where I was going with that !  :D I have to clean coffee out of my nose now. Poor choice of words on my part no pun intended.

I'm just thinking out loud here 7 years ago I wouldn't have thought we would need 3 Phase for the newest stuff.

I guess your right , just because the wheel was invented doesnt mean it was made with the best materials.
 


 

Ah, I didn't realise you were talking about prospective miners rather than the retailers selling the rigs. Anyhow, again I don't think we necessarily need them to know much about Bitcoin. It's just like how investors aren't always clued up, they just see the opportunity to make some money. That isn't a problem really, not every adopter is going to be a believer in Bitcoin in the long term. Doesn't really effect us much in the long term, and probably does improve the amount of money short term investors make.

I don't see a problem with it personally. There's plenty of people getting into other markets that don't understand it, without actually being detrimental to it, and in similar vein I don't think the retail investors as you put it, will be detrimental to Bitcoin. Although, going back to the original point, I think it still stands, they aren't going to have the majority of their friends mining.

I have explained above, that I don't believe it is possible to reduce electricity consumed as long as bitcoin is using PoW to mine. If miners become more efficient, electricity consumption will not decline because people will just buy more of them, or the difficultly will increase. Over the long term, the electricity consumed will be a function of the cost of electricity, the value of the total mining revenue, and a rate of return that miners want for the risk of buying the miners.

IMO, the only way to reduce the electricity consumed below the above is to switch from PoW to PoS. I noted above that it remains my belief that PoW remains superior to PoS.
Well I guess this depends on one's definition of "waste". I noted above that very little "work" that consumes electricity is actually duplicated, as orphaned blocks are very rare.

Three are plenty of people willing to pay for the cost of electricity consumed by the bitcoin miners via paying transaction fees, and allowing the price to not decline as more bitcoin is mined.

I don't think it is reasonable to say that electricity is "wasted" when mining bitcoin. One may argue that too much electricity is consumed by the bitcoin miners, and I would refer those people to my above points.

You are contradicting yourself here.
Even if we agree that PoW should be replaced, the replacement is never going to be a weaker algorithm such as PoS that has many flaws. You see when you are trying to solve one problem you should do it in a way that it doesn't introduce 50 new issues.

Will bitcoin ever move to prove of stake? I’m sure all these waste of energy will be solved

Technically it can, but I don't think it will. And if someone will do that without reaching consensus, that could easily become just another altcoin, if not done correctly and without having backward-compatibility and soft-forks in mind.

No, it will not. Here is some economical point of view: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

It's actually a pretty big topic in legit altcoin projects, which try to implement Satoshi's original '1 CPU, 1 vote' idea as stated in the whitepaper:

I'm not sure anyone really succeeded in doing so; we could argue Ethereum partly does, since GPUs are still viable for Ethereum mining (even though ASICs do exist) and it's pretty profitable to mine on a home computer, which is great for hashpower decentralization.
However, due to the ability of running tons of GPUs off a single platform, industrial miners still have it easy to 'centralize hashpower'. If an algorithm was found that is only able to run on CPUs (maybe even non-parallelizable between cores), it would be optimal. If you wanted to run a mining farm, compared to GPU mining, you would need to buy 1 PSU, 1 motherboard, 1 set of RAM for every mining chip (in this case CPU). The need for a whole separate platform for each chip adds a lot of overhead and could reduce the incentive of building large farms.

An important question though: while something like this increases decentralization, doesn't it also significantly reduce the power put into the network? People who believe mining is wasteful (https://danhedl.medium.com/pow-is-efficient-aa3d442754d3) would argue that's a great thing, however it means lower security and easier to attack using a botnet or any other large set of individual CPUs like a manycore cluster. Right?
So maybe the current ASIC landscape might be somewhat centralized, but it allows to pump a ton of energy into the network and gives it such strong security.

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That's wrong though. There are other algorithms, exactly like pooya is saying.
One concept that I found cryptographically interesting is Chia-Network (https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/FAQ); particularly because there is something 'wasted': storage space (and also the drives themselves whose lifespan is limited - while staked coins don't 'wear') and also some computation.

As said in Paul Sztorc's article, it is still obscured Proof of Work. There are many other options to choose from, for example Proof of Burn. But they are still just some obscured Proof of Work. It is better to split Proof of Work between miners in a decentralized way than to invent a new consensus.

There is a way to make it literally true, but it could kill the whole network. I mean: every miner could produce a new block from scratch. Then, instead of sharing just 80 bytes of block header, every miner will send all shares (expressed as the whole blocks) to all other miners. Then, it is possible to collect everything, produced by all miners, and execute any coinbase-splitting algorithm that is based on all blocks produced by all miners. But it is overkill, unless it will be sufficiently optimized. If many transactions are the same, then only transaction hashes are broadcasted. If merkle tree is created in some order-independent way or if there are rules to always have it somehow sorted, or swapped in some predefined way, then it is possible to broadcast only merkle branches. If it is merge-mined and included as a commitment to the coinbase transaction, it is even better compressed, because then no additional on-chain bytes are needed. If the coinbase transaction is some kind of N-of-N Taproot multisig, that could be even a payment channel shared by N people, that could be also CoinPool or something like that, there are many ways. But still, there are only ideas, they have to be collected and combined to form some BIP.

