What are the biggest competing GPU coins (measured in number of GPUs)?

What is the difficulty target as a function of (average) nethash

2 days out of 10 years for 50% of the coins to be mined? Sounds like a disaster all right.

Short attention span much?

This is fixed with normalization. For example, the blocks include the transactions but you don't need to store the transactions twice.

Potentially the on-disk size may be reduced (both initial size and growth rate), but we don't know how much yet (and probably not in the initial release). The original upstream implementation is as much as 2-2.5x larger than it needs to be.

Not really no. Since PoW networks are competing for energy there will be fewer of them with any scale at all, and it will therefore be easier for one network (or perhaps a small number of networks) to get extremely large, after which point it will have a large network effect. As was said earlier, competing for a scarce resource prevents unlimited duplication at the level of networks.


No I don't think we can assume that at all. We can't even assume that Bitcoin will ever get large relative to fiat. There is certainly no guarantee that any PoS will ever get large, even as large as Bitcoin (which is small). It might happen. I might even agree that diversification is smart. But it is not something that can be assumed.

Dev said 1.5m a few posts back: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=713538.msg8113375#msg8113375

That is true. But just as powerful as network effect is, it is also hard to achieve. How many startups become Facebook?

None of these coins is very big. Possibly excluding Bitcoin. So their network effect is not very big either. Look at the market cap of bitcoin vs. fiat (i.e. tiny). That is an indication of the size of its network effect. All PoS coins are far, far, far below that.

If any of them become a big success then it will have strong network effect, but not before.

(Yes this applies to Monero as well. We are trying to build something but we're not going to go running around saying we have this huge network effect. And as for FCN or whatever, I'm not even sure I need to answer that question, the differences between that and XMR in terms of how likely they are to grow into something big are pretty obvious.)

No the difficulties would just go up, more energy would be used. The fraction of energy used in the entire economy would be largely unchanged and would continue to be a mirror of the relative value placed on the cryptocoins as opposed to other energy uses throughout the economy. (There would be a slight change because cheaper energy would shift around other uses.)


It is the scarcity of energy that prevents having many coins with high energy usage. People have to choose between them, and the ones not so-chosen fail to survive because they can't secure their networks. This need to choose creates scarcity not only at the level of tokens, but at the level of coin duplication.

Not exactly. He's right in a way. Energy is scarce. You can't duplicate Bitcoin or Monero a million times with their high hash rates because the energy usage would be prohibitive. You can create a little million shitcoins with virtualy no hash rate, or which are constantly stealing hash rate from each other as miner jump to the latest scam, and these might indeed be clones of the BTC or XMR code, but those are not duplicates of the BTC or XMR network

POS coins can be duplicated quite literally without physical limit. That is a major difference.

I don't totally agree this means they can never have value though.

Ethereum is going to be PoW, at least initially. They have said they might switch to mixed PoS/PoW.

The more questionable part of the statement was the assertion that buyers don't care about PoW or PoS. They might not care about the inner workings, but they damn well care in so far as it affects the security (incl perceived security) and value (incl perceived value) of their investment. To some extent this may be arbitrary or unfair (or perhaps a better word is undeserved). PoS might just has a bad reputation for whatever reasons not based in actual security (and being associated hundreds of PoS scam coins might well be part of the reason), which affects its perceived value and therefore is value. In that case it is still a bad investment (unless you want to make a bet on this changing in the future).

Lots and lots of coins are testing all kinds of block times.

Unfortunately people tend to have no real clue why Satoshi picked 10 minutes and just go with "we want faster transactions" (occasionally "we want to make it easier to mine blocks") and then make it much shorter without doing anything else to address the underlying justification for 10 minutes.

The numbers in my previous post are more or less right (obviously it depends on the specifics of the p2p network and a few other factors). So if you want a low orphan rate (1% or less) in a distributed p2p network you are stuck with something like 10 minutes.

That post exactly makes my point:


As I said, "show your work." Write down all the assumptions and every step in the derivation of your security results, along with the implementation, and then let other people look at it.

In any case, this is pretty much far off topic for Monero. Let's continue this discussion elsewhere.

No reason to even do that.

He tried to claim to have 2 million, then (fraudulently) edited his post, and then (fraudulently again) claimed he didn't. If he never tried to claim that he never edited his post, it could conceivably have been a typo, but at this point it is 100% scam.

More recent comments. https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/

If anything Vitalik is biased in favor of PoS. He really wants to find a way to make it sound, and I think their plan may include a combination PoW/PoS for Ethereum, but they haven't quite solved that yet, much less pure PoS.

This is incorrect. Vitalik (of Ethereum) is one of the smart guys. He is well aware of Nxt. He tried to develop a PoS algorithm for Ethereum (Slasher) and decided to abandon it after a lot of work because it wasn't secure and he couldn't fix it. He describes PoS as one of the "hard problems in cryptocurrency" here: http://vitalik.ca/files/problems.pdf

This is most certainly not a solved problem. It is promising, but that's all. The Nxt developers are aware of problems with their scheme as well, which is why they plan changes. They think they can fix it. Others are not so sure.

Probably not, everyone has biases.

But math is math, and if you show actual mathematical proofs, the experts will fall in line (and even build on top of your work).

For example, much of the cryptonote cryptography gets good reviews from people who are clearly biased toward bitcoin (gmaxwell being one well known example). They also come up with some very valid criticisms and suggestions for improvement (which we considering).

No one has demonstrated that in a way that has convinced the community of disinterested domain experts that their scheme is sound.

I agree "it would be nice" if you could do something that was distributed, trustless and highly energy efficient, but right now that is unicorn cryptography.

It is not workable. Just stop.