[Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate

[MrSolo]

It's funny how you guys keep mentioning China PoW ban and only see the ban not the afterwards. This supposed "impact on the grids" never existed as it is evident from China and how their energy crisis didn't even change. In fact the stats suggest after China banned bitcoin mining the electricity usage kept on rising instead of having even a small drop!

Basically when it comes to this news you only ate the FUD and didn't even analyze what happened. For example the fact that the hashrate drop was very small and didn't change anything apart from affecting newbies who believed the FUD to panic sell and cause a crash that led to a bigger drop in hashrate than the ban itself!

The meme @n0nce posted is very apt.

Saying that crypto mining has no noticable affect on the grid is like saying that cars cause no pollution, it's just false, from the hashrate you can estimate that Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production  and that's just for BTC, there is ETH which also consumes so much electricity, LTC, BCH...etc

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[pooya87]

Saying that crypto mining has no noticable affect on the grid is like saying that cars cause no pollution,
0.55% of global electricity production

You answered yourself.

there is ETH which also consumes so much electricity, LTC, BCH...etc

Shitcoin hashrates are a joke when compared to bitcoin hashrate and you already admitted that bitcoin power consumption is miniscule.

Code:

BTC 215,000,000 THS
ETH         995 THS
LTC         443 THS
BCH   1,400,000 THS

[n0nce]

Good sir, I think you ate really too much of that FUD. Let me show you.

1. You did not have to relocate.

Did someone ever have to relocate because Bitcoin mining 'took away their electricity'? I have never heard of that. Any source?
Or you mean the miners relocating? By that I don't mean that Chinese mining operators had to travel; they just sold their stock, that's what miner relocation means. The miners moved into other countries and also many people's households as I explained.
Please read: https://www.econoalchemist.com/post/home-mining-for-non-kyc-bitcoin

2. You did not live on the same grid, where the PoW miners drove up the price of electricity for everyone on the specific grid not just other miners.

Even if miners were to drive up electricity prices, what's the issue? This is capitalism. If I want to run a miner or any other industrial machine in my home, and the electricity price will rise because of that, that's what happens in a free market. Are we going to restrict usage of other heavy equipment like lathes, CNCs etc. because electricity price for other residents might rise?
Also, this is absolute FUD because miners don't like high electricity price. If it's not very very low, they rather put their own solar on the roof or rent a facility near to a hydro power station like in northern Italy.

3. You did not suffer rolling blackouts during the cold/heat because of the PoW miners using excessive amounts of energy compared to the local populace.

Where did this happen? In fact, large Bitcoin miners were amongst the few companies who paused operation a few times already when there were power outages due to natural desasters: https://www.fxempire.com/news/article/major-texas-bitcoin-miners-close-operations-ahead-of-winter-storm-886454

4. You think calling everything FUD that is bad Public relations for BTC , will help make you rich. (Good Luck with that.)

You are constantly speaking about 'investors' and 'making people rich'; why are you so focused on this? I don't even consider myself an investor honestly. You seem to care a lot about the investors though (no mention of Bitcoiners or people who legitimately want the best for the future of Bitcoin - like myself).

preparing a plan of action to protect btc investors.

Last Fact for you Governments won't care what you think when their energy resources are being exhausted and power grids are in danger of collapse.

First of all, what do you mean 'their energy resources'? If I pay for the electricity, shouldn't I be able do with it whatever I want. Shouldn't it become 'my energy resource' as soon as I pay my electricity bill?
Secondly, you showed nicely that Bitcoin mining energy consumption is a very very small amount globally, so especially if it's distributed evenly (e.g. 1 miner per household instead of 1 large container in a location), it won't be noticeable anywhere. Neither on the total global power consumption nor on the environmental impacts.

