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Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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The whole point of mining is to arrange transactions into blocks, and then generate a cryptographic hash of the block that meets some difficulty criteria. It costs some small amount of computing to do that. But an astonishingly large number of hashes won't meet that difficulty criteria, which is why miners have to try a gazillion times to find one that works.
However, once a block has a valid hash, it is added to the chain. Then, the hash of that valid block must be used in the next block, which will be equally hard to find.
By "security", what is really meant is "How can I be sure that a transaction can't be undone once it is committed"? And it's because all these blocks are stacked on top of each other, and cryptographically related. Once a transaction appears in a block, and a few blocks get mined on top of it, it becomes prohibitively difficult to un-do it, because someone would have to put in the computing power to re-authenticate a string of blocks, all while the rest of the network is adding blocks to the valid chain at a faster rate.
The security of this whole arrangement has so far been working good as well.
In order for someone to try and perform a 51% attack, they'll need to either compromise a large swathe of existing miners (e.g if the government seized control) or create/acquire hardware totaling more than 100% of the existing network today plus growth while you attempt to build more than 100% and then maintain growth over the rest of the network.
As the network grows that becomes exceedingly more difficult to perform.
I have really high hopes for something like proof of ~~work~~ stake, but it's not without it's own problems either, and with Ethereum, it's the first massive scale test, so it's not as battle tested as proof of work yet, although it's been used in smaller projects so there has been some testing. With more money on the line though, comes more will to try and break it, or use an exploit you may have held back beforehand.
One interesting difference with POW/POS is that if a miner/entity does somehow perform an attack, they keep the hardware and can continue to try. With POS, they should get slashed in which case the money is gone. But with POW you have the barrier of actually acquiring the correct amount of hardware, meanwhile in POS, you just need the money so there's no manufacturing/lead time and will be easier to achieve by state actors.
Bitcoin has literally 2 pools who have more then half of the block production. Also not all PoS systems have locking and slashing btw.
Pools that people could leave if something suspicious was happening.
Very different than an individual entity.
Well... Cardano has like 30 different pools that add up to 50+% of the block production.
If something sus was happening with one or more of those - people can just leave them.
Same thing but 30 is better than 2.
Definitely agree, 2 isn't ideal, and there's some level of trust happening there because of it.
There's been pushes over the years to get people to split apart more, and I'm pretty sure there was a significant split due to this at least once in the past.
It's gotta be either something like reliability, ui/ux, ease of setup, otherwise all I can come up with is a larger pool pays out smaller amounts more consistently and people prefer that?
We in Cardano have a "saturation" limit per pool. So if you have more than like 70M ADA, you don't get rewards for anything above that. This encourages people with a lot of ADA (either theirs or delegated to them) to run multiple pools. We call them multi pool operators. Cardano community has a really strong sentiment against delegating to multi pools. And if you are wondering if that figure I mentioned earlier (30 pools to reach 50+%) is just a few entities with many pools. No - this is actually 30 individual MPOs (multi pool operators).
That's a pretty cool way to address the problem. I originally wrote solution, but that's not really a solution since it could theoretically just be multi pools, but by putting a barrier in place like that to discourage it, it should lessen the problem.
My main issue with Bitcoin isn't even the POW vs POS angle, it's the fact that the core devs see no problem with their current POW algorithm, which is not designed to put any bounds at all on energy consumption. But I also think they should have increased the block size, and you can see where that discussion went.
I sometimes have a weird vibe like someone somehow crippled Bitcoin by making it not able to evolve and develop. I mean... If I wanted it gone and couldn't just destroy it, I would cripple it. Idk, just feels sus.
Anything that makes bitcoin more valuable is a financial benefit to all people holding bitcoin. Anyone who has a brilliant idea is financially better off by making their own coin.
Miners, who have money tied up in bitcoin-specific hardware, have a vested interest in maintaining the POW system or else their capital loses value.
There are probably exchanges short on bitcoin that stand to profit from a decreasing price.
So yeah. Someone crippled bitcoin. That someone is Satoshi.
I just realized I wrote the above, but if it wasn't clear, I meant proof of stake.
Fuck the core devs is really all i have to add to that without going into it...
Luckily things like Ethereum and others were born due to them.