The algorithm does not matter that much. We should assume that ASICs will be designed even for CPU-mineable yespower, when it will be profitable. The only thing that matters is splitting the coinbase transaction.

It is even worse, because it increases work that you need to verify things. Just try to download some CPU-mineable coins, it will take a lot more time than initial block download for the same blocks on SHA-256 mined chain, you can even re-mine that on regtest and compare downloading and verification time. Even if both nodes will be running on localhost, it will have far worse performance for CPU-mineable coins than for SHA-256-based coins.

That makes sense; then I would tell PrimeNumber7 that there are absolutely ways to reduce energy consumption, while staying within PoW, by possibly using hard drives to prove space in time (even though that's just another type of work), since keeping a platter running doesn't take much energy.

It does, though. For instance (I'm not very familiar with altcoins in general), I believe to remember Ethereum (or another coin) needs a ton of fast memory since it needs to do lookups in large data sets as part of the mining process. There also is the attempt of some currencies trying to simply change the algorithm or some non-predictable parameters in regular intervals for instance. Honestly, even pretty unpopular coins have such high prices these days that the incentive to build ASICs for them should be pretty high. Especially as we saw SHA256 ASICs very early on, when the dollar-price for 1BTC wasn't very high and the longevity of the project wasn't yet certain. Still Bitmain et al started making these chips. But I need more knowledge about altcoins to really be able to judge whether they do succeed in making their hashing algorithms ASIC-proof.

That part is tricky, because Proof of Capacity (also called space and time) can be faked (also, it is not the first coin with this consensus, there were other failed attempts before, for example Burstcoin). There were fake plots on Chia. Like someone said on Discord, it is like selling a car and assembling it at the same time, when you are trying to pay for it. If you have 1 TB plotted hard drive, then you can play by the rules and get some coins, equivalent to this 1 TB. But if you can plot things in memory, and then save only every second piece, then you need only 500 GB, you will still have some chance to hit something, and you could recompute things when needed. In general, as in ECDSA: you don't need real signature, you need a signature that can pass verification. The same with Chia: you don't need to plot 1 TB, you need to produce a proof that you did it, even if you plotted only a part of that and splitted your work between plotting and on-the-fly computation. So, I guess it could be possible to mount an attack that would plot nothing and focus on mining. For well-designed ASIC, that could be more profitable than buying large disks and plotting everything, also because your read/write to disk also takes time, when RAM operations or some assembly code based on registers could do some parts much faster, so there is no point in storing them permanently on your disk (also because you only need to verify things, not to plot exabytes by yourself to check that it was plotted correctly).

I remember some discussions, where people reached nice results for yespower on FPGAs. And also I remember that some people complained about yespower in early days, even before the coin was released. They were saying that this algorithm can be optimized for non-CPUs, and judging by historical blocks and network difficulty, I guess at least some of them were right (or they had a lot of CPUs, definitely warehouse-level, not home-miner-level).

This is a simplification of explanation not a promise. It is not like ASICs were invented after bitcoin invention. They existed ever since 1967. Not to mention that having ASICs or even a ASIC farm doesn't centralized mining as long as these farms are distributed around the world which they are.
What centralized mining (even if you can only mine it using CPU) is when majority of hashrate is controlled by a handful of people. This has never happened in bitcoin (ignoring day 1 of course when it was only Satoshi and a couple of others mining blocks).

I think people are looking for solutions for a problem that are very exaggerated and not properly researched. We can come up with any solution to reduce energy consumption and the (paid) media will still push the misinformation to the public. We cannot introduce anything that will centralize Bitcoin mining into a single Pool... so #1 is a definite NO for me. 

Also, if you want to win the argument against the Bitcoin&Energy myth, then you should have a better researched counter argument. So.. How many people have actually did the math to find out what percentage of Bitcoin mining is done with "Clean/Renewable" energy? (If it is even possible....)

Do not change the PoW into something that will destroy decentralization and also the strong security that the hashing power provides.  ;)

Sure, you can trade memory / storage for computation and as always, an ASIC is the most efficient way to accomplish such a thing (like with any other task, ASICs are obviously the most efficient chip to solve said task). I believe in the end, it comes down to a simple equation where you'll be trading various sorts of energy (used for producing hard drive storage) for electrical energy (for doing more compute work on a CPU or ASIC). By the laws of physics, the energy should equal out and the most efficient (cheapest to operate) solution will prevail.

It's important though, that energy will be expended in one way or another - be it in production of spinning platters or in powering highly optimized electrical circuits.