Will it take 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, or longer for a worldwide PoW ban, but that is undeniably the final destination of PoW,

Besides the fact that this won't happen since not all countries in the world are authoritarian dictatorships, how are you going to stop home miners?
Apollos, small S9s, and even a bunch of Compac Fs plugged into random kids' PC ports. You can't stop this dude. Unless you have something like DDR Stasi going through millions of homes and checking what hardware people are running in their homes (again, I told you most countries are not authoritarian dictatorships).
Furthermore, even today we have countries that are basically lawless if you bring with you enough money; hence people have their bank accounts in such countries and register companies there - no reason why large miners who don't want to stop operation would set up a facility over there.

which is why any coin with a sane development team is moving to Proof of Stake.

No, as we showed you, PoS is definitely not a solution; even if PoW needed to go. I think BlackHatCoiner already posted this, but maybe try to read this: https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-people-promoting-it-are-scammers/

Home PoW mining was stopped by the Elites centralizing PoW mining and going industrial ,

How's that? It's just a free market; and you do have an advantage with larger operations due to economy of scale. But there is no conspiracy 'Elite' stopping PoW in the homes deliberately. Especially if there were government bans and if large operations would have to shut down, the profitability of home mining would rise again. The 'stopping' (it never stopped, but let's say so) of home mining isn't irreversible, you know.

The Elite Miners would rather take the whole btc chain down with them than promote a longer run by returning to CPU only PoW,
but what do you expect when the PoW miners whole motive is pure greed.

Dude 'pure greed'... It's just business man. Get a grip. Then I'll say the 'whole motive' of you going to work is 'pure greed'?

Actually considering China is a major hydro power producer and they still banned PoW,
only proves that all countries will have to at some point ban PoW mining, for the same reason China did, to protect their power grids.

How hard is it to understand that they did not have to ban it; not for the sake of any power grid or environment. Their authoritarian dictators don't care about people's access to electricity or the environment; I can tell you that. They care about total control of the population; and Bitcoin can't be controlled, that's what scares them so much about it.
In comparison, they can much easier control a PoS currency by e.g. buying out its market cap. If that gets too expensive, they will just ban that, too. It's not about energy, it's about control.

PoW miners have only just started moving to Texas,

So? Nothing changed for Bitcoin. Even if a large part of miners goes offline: difficulty will adjust and everyone still mining will start making more money. This will motivate more people to start mining and they'll try buying miners as well. It all self-stabilizes. Bitcoin doesn't care.

Best case Texas bans PoW mining within 2 years,
Worst case Texas power grid collapses within 4 years, and Texas needs ~5 years to restart the power grid, if and only if China sells them the replacement transformers. Expect a worldwide PoW ban in less than 6 months if that happens.

Bitcoin don't care. Difficulty keeps adjusting, miners keep getting more efficient, hashrate keeps decentralizing; wonderful.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Last Fact for you Governments won't care what you think when their energy resources are being exhausted and power grids are in danger of collapse.

Yeah, Bitcoin will collapse the entire world, who's going to think of the children, right? People can use their energy however they wish. It's theirs. If the energy exhausting rises the electricity prices, it'll push them into cheaper sources, such as renewable ones. It's already well-known that more than half of the hashes that are done, are green. Periodically, Bitcoin becomes even more environmentally friendly.

I'm now even more disgusted by those PoS supporters. They abuse your humanistic feelings (such as the environmental awareness) for improving their persuasion. And they're calling you greedy... Keep your "government regulation", I'll keep my decentralization, thanks.

[vjudeu]

but what do you expect when the PoW miners whole motive is pure greed

Talking about greed is quite funny in context of Proof of Stake, where whales can print money, just because they are whales. Also, even if you can produce some kind of Proof of Stake that would be honest, then it will work just like some obfuscated Proof of Work, like in this table: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#nonproductive-investments-are-wasteful

[tromp]

Code:

BTC 215,000,000 THS
ETH         995 THS
LTC         443 THS
BCH   1,400,000 THS

Comparing hashrates of different PoWs is quite meaningless...

If you want to compare mining efforts, use something more meaningful like daily dollar issuance;
see the column labeled "PoW Produced (24h)" in https://www.f2pool.com/coins

[LegendaryK]

Good sir, I think you ate really too much of that FUD.

