A useful PoW without replacing Nakamoto Consensus

[kernel1983]

The nonce are the enocded value.

A block can have some extra metadata. You don't have to mess with nonce if you want to include an encoded value. I still don't understand why you'd want to do this, though.

However, if I did not step into the detail of Filecoin, I will never realize that PoW can be upgraded.

Seriously, do you call this whole thing an upgrade? It's unnecessary and inefficient.

Compare to other blockchain storage project, I will say EcoPoW based blockchain is totally different.

I don't question your part, in comparison with other such blockchains. I question the entire "decentralization of storage" as a concept.

It is not just a blockchain storage, this is the key to build a more decenterization blockchain!

I strongly disagree. A more decentralized blockchain puts scaling above all.

OK, looks like you dont like this.
Sorry that we can not be friends.

I already pasted the python code above, maybe it takes time to understand.
However, thanks for spending so much time on this, bye.

[1714897234]

1714897234

[1714897234]

1714897234

[1714897234]

1714897234

[n0nce]

OK, looks like you dont like this.
Sorry that we can not be friends.

I already pasted the python code above, maybe it takes time to understand.
However, thanks for spending so much time on this, bye.

It's not about liking something or being friends or not; the tone in this forum is just generally pretty direct and honest. Something I really appreciate.

TL;DR: I don't see why you wouldn't just implement your idea as an addition to a Torrent system or as a whole new Torrent system. Just like Bittorrent, except that 'storage nodes' can set a price per GB and get paid monthly in some (or maybe even one of a few selectable) existing cryptocurrencies. To me, that sounds like an actually useful and realistic product. Tying paid, decentralized storage too much into a (existing or not) blockchain or cryptocurrency client seems to make less sense than tying it into a decentralized file hosting client.

[kernel1983]

GM,

More about what I had done so far

http://159.65.14.92/dashboard
I have a testnet launched since May 2022.
There are lots of debug info.
It runs on a $6 DO server.
This is developed since 2018.
However, after found EcoPoW I decide to change this into a pure PoW blockchain.

I haven't intergate the storage feature onto the chain.
The design is there but still needs time to code.

It is open to any one. I can only do algorithm and code.
You can be the CEO or any roles.
Feel free to talk to me https://discord.gg/bUu5GcQPb5

[thecodebear]

I feel like this would just complicate things. PoW is simple, powerful, useful, and has big side benefits to the energy infrastructure of the world. That's pretty great.

I don't see the point of adding Filecoin storage concepts to PoW.

I get the idea of wanting to add extra use cases to PoW's power consumption, but this is just an optics thing. People who don't understand Bitcoin and PoW and aren't educated on its purpose and utility are the ones who attack it. The vast majority of people don't understand these things. Like 99%+ of people. It's just an educational gap that causes bad optics.

PoW is perfect because it doesn't rely on secondary use cases or a secondary market. It's entirely self-sufficient.




So the solution is not to make PoW more complicated by adding ideas from some altcoin. The solution is to continue educating the world so that eventually the majority understand Bitcoin and PoW and a shrinking minority are against it.



The educational keys to the PoW optics problem are:

1. There is no relation between PoW energy consumption and # of transactions so talking about energy used per transaction is nonsensical.

2. There are many more bitcoin transactions happening than what are shown on-chain so even if it wasn't nonsensical to talk about energy per tx the number would still be very much lower than the frightening numbers thrown around by the media and politicians.

3. PoW is by far the most useful consensus mechanism for a decentralized monetary system and is an absolute requirement for Bitcoin's value proposition (and Bitcoin's value proposition for humanity is immense!).

4. Bitcoin will never switch away from PoW so there is no point pushing for the change anyway.

5. Much of Bitcoin's mining has been done by renewables for numerous years now, and some of it is also done with already produced but 100% wasted energy at power plants, which also don't add any pollution to the environment, so compared to the rest of the world Bitcoin mining is leading the movement to clean energy.