Sure, but did SHA256 ASICs exist before 2009? I imagine if not, it was a pretty large bet starting SHA256-ASIC production back then, because if the Bitcoin project would have failed, all the R&D work and the cost for the chip production masks and whatnot (in the millions) would have been for nothing. I'm pretty sure when Bitcoin ASICs first came out, BTC actually still suffered from a few, but very severe bugs, so it was not yet as 'set in stone' as today's 'immutable, secure L1'. I remember early versions of the codebase didn't even have tests and little structure in it.
But if SHA256 chips existed for some other purpose already, then I'm wondering why Satoshi and the early Bitcoin developer community didn't think those would be going to be used in the future for Bitcoin mining and driving out CPU miners rather quickly.

I totally agree! ASIC farms or even large mining pools are often used as an argument to claim Bitcoin mining is centralized, while it's not; especially since pools can be switched at any time.

I do still believe people should mine more at home. Did you guys read about the recent 'Compass Mining incident'? Users' gear was suddenly shut down and they had to sell their gear within 48 hours notice, because the company had issues with the Russian hosting provider. No chance of getting the gear home. I'm not against people building mining farms for themselves, but I'd try to have full control of my hardware at all times and not rent it to someone who might not let me have it back. But I digress, sorry for the off-topic.

Home miners have mostly CPUs, sometimes GPUs, sometimes some other hardware. But you can safely assume that most users have CPUs. If you want to encourage people to mine more at home, then they should be rewarded for doing so. Mining a block with difficulty equal to one on CPU is still possible, so every miner could start mining on top of the latest block and produce some hash with a much lower difficulty than needed for the network. However, people can use merged mining and be rewarded for doing that. They can for example receive rewards through LN. So: technically it is possible to have a node that will give you a discount on fees if you mine something on your CPU. Some millisatoshis probably, but still, that will be proportional to the work done by that home miner.

Every miner can adjust its own starting difficulty. It is also possible to be connected to N nodes and assign a difficulty for each of them, it could depend on submitted shares and be auto-adjusted. To start with, it is possible to collect just 80-bytes block hashes. That could be the base layer, the bare minimum to mine anything. Then, that system can be extended by adding more and more limits, to make nice blocks, as people will start mining at home. So, when a lot of people will switch to mining 80-byte headers, then it is possible to soft-fork and add a rule that each miner has to show the coinbase transaction. Then, coinbase amount validation (by checking fees) can be added, the system could be extended. It mainly depends on resources, because a stream of 4 MB fully filled blocks, where each miner will mine entirely different block, that would be hard to check. But checking just headers, allocating coins, and unlocking them after full validation, that could be easier.

So, the easiest thing to do is collecting 80-byte headers, checking Proof of Work and doing some basic validation, then preparing reward for each miner. If someone will attack by making random headers, then such coins will be simply burned. That system could work in case where there are a lot of headers. On the other hand, by assigning a difficulty for each connection, we should receive shares in regular intervals, for example every 30 seconds, as it is in many mining pools. Then, it should not be a big deal to fully validate each share, and sending rewards for that (or just a discount on LN fees). So, I can see two options: checking everything and distributing rewards only to honest miners, or checking only basic things, and delaying validation to the moment when someone will claim the reward in LN (optionally, coins can be burned if they will be invalid, to discourage cheating the simplified validation).

Another thing is that people can commit as much data to a single address as they want. So, home CPU miners can just tweak their keys to later prove they mined some blocks, if such proof will be needed. In that way, the network of decentralized shares could be automatically commited to the blockchain, without increasing size of any on-chain transaction, used during opening and closing channels. However, there are some issues with that system. It is a good start, but it still needs clarification on some points, also it may be connected with CoinPool, we will see.

No SHA256 ASICs didn't exist back then but my point wasn't about their existence but the possibility of their existence. Satoshi surely know that CPU mining won't last long and other methods would replace it soon like GPUs, FPGA and eventually ASICs since they all existed way before bitcoin and were used in computationally intensive work similar to bitcoin mining. Ergo we shouldn't focus on the "1 CPU" 1 Vote quote so much since as I said it was a simplification.

"Waste" of energy is rather subjective. Depends what you mean, do you mean the energy lost from the heat the miners create, or the energy expended to satisfy the Proof of Work system? If it's the latter, simply put it's an important part of what makes Bitcoin stand out, if you change from a different algorithm, then much of the benefits are lost, without too much to gain.

The problem with this is that a lot of people would rather take that risk, which to be honest isn't exactly common, than pay the increasingly higher electricity rates at home. I'm assuming you mean by home, actually in their house, or even if you're referring to mining within their own country, if you're in the West, then you're very likely paying more for your electricity than you would in the East. So, naturally there's a lot more incentive to have off shore if you will, mining operations.

Also, the other downside, and this only really applies to if you mean mining at their actual home is even the quietest miners, tend to make some sort of audible sound, which not everyone wants in their home. Then you have to think about the dynamics at home, the husband/wife might want to mine, but does their partner want the constant hum of the miners, and the wires sprawled everywhere. Its not like the West have better availability of clean energy, so it doesn't even work in that favour.

The way to go forward likely is creating their own energy, and then hooking the miners up to that. Although, that only appeals to a very select few, and probably more of the type that have hundreds of miners on the go, rather than just a hobbyist.