You Dear Sir,
Are full of something, I suggest using it in your garden, instead of spewing it in your posts.

Biden new execuitive order on digital assets that no one read had the following line:
Climate and Pollution—The United States also has an interest in reducing “negative climate impacts and environmental pollution” from “some cryptocurrency mining.”

In case you don't get it, this is the starting point of a US PoW ban within 3 years.
Your Greedy PoW miners better start looking for a new home, until their are none left.

but what do you expect when the PoW miners whole motive is pure greed

Talking about greed is quite funny in context of Proof of Stake, where whales can print money, just because they are whales. Also, even if you can produce some kind of Proof of Stake that would be honest, then it will work just like some obfuscated Proof of Work, like in this table: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#nonproductive-investments-are-wasteful

Anyone can pool coins and stake them, where as only the elite can afford to PoW mine.
How is having a consensus where only the rich can afford to participate in printing money as you say , not greed and keeping the common man down.
You make such a silly argument, please list the address of the warehouse you own that is participating in bitcoin PoW mining.

Last Fact for you Governments won't care what you think when their energy resources are being exhausted and power grids are in danger of collapse.

Yeah, Bitcoin will collapse the entire world, who's going to think of the children, right? People can use their energy however they wish. It's theirs. If the energy exhausting rises the electricity prices, it'll push them into cheaper sources, such as renewable ones. It's already well-known that more than half of the hashes that are done, are green. Periodically, Bitcoin becomes even more environmentally friendly.

I'm now even more disgusted by those PoS supporters. They abuse your humanistic feelings (such as the environmental awareness) for improving their persuasion. And they're calling you greedy... Keep your "government regulation", I'll keep my decentralization, thanks.

You have centralized PoW mining for the elite only.
And the only disgusting thing is your greed, as you are not even an elite PoW miner, but a mere pup crying for scraps at the elite PoW mining table.
The confusion , more energy will just be produced shows a level of ignorance of the power industry as no other.
Bitcoin PoW energy drain doubles every two years or so, energy resources from all new renewables is maxing out at 4% increase per year.
It would take 25 years for renewals to match 1 bitcoin energy waste doubling, which is why their is not an energy solution to the PoW dead end.

[garlonicon]

please list the address of the warehouse you own that is participating in bitcoin PoW mining

You don't need a warehouse if you can mine fractional satoshis with your CPU. If someone will succeed at shutting down huge ASIC miners, then the difficulty would drop, so small CPU and GPU miners will start mining. Also, it will make more pressure for decentralizing PoW mining.

For example:

network target: 0000000000000000000a37730000000000000000000000000000000000000000
reward per target: 6.34333655 BTC (basic block reward plus fees)
target for single satoshi: 00000000000182482072fc950000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (network target * number of satoshis)
target for single millisatoshi: 0000000005e4e9bec12aa6080000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (target for satoshi * 1000)

As you can see, single millisatoshis could be mined today on CPU's, if miners could be rewarded proportionally to their mining power. Banning ASIC's is just pushing us faster to that scenario.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Anyone can pool coins and stake them, where as only the elite can afford to PoW mine.

Rich people can afford more than the poor, capitalism 101. The difficulty changes based on the rich and that is true for everything in life. The "sharpest" criticisms of capitalism lie on this fact. Unfortunately for us, humanity is a clustered phenomenon.

What you fail to understand is that PoS will get much more centralized in the course of time, because the stakers are encouraged to continue earning their share than to dump it. There's no uncertainty. And new stakers can't enter the system if those few decide to remain.

If I found out Bitcoin in 2009, figured out that you can mine with GPUs and had one third of the total hashrate for a little while, I couldn't keep it mine, because there were newcomers I could not control of. It wasn't down to me to approve them. On the other hand, if I somehow acquired 10% of the total coins in circulation, of a PoS crypto, it'd be like I owned a part of the network... Forever.