6. Bitcoin mining strengthens the energy infrastructure of the world because it can use the wasted energy from any kind of power plant (and power plants waste A LOT of energy), thereby making the energy industry stronger, likely helping lower the cost of energy for society, and allowing humanity to increase energy production (granted this part of Bitcoin mining is still in the early stages but I bet in 10 years the vast majority of power plants will have Bitcoin miners set up on-prem for precisely this reason).

7. PoW is a self-balancing system so the only reason why energy usage keeps increasing is that the economic output of Bitcoin is increasing even faster. PoW mining will always produce more economic output than the energy-cost input. That's just a fact of its design.

8. PoW is already very useful and it is a misnomer to say the energy is wasted. 100% of the energy is used in exactly the way it was designed to be used. The energy is used to secure the most secure network in human history, which operates the most fundamentally sound currency in human history.

9. Bitcoin's energy consumption is still minuscule compared to plenty of other industries, and the only reason Bitcoin's energy consumption is talked about and derided so much is because it is easy to calculate and it is still a new technology that most people don't understand yet so they question it.

...I think those are the main educational points, which, if the populace understood, the bad optics of Bitcoin's PoW would disappear entirely. So that should be the goal, not trying to make hybrid and complicated PoW models.

To the OP, have fun working on your idea though! Nothing wrong with that. I'm sure it'll be fun to try to design it. But since Bitcoin isn't going to hard fork and adopt a different consensus mechanism when PoW already works perfectly, and there isn't really a point to making yet another random altcoin just for the purpose of having a hybrid consensus mechanism, I would point out that this idea should just be an interesting experiment for you and it isn't likely to be something needed by society.

[tromp]

1. There is no relation between PoW energy consumption and # of transactions so talking about energy used per transaction is nonsensical.

There will be in a few decades when the block subsidy dwindles into insignificance and the network security is mostly funded by transaction fees.

[thecodebear]

1. There is no relation between PoW energy consumption and # of transactions so talking about energy used per transaction is nonsensical.

There will be in a few decades when the block subsidy dwindles into insignificance and the network security is mostly funded by transaction fees.

That's just simply not true.

The lack of relation between PoW energy consumption and number of transactions has nothing to do with the fact that there is a block reward. The two systems are entirely unrelated. When miners get mostly, or even only, tx fees the mining energy consumption and number of transactions will still not be related at all. Number of transactions is decided by block time and block size limit, which have nothing to do with amount of energy used by miners.


Think about this: Would number of transactions change if a year from now mining was 1/10th what it is today, or 10x what it is today? Nope. It would have zero effect on number of transactions processed. Transactions will simply continue to stay at the limit of what Bitcoin can handle no matter how much or how little energy is used.


Thank you for pointing out the educational gap in Bitcoin. You're a "hero member" on this forum, so presumably you've been into Bitcoin for a while. And no offense, but even you just got something basic about Bitcoin totally wrong. This just emphasizes the lack of education about Bitcoin because if someone who has been around Bitcoin for a while can get something as basic as that wrong, it kinda drives home the point about why the average person who knows nothing about Bitcoin can so easily buy into the false bad optics spread by the media and politicians about Bitcoin.

[BlackHatCoiner]

There will be in a few decades when the block subsidy dwindles into insignificance and the network security is mostly funded by transaction fees.

The fact that the system will be dependent on transaction fees doesn't mean that you can measure transactions in energy that is spent effectively. A block can contain 4,000 transactions, or it can only contain 1 (e.g., mined right after the previous). Furthermore, a block that took very little time to be mined likely used less energy than one that took longer, while both blocks can have the exact same number of transactions.

Then, we have off-chain transactions, whose number is unknown as far as anyone can tell. Measuring transaction per energy spent is fundamentally prone to error.

[tromp]

Would number of transactions change if a year from now mining was 1/10th what it is today, or 10x what it is today? Nope.

You have the causality all wrong.
Amount of mining depends on amount of transaction fees, not the other way around.