Even though 'off-shoring' is often cheaper, as I say you run the risk of losing (access to) very expensive hardware which should be seen as a cost (with a probability attached to it). Also if you use a miner as a 'stacking device', how I've seen it called, it's profitable even in very expensive countries; you're essentially buying Bitcoin at a discount, with a one-time investment of the mining hardware. If you try to break even, it's a lot harder, I agree.

However, it's important that people do it, and every little bit of hashpower helps, so if someone is willing to splurge $200 on a Compac F or $600 on a 3TH/s Apollo, they can aid the network without a lot of noise and without spending too much money.

Honestly, many people today are already creating their own energy by putting solar cells on their roofs. Especially in expensive energy countries like in Europe, it is very interesting to get such an installation instead of buying power from the grid. I wouldn't be very surprised if we see completely integrated 'green' mining solutions for homeowners in the near future (hobbyists are already working on them as we speak), consisting of solar panels on the roof, using the miner's heat output to heat water for the house (needed winter & summer) and a way to put it outside or submerged to make it silent. The miner(s) could even help repay the solar installation faster, as you don't usually pull the whole power that it can theoretically provide, so part of the generated energy is lost if you're not mining. With a good OS, the power draw can be dynamically adjusted depending on the output of the solar array.

Thermodynamically, it hardly makes a difference whether the security budget of a given monetary network is spent directly on proof of work or on return on capital securing this network, for energy consumption will inevitably occur as the owners of capital begin to consume the profits.
So switching to PoS does not reduce energy consumption if at least a similar level of security is to be maintained (secure PoS is just obfuscated PoW).

Do you want to really save energy?
Work and earn less, in order to be able to spend less.

Otherwise you only contribute to shifting energy consumption between industries, depending on what you prefer to spend your income on.

By that, do you think it'll ever be a possibility that energy solutions might be sold or supplied with the purchase of mining equipment, or is that a little bit too expensive, and bulky to justify?

I do agree, that a lot of miners will be looking to repurpose that lost energy, and heating water might the method of choice. Although, I haven't looked at the practicalities of that or how much water you'd be able to actually heat up. Since, most water is heated up on demand, i.e if you want a bath, that's when your boiler kicks in, and heats up the water. I'm not sure if a miner will have enough to be able to do that on demand? The energy could be banked potentially, and then used?

I'm not a miner, I'm just interested in combatting this movement of Bitcoin vs Energy. While, I do think it's blown out of portion from what I can gather, its still an issue that ideally we need to overcome. Public perception means everything when it comes to adoption.

I can definitely imagine this happening, yes. Especially since it's not very easy to set up without a lot of knowledge not only about Bitcoin mining, but also about fields like solar energy and house installations. What we have today are specialists in specific areas, but an integrated solution doesn't exist yet, so I believe there's a market for it. I've seen a bunch of DIY projects that use excess solar energy to run miners and the heat of the miners to heat their home, as well as people doing just one of the two.

Here's one I could quickly find again, who 'reduced natural gas use by 64% in March and reduced his effective electrical residential rate to $0.073/kWh': https://twitter.com/DaddyBTC_pleb/status/1516118484375293957

The creativity of some people is commendable! This guy runs the hot air from the miner into his drier to run it without gas: https://twitter.com/missaghi/status/1515371115664846848

And this one here heats his whole house with seven S19's (not cheap, I agree, but if you can afford it, they will pay back quicker this way, since he doesn't have to pay for heating anymore): https://twitter.com/ResetEconomic/status/1506428719778435073

https://i.postimg.cc/SKGyHnVK/image.jpg

I'm not 100% familiar with the control circuitry of a modern boiler, since what I have is very old. I think it actually keeps the water relatively warm at all times, since it would need a lot of time to heat up the whole volume if it only kicked in the moment I open the hot water tap. I mean, worst-case, you're heating the water 'more than needed'; so the boiler may be hot the whole day, while you don't need hot water around the clock. But if the alternative is dumping the heat outside the window, that's still better, right?
Sure, you can add in a battery; the whole system just gets more and more complex.
One option I can envision, with modern solar installations often including a battery anyway, is that the miner starts up once the battery is full and you still have excess power.
It would be financially infeasible to go this route with an S19 or so that is very expensive (+10 grand) to buy and already takes ~2 years to ROI when running all the time, but since this is excess power, you can use an old S9 that just costs $500 used.

Honestly, I believe the public perception could shift if people understand two things:
(1) The current monetary system they know and (maybe) love consumes not only much more energy, but also emits more carbon dioxide and costs real human lives.
(2) Bitcoin mining creates an incentive to build new wind and solar installations which will long-term kill coal and gas power, which they must surely be big proponents of if they're really environmentalists.

This answers the OP's question. OP seems to have misconceptions about mining and energy use and so therefore is trying to come up with solutions (that would be much worse than PoW) to a problem that doesn't exist.

The 'energy waste' of bitcoin mining is something you read about in articles written by people who aren't educated on Bitcoin mining. There is no energy waste because it is all used productively to secure the network. In fact, instead of wasting energy, it actually productively uses a lot of wasted energy, which is obviously a positive thing - society wastes tons of energy, Bitcoin allows us to take some of that wasted energy and direct it to something productive, specifically, the securing of the world's best form of money.