Staking is progressive. The greater the economic base, the greater the individual's economic growth. Mining is inversely progressive. The greater the economic base, the worse the individual's economic growth. (Macroeconomically)

Whoever wants to mine is in no miners' question to do so. Mining, by design, reduces the network portion of each miner, over the long term.

[stwenhao]

which is why any coin with a sane development team is moving to Proof of Stake

Bitcoin could move to Proof of Stake naturally, by using Merged Mining (or rather "Merged Signing", because it would be based on Bitcoin signatures, not block headers). There is no need to make new coins out of thin air, each participant could join just by owning bitcoins. Bitcoin transactions could be reused to push the new chain forward, and then the economic majority would decide if they want to stake their coins or not. It is protected from pushing random transactions to such chain, because that altcoin could have consensus rules based on commitments, and public keys cannot be tweaked after sending some coins to them.

Also, things like slashing are possible, because it could be done by putting commitment in some pre-calculated R-value of the signature, so that two signatures would reveal the private key of the cheating staker, that could cause not only loss of altcoin, but also loss of Bitcoin, so it should be enough to discourage signing more than one chain.

[tromp]

if I somehow acquired 10% of the total coins in circulation, of a PoS crypto, it'd be like I owned a part of the network... Forever.

So exactly the same as if you somehow acquired 10% of the total supply of a capped PoW coin...

[n0nce]

if I somehow acquired 10% of the total coins in circulation, of a PoS crypto, it'd be like I owned a part of the network... Forever.

So exactly the same as if you somehow acquired 10% of the total supply of a capped PoW coin...

No, not at all! That's exactly the difference. Acquiring e.g. 2.1 million Bitcoin will give you no power over the network, will not allow you to mint new coins and won't allow you to decide who enters the network or not.
In contrast, acquiring 10% of capped PoS coin will basically give you 10% of the hashrate forever, how BlackHatCoiner nicely put it. Whereas owning a warehouse of GPUs which in 2009 would have represented 10% of the hashrate (voting power, coin minting), just a few years later would be useless. Today, a ~10W USB stick ASIC can probably outperform an entire such warehouse. So the ones who 'invested early' (into hashrate) don't get anything anymore out of it right now, whereas in PoS that would be the case.

[pooya87]

Comparing hashrates of different PoWs is quite meaningless...

It is very meaningful, it is comparing the number of hashes that are being computed every second in algorithms that sometimes are roughly the same too (SHA256 vs SHA3-256 vs scrypt) that in turn shows number of miners hence the total power consumption.

If you want to compare mining efforts, use something more meaningful like daily dollar issuance;
see the column labeled "PoW Produced (24h)" in https://www.f2pool.com/coins

Just because it has the word "PoW" in it doesn't mean it is related to power consumption or hashrate!
They are taking the total new coins produced that day and multiplying it by the price.

Code:

BTC:  6.25 *  144 * $41,000 = ~$36.89 mil
ETH:  2.00 * 6500 * $ 2,700 = ~$31.81 mil
LTC: 12.50 *  550 * $   109 = ~$ 0.75 mil

[LegendaryK]

What you fail to understand

Failing to understand,
that is the problem, but it is bitcoin PoW supporter's problem.
Governments declare and warn they will ban PoW mining, due to the dangers to their electric grid collapsing.
Numerous new articles point to the energy problems, from numerous countries.
And what does the bitcoin PoW supporter cry FUD, FUD, FUD.
It is like PoW supporters have some cognitive impairment that prevents rational thinking.
A sane person when forewarned of an potential threat, plans a defensive , PoW supporters cry fud.

if I somehow acquired 10% of the total coins in circulation, of a PoS crypto, it'd be like I owned a part of the network... Forever.

So exactly the same as if you somehow acquired 10% of the total supply of a capped PoW coin...