With no block subsidy, if the amount of txs drops 10x, then there will be 10x less rewards available for miners  (actually even less if you go from (nearly) full blocks to never full blocks) and so mining must decrease 10x to remain profitable.

It's worrisome that senior members can get such a trivial implication all wrong.

A block can contain 4,000 transactions, or it can only contain 1 (e.g., mined right after the previous). Furthermore, a block that took very little time to be mined likely used less energy than one that took longer, while both blocks can have the exact same number of transactions.

Of course I'm not talking about individual blocks, but about longer term trends.
I'm also (like the poster I replied to) talking about on-chain transactions only. With L2, the number of off-chain transactions becomes completely unrelated to everything, as you could do a trillion off-chain transactions for 2 on-chain ones.

[oryhp]

That's just simply not true.

It is true. Think of it this way. The network asks humans to provide security to the network in terms of energy in each step. Since the amount of energy is nontrivial (the whole basis of Nakamoto security), the network promises some compensation to those that protect the network. Nobody is going to mine at a loss (unless they expect greater returns in some reasonable amount of time) so the network security will be roughly the same as the compensation amount because of the incentives/game theory. At the moment, the compensation is a sum of two variables:
1. subsidy - a fixed reward that mints new coins. This variable is design such that it phases out over time
2. fees - a "tax" to incentivize your transaction to take the space on the chain

With time, the subsidy variable disappears into "basically nothing" value and you're only left with the fees. This directly corresponds to the number of transactions as a lower boundary. The network security will be based on it's usage which means on the number of onchain transactions and the competition to capture the block space (bumping the fees as a bribe mechanism).

[BlackHatCoiner]

With no block subsidy, if the amount of txs drops 10x, then there will be 10x less rewards available for miners  (actually even less if you go from (nearly) full blocks to never full blocks) and so mining must decrease 10x to remain profitable.

That, provided that parameters such as bitcoin price, energy price, ASIC price, state intervention etc., all remain constant. But they don't. If you check on the numbers, you'll see that there are times when the price fell by more than 50%, and difficulty rose more than 100%.

Of course I'm not talking about individual blocks, but about longer term trends.

Maybe there is less room for error if you consider long term trends, and exclude off-chain activity, but I'm yet to acknowledge the whole point then.

Nobody is going to mine at a loss

You don't know where the price goes. You might have purchased an ASIC, done the logistics, but there's definitely one variable you can't be sure of.

[oryhp]

Nobody is going to mine at a loss

You don't know where the price goes. You might have purchased an ASIC, done the logistics, but there's definitely one variable you can't be sure of.

I agree, hence why I added the "(unless they expect greater returns in some reasonable amount of time)" which you left out of the quote.

[Wind_FURY]

1. There is no relation between PoW energy consumption and # of transactions so talking about energy used per transaction is nonsensical.

There will be in a few decades when the block subsidy dwindles into insignificance and the network security is mostly funded by transaction fees.

That's just simply not true.

The lack of relation between PoW energy consumption and number of transactions has nothing to do with the fact that there is a block reward. The two systems are entirely unrelated. When miners get mostly, or even only, tx fees the mining energy consumption and number of transactions will still not be related at all. Number of transactions is decided by block time and block size limit, which have nothing to do with amount of energy used by miners.


Think about this: Would number of transactions change if a year from now mining was 1/10th what it is today, or 10x what it is today? Nope. It would have zero effect on number of transactions processed. Transactions will simply continue to stay at the limit of what Bitcoin can handle no matter how much or how little energy is used.


Thank you for pointing out the educational gap in Bitcoin. You're a "hero member" on this forum, so presumably you've been into Bitcoin for a while. And no offense, but even you just got something basic about Bitcoin totally wrong. This just emphasizes the lack of education about Bitcoin because if someone who has been around Bitcoin for a while can get something as basic as that wrong, it kinda drives home the point about why the average person who knows nothing about Bitcoin can so easily buy into the false bad optics spread by the media and politicians about Bitcoin.