So yeah odolvlobo is right in saying the real obstacles are misconceptions about bitcoin mining energy usage. There is no problem in PoW to solve. PoW solved a set of problems extremely well, and as a huge side benefit it allows humanity to make productive use of the vast amounts of wasted and stranded energy in our society/planet. Furthermore, there is never excess energy used for mining Bitcoin because miners are held to economic incentives - if mining outstrips adoption (aka price) some miners most exposed to a price drop will stop mining and then difficulty drops to keep the economic incentives for everyone left mining.

It is a self-correcting system. PoW mining naturally gravitates toward stranded or wasted energy because that is cheap energy, and the energy usage of mining always stays in line with what the economic value of Bitcoin can sustain. People who think that PoW is some problem that needs a solution don't have a firm grasp on how mining works and the benefits it provides.

Apparently some company is going to be selling a 128 core cpu next year. i bet that will put asics out of business. plus it won't make any noise.

ASIC is like a specialized hardware designed to run at maximum speed to perform a certain computation, in this case SHA256 hashes. Not to mention that they are very efficient when it comes to energy consumption. CPUs can not compete with that.

yeah you might be right. i checked and i think all it would be able to do is a half a gigahash per second. that wouldn't be enough to make any cash. so it won't help with mining bitcoin but maybe some other altcoin it could.

No chance. An S19 Pro is 5 million times faster than a CPU core. You would need 40,000 128-core CPUs to match a single S19 Pro.

When you are calculating total computing power, you should keep in mind that usually when the number of cores in a CPU increases their individual clock speed decreases. That's because high CPU clock produces a lot more heat than a low CPU clock, with more cores you get more heat and at some point it would take a lot to cool the CPU down.
For example core i9-10980XE has 18 cores but speed is 3 GHz while core i7-7740X has 4 cores with the speed of 4.3 GHz each.

Not at all! I first thought you were trolling, but it's good. We're all here to learn. First of all, 64-core CPUs are widespread in server applications for years, and a 2x improvement in core count is just O(1) difference, so those would compete with ASICs just as well as 128-core CPUs (just use 2 of them, right).
Secondly, no general-purpose chip can compete with ASICs per definition. Realistically, even a very old ASIC will beat such a CPU.

Little back of the envelope calculation:
Let's assume the CPU was able to do one SHA per clock cycle (absolute maximum, with specialized instruction that doesn't exist). Let's assume a constant all-core (usually only 1 core can boost, but let's assume so) boost clock of the highest boosting CPU of roughly 5GHz (high core count CPUs clock lower, but let's give it its best shot). 128 cores x 5GHz x 1 hash/s = 640GH/s.
At a power draw of probably 300-500W and probably costing around $2,000 USD.

You can get a Compac F [1] for around $200 and 15W of power draw that pushes 300GH/s, so two of those would match this hypothetical CPU at a price of $400 and 30W. That's 5 times cheaper and at least 10 times more power efficient, so you could say 50 times better.

However I gave very very optimistic numbers; a CPU needs way more than 1 cycle per hash; I believe 100-1000 cycles if memory serves correct, which would be 6.4GH/s or 0.64GH/s - much lower than even an old stick miner which just pulls 5W like NewPac [2].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5355470.0
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5053711.0

Well if what they saying is true that it power consumption is 10 times less than what exist now, if you assume 15 watts per core for standard hardware, then this thing 1.5 watts per core. so under 200 watts total at full load. $2000 for that cpu is probably about in the right ballpark. they said the cost is 3x lower than other things.


the problem with doing that is, it can't mine anything else except sha-256 coins and even at 300GH/s I don't think it makes any money. which is why i later said that the only way this cpu could make sense in mining is to mine some other algo. where it could probably make some money.

but there is an upfront cost kind of like there is for asic mining. no getting around that. but i realize now that asics are way more advanced in bitcoin for cpus to be competitive. ;D

Okay, so if it's 200W, it's only 1/3 less than what I used, so it doesn't change the result much.

Sure, you would buy more of them if you have $2000+ in budget or just get something with better hash / $ ratio like an S17 ASIC. These are definitely overpriced if you want to get a lot of hashrate and really make some money. Even the little Apollo BTC has a better hash / $ ratio than the Compac, though it consumes more power (per hash).

Sure, there always is. The CPU you mentioned will surely be great for something like Monero or other CPU-targeted coins, however I'm not sure if there won't be ASICs for those eventually, too (or already exist but nobody knows about it). But this is another topic. ;)

All miners who compete for a new block actually contribute to the blockchain security because the network operate in a consensus mechanism in that if the rest are completely wait for a new block to be registered by selection or declaration of interest to register it can result in an invalid UXTO. Bitcoin will remain an energy consumption crypto due to it's proof of work the only remedy is alternative source of energy generation preferably through waste

What I like so much about PoW / wasting electrical energy is that you can produce this energy cleanly, so without harming the environment.