No, not at all! That's exactly the difference. Acquiring e.g. 2.1 million Bitcoin will give you no power over the network, will not allow you to mint new coins and won't allow you to decide who enters the network or not.
In contrast, acquiring 10% of capped PoS coin will basically give you 10% of the hashrate forever, how BlackHatCoiner nicely put it. Whereas owning a warehouse of GPUs which in 2009 would have represented 10% of the hashrate (voting power, coin minting), just a few years later would be useless. Today, a ~10W USB stick ASIC can probably outperform an entire such warehouse. So the ones who 'invested early' (into hashrate) don't get anything anymore out of it right now, whereas in PoS that would be the case.

You know you just pointed out how wasteful even the PoW ASICS are, less than 2 years and they are nothing more than paperweights.
Only 4 mining pool operators determine what bitcoin transactions are allowed.
Their are No PoS networks that are as centralized as bitcoin PoW.
As far as a PoS coin, 10% would give 10% of the staking rate, but they have to sell coins against fiat to make a profit,
meaning they sell their stake amounts, and if others don't, then that 10% staking rate drops over time, as it becomes less than 10%.
PoW is pure waste, ASICS (2 years and toss) and the energy drain, all waste and no performance increase when you waste more energy,
not even transaction finality in 4 hours.
While Algorand a PoS coin has transaction finality in 4 seconds, and massive onchain transaction capacity, that bitcoin PoW can't even hold a candle too.
Bitcoin PoW onchain transactions are so limited, that they want people to use offchain 3rd party networks such as LN or Liquid to compensate for btc onchain weakness. (Lame)

[tromp]

algorithms that sometimes are roughly the same too (SHA3-256 vs scrypt)

Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.
A scrypt hash is 4 orders of magnitude harder to compute than a SHA3-256 hash.

Daily dollar emission on the other hand is a good proxy for how much energy will be spent competing for those rewards.

[BlackHatCoiner]

It is like PoW supporters have some cognitive impairment that prevents rational thinking.

You seem to be the only irrational here, buddy. I've already answered you about these "warnings". @n0nce also did; it's not about ethics or economic damage. It's about control.

A sane person when forewarned of an potential threat, plans a defensive , PoW supporters cry fud.

A sane person filters what's been served to them by the media. If by "cry fud" you mean "resist to propaganda", yeah, I've seen this behavior from Bitcoiners very often.

[n0nce]

You know you just pointed out how wasteful even the PoW ASICS are, less than 2 years and they are nothing more than paperweights.
Only 4 mining pool operators determine what bitcoin transactions are allowed.
Their are No PoS networks that are as centralized as bitcoin PoW.
As far as a PoS coin, 10% would give 10% of the staking rate, but they have to sell coins against fiat to make a profit,
meaning they sell their stake amounts, and if others don't, then that 10% staking rate drops over time, as it becomes less than 10%.
PoW is pure waste, ASICS (2 years and toss) and the energy drain, all waste and no performance increase when you waste more energy,
not even transaction finality in 4 hours.
While Algorand a PoS coin has transaction finality in 4 seconds, and massive onchain transaction capacity, that bitcoin PoW can't even hold a candle too.
Bitcoin PoW onchain transactions are so limited, that they want people to use offchain 3rd party networks such as LN or Liquid to compensate for btc onchain weakness. (Lame)

So many words and so much nonsense.


'Wasteful ASICs' - that's the whole thing this thread is about. Without waste, no value. In other words, PoS is also wasteful since there is no incentive not to lock up funds forever (it's a free money printing machine with guaranteed returns). ASICs don't guarantee returns.

Centralization aspects due to mining pools are debunked over and over; yet you argument that in PoS you can pool your stakes, so on one hand you're against pools, while on the other hand you encourage them. Sounds odd.

Stakers don't have to sell their stakes to make a profit. In the real world, rich people don't e.g. sell shares to live off of, instead they borrow money against those shares. Same thing does / will happen with PoS holders. They just get richer and richer by design, guaranteed and will never sell off anything if they are smart. I'm sure they'll convince you that the only option to realize profits is to sell, because they don't want you to have a lot of stake and have it all for themselves. Bitcoin miners don't have to sell their machines to make a profit, for the record. They can sell the coins or hold them, both options are open.