Although you must remember, the incentive structure developed within the system of Bitcoin is what's making everything stick together. If the miners are not incentivized, do you actually believe they would continue mining altruistically at cost?

There are Bitcoiners, such as Peter Todd, who are starting to believe that there should be continued block rewards through a "tail emission" for Bitcoin to support the system. I made a topic asking about it before, but no one joined. Hahaha.

[n0nce]

There are Bitcoiners, such as Peter Todd, who are starting to believe that there should be continued block rewards through a "tail emission" for Bitcoin to support the system. I made a topic asking about it before, but no one joined. Hahaha.

Where did you make such topic? I can't find it.
There was a 9-page discussion on this in summer, though:
"Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary" -- A post by Peter Todd

[Wind_FURY]

There are Bitcoiners, such as Peter Todd, who are starting to believe that there should be continued block rewards through a "tail emission" for Bitcoin to support the system. I made a topic asking about it before, but no one joined. Hahaha.

Where did you make such topic? I can't find it.
There was a 9-page discussion on this in summer, though:
"Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary" -- A post by Peter Todd

I can't find it too, maybe it was just a post in one of someone else's topic, but the "shower thought" behind it was not essentially a tail emission, but a soft fork to decide, yes or no, to a hard fork for maintaining the block rewards by cancelling any future halvings. For example a hard fork, starting on 2048 block rewards are maintained to be at BTC0.04882812 per block until all the coins are mined, cancelling all future halvings.

I'm trying to find it. I found another post of mine, posting about it, but I can't find the original, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5357973.msg57847458#msg57847458

[n0nce]

I can't find it too, maybe it was just a post in one of someone else's topic, but the "shower thought" behind it was not essentially a tail emission, but a soft fork to decide, yes or no, to a hard fork for maintaining the block rewards by cancelling any future halvings. For example a hard fork, starting on 2048 block rewards are maintained to be at BTC0.04882812 per block until all the coins are mined, cancelling all future halvings.

I'm trying to find it. I found another post of mine, posting about it, but I can't find the original, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5357973.msg57847458#msg57847458

That doesn't solve the issue in the long run, though - if anything, it makes it worse since the date for the last mined coin would approach faster. Anyhow; this is now very off-topic from this thread's original purpose.

[ir.hn]

Here is a really easy way to implement "proof of replication" in bitcoin:

Require each mining attempt to hash the last "n" blocks, instead of just the current block.

Here is a really easy way for bitcoin to democratize mining pools:

Instead of hashing attempts to find a golden nonce, require signing attempts, where the key used in signing is 1/100th of all the coinbase outputs.  This would mean mining pools realistically could only have around 100 miners each.

[ir.hn]

I totally agree that PoW is useful.
However, the others who are worried about the energy cost of PoW, most of them choose PoS now.
I wouldn't say I like PoS, as the soul of blockchain, is about the miners contributing resources but not capitalizing.

I'm glad you are using your PhD to try to help solve this energy problem.  As someone who has been thinking about blockchain since 2010 and energy use nearly as long, I can assure you the place to be looking is "difficult" algorithms.  CPU only algorithms are one of the best places to go.  Also research CAPEX/OPEX ratio, you will find it discussed in oPoW whitepaper.

If we can limit only CPU's to mine it democratizes mining like you want and also limits large mining farms by the much higher capex/opex ratio than easy algorithms like sha256 which can be sped up by orders of magnitude with specialized hardware, throwing much more power at it than CPU's ever could utilize.

There has been a missing link, and that is memory hardness is the only way to reliably stop asics or gpus, but given enough time they will overcome the memory hardness due to moores law.  The simple yet non-obvious solution which I described previously, is to scale the algorithm's memory requirement with moores law.  So for example every 2 years worth of blocks the memory requirement for the hashing algo doubles.  This will preclude asic manufacturers keeping up as the consumer commodity market is the only thing that can keep up with moores law in fast memory.

[n0nce]

energy problem.