I'm not aware of anything else that can be produced and wasted in a climate-neutral fashion; for instance, proof of space requires certain materials to produce HDDs and SSDs and they end up on landfills at the end of the day. ASIC miners eventually also have a limited lifetime, but are often resold and reused for many years down the road. I can also imagine future ASIC designs to e.g. allow to upgrade hashboards without trashing the whole device. This would already reduce e-waste a good bit.

Side note, the problem with Proof of Space is not the algorithm itself,
it is the use of SSD drive, which are designed from the beginning to have a shorten lifespan of writes.
If one used the older design Sata drives with no writes limits or created large virtual drives in pure ram,
this SSD waste issue could be eliminated.   ;)
 

So, it would be "obscured" Proof of Work again, right? Because if you add the magic word "compressed" to those "large virtual drives", then you will get Proof of Work. So, you have a choice: you can execute SHA-256 many times, for example 2^32 times at difficulty one, and get one matching block hash. Or you can create 2^32 hashes on hard disk, ram disk, or just "any" disk, then we have your "large virtual drives in pure ram". And if you change SHA-256 to Shabal, and add plotting, then you will get Chia, Burstcoin, and others. As you can see, Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work (https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/). Again.

i did read about a cpu that had almost 1 million cores i think 850,000 but i'm sure it's an expensive machine. but assuming each core could do 1 gigahash per second, that would be 850 terahash per second. not bad.

In your opinion,
PoW is cheapest, only bitcoin supporters believe such fantasy.
No one else does.

Everyone else is moving to proof of stake or anything but PoW.

An alternative opinion : Bitcoin is a Dumpster Fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeM1VK7yyCI

* PoW in it's current energy wasting state can't survive a carbon tax.*  :)

Plus Bitcoin miners make lousy neighbors by raising everyone power bill and increasing blackouts.
https://www.governing.com/next/what-risks-does-crypto-mania-pose-to-texas-power-grid

It's a free world, nobody can force them to use the most secure option. It's like food, for centuries we've been eating healthy food but suddenly some people decided to eat cockroaches. We can't prevent them, no matter how stupid that is. ;)

The PoS coin Algorand is more secure than PoW BTC.

A more proper analogy,
is why do people driving old model T car (BTC) believe they can out perform a Corvette (Algorand).

Simple delusions based on confusing a technology with a religion.   ;)

Algorand 4 second block time with transactions guaranteed forever after 1 block
BTC 10 minute block time with no guarantee against transaction rewrites aside from the last checkpoint coded by satoshi himself.

True security only happens with transaction finality, Algorand has it after only 1 block , bitcoin does not.

Sure; a centralized 100% premined coin can be more secure than a decentralized PoW coin.

Again, it is a free world and nobody is forcing others to buy the secure, decentralized and fairly distributed bitcoin. If people think that dog poop in a pretty bag is a valuable purchase who are we to judge them ;)

And if people can't recognize that PoW is the dog poop, well enjoy your btc until they do.  :)

And nearly everyone's using Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, Windows, Google products, PayPal, other financial institutions etc.; that doesn't make them good.

Because they think they're driving a Corvette, but in reality, their car is worse than Hyundai Atos.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

You have no idea what I am talking about.
That's on you.
 :)

Maybe a little reading might help you, but I remain skeptical of your ability to comprehend.
https://smithandcrown.com/glossary/transaction-finality-probabilisticdeterministic/
In Short , you hope BTC attains transaction finality with each additional block,
but without a program coded checkpoint there will never be a 100% guarantee with btc that a transaction can't be overwritten.
While on the other hand algorand has transaction finality after 1 four second block.
The should be apparent to anyone that algorand transaction are more secure than btc transactions.
Plus Algorand does it without raising energy rates or causing increases in grid blackouts.

Feel free to deny it, but reality will be unaffected by your false belief.   :)

The problem with analogies is that you have to come up with clearly defined comparisons, in this case, you're simply labeling coins as you wish without any single valid point.
If Algo is the corvette because of speed, then what is Solana?, A Ferrari? Doge is a Mustang?
And what has PoW and PoS to do with block time anyhow? Should we start the debate on electric or diesel now?  ;D

Rather than labeling BTC as a Model T, how about you label it as the car that gets you everywhere, while your algo is just a bling coin that is not accepted anywhere as it doesn't mean road standards? See, this analogy is based on a clear observable fact!

For a more accurate analogy, which cars have been banned from driving on public roads in China?  :)

So do you also believe that transaction finality is irrelevant to security as blackhatcoiner does?

I'll deny it, thanks.

Checkpoints protect against a low difficulty flood attack. They can't protect the system against a 51% attack, which is the kind of attack that overwrites transactions, unless they happen on every block. If they do, as in the case with Algorand, there's no decentralized decision-making.

If you start "locking" blocks by inserting unnecessary checkpoints everywhere, denying the existence of a chain with more work that isn't complied with your chain, then you fail to produce consensus. This isn't a technical problem, but a logical. If your coin is so insecure that you have to update the checkpoints in each block, then it fails at being decentralized.