There is no value without waste. There are many articles about it. Either your coin is worthless or waste is happening in a different way (not directly through power consumption or electronic waste).

Transaction finality in 10 minutes is easily quick enough compared to what Bitcoin is competing against (the fiat system). I understand that altcoins compete against each other so they have to come up with something to be 'the best' so they push for something like unnecessarily short confirmation times. Since you can achieve shorter conf times with PoW just as well as with PoS, the debate against a shorter confirmation time is a different one than the one we are having here, so I'm not going to go into more detail on this.

What you call on-chain weakness is what we call on-chain security and stability. Firstly, if we changed something drastic in Bitcoin (such as much faster confirmation time or switch to PoS) and for whatever reason the new code is buggy, leading to BTC's demise, all of your little altcoins will go down with it. Secondly, layers make sense. If you don't have much experience in computer science, everything we use today is based on layers. Nobody writes in assembly code anymore; instead we write in high-level languages which are compiled once or multiple times until they become machine readable. This results in more efficient computations and less development times, as well as lower risks in terms of security and safety. Or the network stack. We speak of five to seven layers of abstraction, which allow us to send encrypted emails back and forth with a few clicks and no thoughts about protocols, IP addresses, ports, MAC addresses or physical electrical signals in the cables.

Daily dollar emission on the other hand is a good proxy for how much energy will be spent competing for those rewards.

That's true, under the assumption that energy costs are roughly equal to the mining rewards. In reality though, they're often not. So daily dollar emission can be a very rough indicator at most, in my opinion.

[pooya87]

algorithms that sometimes are roughly the same too (SHA256 vs SHA3-256 vs scrypt)

Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.
A scrypt hash is 4 orders of magnitude harder to compute than a SHA3-256 hash.

Apparently you forget what we are discussing here yourself. We aren't just comparing computational cost. We are comparing all values at the same time.

SHA2 and SHA3 have almost identical computational cost. Yet the "PoW Produced (24h)" in that chart is almost the same and ETH hashrates is 4e-6 times bitcoin hashrate.
Scrypt has higher cost than SHA2/SHA3 (4 times according to you) but the "PoW Produced (24h)" in that list is only 0.02 and hashrate (LTC) is 2e-6 times bitcoin's hashrate.

Daily dollar emission on the other hand is a good proxy for how much energy will be spent competing for those rewards.

The most accurate estimation of electricity cost is always going to be hashrate since hashrate is directly related to hardware that consumes the energy.

[BlackHatCoiner]

So exactly the same as if you somehow acquired 10% of the total supply of a capped PoW coin...

There's difference between owning a trillion dollars in cash and owning the FED's printing machine with a trillion dollars. With the latter you exert much more influence to everyone who's using the currency. Let alone, you vote against the collective carryout of the transactions.

Apparently you forget what we are discussing here yourself. We aren't just comparing computational cost. We are comparing all values at the same time.

Isn't computational cost part of "all values"? From my understanding, we can't divide the "PoW Produced (24h)" with hashrate to find which one has the most effort, because of different hashing algorithms.

[tromp]

SHA2 and SHA3 have almost identical computational cost. Yet the "PoW Produced (24h)" in that chart is almost the same and ETH hashrates is 4e-6 times bitcoin hashrate.

You REALLY have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
ETH's PoW is not SHA3, it's ethash.
Computing a single ethash hash involves two SHA3 hashes, along with many other MUCH more expensive computations (computing the DAG whose values are sampled during an ethash hash involves tons of SHA3 itself, but that is done offline once every 30000 blocks).
An ethash hash takes at least 4 orders of magnitude more energy to compute than a SHA3 hash.

A scrypt hash is 4 orders of magnitude harder to compute than a SHA3-256 hash.

Scrypt has higher cost than SHA2/SHA3 (4 times according to you)

It's embarrassing how you don't even know what order of magnitude means.