CPU only algorithms are one of the best places to go

Have you compared the energy efficiency of CPUs against ASICs?
And have you compared the CO2 footprint of residential energy mix to the CO2 footprint of an ASIC farm's energy source?

12% of the electricity in the US is renewable; while Bitcoin ASIC mining operations use around 70% renewable.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
So suggesting that mining farms are an environmental problem makes no sense.

In December 2019, one report suggested that 73% of Bitcoin’s energy consumption was carbon neutral, largely due to the abundance of hydro power in major mining hubs such as Southwest China and Scandinavia. On the other hand, the CCAF estimated in September 2020 that the figure is closer to 39%. But even if the lower number is correct, that’s still almost twice as much as the U.S. grid, suggesting that looking at energy consumption alone is hardly a reliable method for determining Bitcoin’s carbon emissions.

Also do consider that CPU mining farms would fuck up the consumer PC market even more than the GPU mining of Ethereum did in the past. You could run a PC without GPU, but not without CPU.

[ir.hn]

Many good points n0nce.

Firstly, when you talk about energy efficiency of CPU vs ASIC, you are probably talking watts/hash.  This isn't a valid metric because the algorithm determines how many hashes is "alot".  A slow algorithm could provide just as much security at 100 hashes/second as a fast algorithm at 1 billion hashes/second.  Hashes/second does not matter, what matters is how difficult it is to achieve 51% of the network hashrate.

Mining uses a lot of power.  It has been discovered that the reason for this is (of course the value of the coin and the block subsidy) but also the low CAPEX/OPEX ratio of SHA256 hashing.  In other words, the equipment to hash a tiny SHA256 input is very basic.  So this framework (an asic chip) can be produced cheaply and fed (with data and power) easily so that dozens or hundreds can live on a single board.  They can run reliably at high temperatures and speeds.

This leads to a massive ability for people with modest capital and lots of cheap energy to scale almost indefinitly.

On the other hand with CPU mining, CPU's are complex and difficult to feed (you often won't find more than one on a motherboard) and the capital (CAPEX) versus power cost (OPEX) ratio is very high.  You simply can't easily scale up to 100 computers (the equivalent of 1 asic hashboard) very easily.  Especially when these large miners can't dominate the market, everyone with a laptop from angola to zimbabwe will be competing with them.

For an example I am CPU mining as I am responding to you, browsing the internet, watching videos, there is no noticable slowdown. Wheras with GPU mining you can't use the computer that is running the GPU mining. Yet this dual use of CPU mining and browsing the web is producing 1/3 the coins as an S9 miner would produce at a fraction of the power usage and heat production.  So I don't think it would hurt the consumer market, in fact it would benefit it by not diverting extra fab capacity to unnecessary GPU chips or ASIC chips.  Especially with the moore's law memory req scaling, consumers would always have, at the very least, last gen of CPU's on the secondary market to buy up.

A little off topic, but that was one of the problems with GPU paradigm was that the memory scaling for EThash was linear not exponential, so GPU miners could basically use all the cards that have been on the market for the last 10 years.  Not so if you double memory req every 2 years then miners would only be able to use the newest cards.

[NotATether]

On the other hand with CPU mining, CPU's are complex and difficult to feed (you often won't find more than one on a motherboard) and the capital (CAPEX) versus power cost (OPEX) ratio is very high.  You simply can't easily scale up to 100 computers (the equivalent of 1 asic hashboard) very easily.  Especially when these large miners can't dominate the market, everyone with a laptop from angola to zimbabwe will be competing with them.

So I was looking at the prices of some dual-socket and quad-socket servers that also got some good memory inside them, and if you put a few of these together, you're staring at the price of an ASIC, but nowhere near it's performance.

It's all in the circuits. I'm not a hardware engineer or anything like that but the more stuff you can push to transistors directly, the more performance you'll get in any application.

And if you can't afford the short-time cost of accelerating a formula like that (likely because the problem will be irrelevant soon), then FPGAs are a nice alternative that gives you some flexibility in wiring it without sacrificing too much performance.