Here's a discussion, 6 years ago, regarding this matter: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/7591
And: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5276774.msg55225123#msg55225123

Checkpoints protect all transactions before it, not even a 51% attack could change it.
There are program coded checkpoints or rolling checkpoints that block reorgs at a specific number of blocks.
Satoshi was the 1st to put checkpoints into btc code after software updates.

But you are confused on the issue,
as only 1st or 2nd generation blockchains such as the ancient btc, would be helped by checkpoints to achieve transaction finality.

3rd generation Blockchains such as algorand and cardano have evolved past the needs for such an old design of checkpoints.
One example Algorand design prevents any forking, something old outdated btc using PoW could never hope to accomplish.

Exactly. A 51% attack can't happen if the nodes don't accept to change their past blocks, but this, ultimately, ruins the thing the entire game theory is dependent on; decentralized decision-making. Consensus is produced only if everyone's following the chain with the most work. If one denies to change their past block, because they believe they've been attacked, then you can't tolerate the Byzantine's fault, which is the problem you're trying to solve.

The only way, for the Byzantine generals, to agree on a concerted strategy is by following the most work, objectively. If there's subjectivity, then there's no true blockchain. One node says that their chain's true, another might disagree. This is essentially Proof-of-Stake; and that's why I believe it's less secure.

---

If Algorand has a new checkpoint on every block, then how does it bear with stale blocks?

Like I said, you are confused,
Algorand does not use checkpoints and it never forks.

We have derailed this topic enough,
I suggest you research the 3rd generation blockchain designs of algorand and cardano thru google.

And on that note, To all of you a good day.  :)

I think that is a common misconception. PoW can result in an increased usage of clean energy, ONLY under the assumption that they're cheaper than fossil fuels. Well, they can be very well true but you have to realize that by dedicating clean energy to mining, you are also depriving some other areas that is currently burning fossil fuel. There is no good way to argue that any energy intensive task is inherently green, because they aren't.

There is also a common misconception about the lifespan of ASIC miners. Unlike most other electronics, ASIC miners don't actually get re-used solely because of the economics. Once they are disposed, they do not get reused because it would've already been unprofitable. There is no reason for it to be resold for anything other than scraps, because they have next to no value. Something that also perpetuates this is also unfortunately the technological improvements on the efficiency. This is unfortunately a vicious cycle that we cannot solve.

Also, the way that the mining industry functions is that we don't expect technological innovations other than if it helps with the efficiency. So no point trying to explore re-purposed hashing boards or to have it function differently and on that topic FPGAs are re-programmable. ASICs are not, they are optimized for one task and also cheaper.

The response to all of these is to just live with it.

The issue I have with this statement is that it has been said by every single one of the thousands of altshitcoins for over a dozen years now. It gets old. After a while, when you see these claims have always been unfounded and the coins have always failed after a few years of hype, you lose interest in looking into these new revolutionary protocols and ideas.

Yeah; this stuff gets old.. :D Newcomers who haven't heard of these ideas in the past think they're new and modern, just like they think PoS is the new hot thing. While Bitcoiners have discussed it thoroughly long before and decided unanimously that it's not a good idea. Now that enough time has passed, non-cypherpunks saw the opportunity to make a lot of money by selling this old, dismissed idea to clueless people as the new, hot shit and took it.

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I didn't intend to argue that an energy intensive task is inherently green, so this would be a strawman argument against me. However I stated the fact that using electrical energy has the chance / possibility to be done in a climate-neutral fashion, while other forms of securing money can't do this. Such as proof-of-storage or fiat currency.

Isn't this one of the greatest things about Bitcoin mining? People have a financial incentive to research and develop more efficient silicon, smaller chip manufacturing nodes and better optimized package designs, amongst many other aspects that go into making these highly-optimized, highly-efficient chips. This not only adds more hashrate to the network without significantly increasing the energy footprint, but I'm sure the technological advancements trickle down to other chips as well.
For instance, a 5nm ASIC fab should be able to produce 5nm consumer chips, as well (correct me if I'm wrong).

Yeah, PoS was created in early days and died then and there. Most of the coins that started it don't even exist today. But unfortunately there are "expert looking people" that are pumping this type of misinformation to the newbies minds. People such as the creators of centralized shitcoins that all have a massive premined like ethereum and its 70+ million premine. They are trying to convince people that PoS is better so that they can make more money by receiving "interest" on the massive amount of premined coins they printed for free.

Not really. Your ASICs are usually not recyclable, perhaps only the aluminium but for the chips, boards and stuff they can't really be recycled and they would probably just be thrown in a landfill. The production of these devices already incurs a huge penalty on the environment before the process even starts. That aside, pretty much the same argument can be made from the rest, because your initial production already uses so many raw materials (aluminium, copper, silicon, etc) and they are all being (physically) mined at the same time. So I would argue that the actual (non-intrinstic) environmental impact could potentially be larger, even if for some reason renewable energy becomes cheaper than coal everywhere.
It depends. When the cost of production goes down, you get more devices on the network and even more e-waste problem. The problem with the increase in efficiency, specifically in Bitcoin mining is that you get a lot of machines going obsolete far before the actual lifespan of the device and you can't do anything but to just throw it away. A good percentage of the device cannot be recycled. Energy footprint will always increase so long as ASICs are being produced.

The technological improvements won't actually trickle down to consumer chips or anything. Firstly, the entire mining's market share is far smaller than your regular electronics and the fabs are done by the fabrication plants but the chip designs are done by the ASIC manufacturer. Any improvements that you make is basically limited to Bitcoin specific application because the architecture is very different (ie. having only to hash SHA256 vs graphics processing, data processing, etc etc).

It's not completely correct. Sure, 'mining for profit' usually requires the latest-gen machines due to Bitcoin difficulty adjustment. As soon as the new generation of miners is released, the old ones aren't usable anymore even though the hardware is still fine.
But what I see at the moment and hope to see more in the future, are projects like Apollo BTC [1] and GekkoScience Compac F [2] (though I am waiting for their Apollo-style pod miner), which utilize a bit older chips as a way to 'dollar-cost average through the power bill' and get KYC-free Bitcoins in a regular interval. These home-mining devices, as well as various Bitcoin water heaters and similar ideas, could make use of outdated and even used chips and hashboards.

Generally, people keep buying old ASICs; even though I'm not always sure why (for example really old MHz-range USB asics). Maybe mikeywith knows more; but I suspect some of them have fixed-rate, so basically free extra electricity contracts.

When I said 'other forms of securing money', I was mostly targeting fiat. It requires much more energy and earth resources than the electronics used to build ASICs.

As for the price of coal energy, as far as I know the reason it's so cheap in some location is that it's heavily subsidized; but I may be wrong.

Interesting, thanks! I was hoping that the gained knowledge, techniques and machinery could be used for other chips, by just using a different photolitography mask (that 'encodes' an x86 CPU instead of a SHA256 ASIC for example).

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5314398.0
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5355470.0

I see some point as using it as a heater, though those older ASICs typically incur more power costs than profits, and they are generally barely profitable (might have $1 or so profits after eliminating the power costs) so the ROI is typically never. They are generally built for hobby and lottery mining and not much purpose otherwise.

I was actually researching into getting older ASICs when I was having free electricity and the ROI was basically not happening, and it was just more worth it for me to either get an S19 (with a reasonable ROI) or S17 (with an unreasonably long ROI). Not to mention that the state of these are not really ideal for home mining. Just my two cents here, perhaps you might have a different experience.

As for your last two points, I'd say it depends. There is a shift towards cashless transactions and the reliance on physical currency is rapidly decreasing with the growth in fintech so I don't foresee it to be a long term issue.

I think part of the reason for the cheaper prices might be subsidies. But I think it also differs between locations; they have established infrastructure to utilize the coal as well as being a coal/fossil fuel producers. Some countries simply cannot fully support themselves with just renewable energy.

The idea is that for instance if you're heating with electricity anyway, usually you just burn it and get the heat out; instead if you generate heat by mining, you also get some coins. But of course an ASIC will be more expensive than a simple heater which just creates a short circuit in a piece of metal that heats up.

I didn't mean that huge amounts of resources and energy are needed to create the physical form of fiat; but this energy is needed to 'secure the network', similar to Bitcoin. Just that you can't make it 100% renewable due to e.g. the need of a military to secure the fiat currency.
My guess is that the energy used by the lights in bank branches all over the world exceeds Bitcoin's energy consumption; but there are less 'tangible' forms of energy consumption in the traditional banking sector, as well. For example (good article as a whole):

Then there isn't a good point isn't it? ASICs are not good space heaters because:
1) They're far more likely to spoil with little resale value.
2) They don't generate enough to warrant the hassle to set it up.
3) You make far more Bitcoins by buying a simple space heater and buying Bitcoins directly with the rest
4) They're really, really loud and just like a vacuum cleaner running 24/7. Trust me, you won't want any of them near your house.

It isn't quite a fair argument, if you're buying used ASICs specifically to heat your space. A used S9 is around $400 (might be more expensive depends on your location), and incurs a $0.60 loss a day assuming electricity rates of $0.05/kwh, which isn't very common. Also, not to say that just because some might want to lottery mine, it doesn't mean that the other millions of ASICs are also resellable.
Banks have a CSR to follow actually, if you look at their yearly report, they have made conscious efforts to shift to either renewable energy or to digitialize their banks. All in all, for their transaction volume, it is fair to say that the cost is very much worth it. Can't say the same for Bitcoin or any crypto in general.

I'm not so sure about the point on military, the carbon footprint incurred by the military, either due to securing fiat(?) [which I believe would be rather negligible] or just in general is very much necessary and is a good tradeoff.

The thing is that, most don't appreciate the role of central banking systems. Central banking system actually plays an important role in ensuring economic stability. A totally unregulated and decentralized system like Bitcoin is actually quite a novel concept and it is insufficient to determine the avalanche effect that could happen if Bitcoin were to go through certain adjustments and if the world currency is totally dependent on it.