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Comment by dsco | Hacker News Reader

There’s also proof of stake which requires a lot less energy. I think a lot of nuance is missed when discussing Bitcoin and its consensus mechanism as the only way of running a blockchain

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So far no one has shown in practice how to run a decentralized proof of stake network.

How do you bootstrap a node in the face of conflicting history? How do you handle network partitions?

There are also open question surrounding security, prevent actors from colluding and so on. Most other blockchains do not even bother. At least the Ethereum people have the ambition to have something practical. Let's study the design when it you can make an eth transfer with it.

These discussions are like when in a discussion about uranuium waste management someone inevitably cries about how we should just scrap it and go with fusion energy instead.

Great idea, but let's have something working first.

It is quite noteworthy that Ethereum trusts proof of stake so much that they want to move to it though. Ethereum has some really good devs.

Last time I checked for altcoins that are trying to solve Bitcoin‘s various scalability problems I ended up with a proof of stake coin too, Nano (using the rather new idea block lattice, small but so far quite low-toned development team that seemed to focus on problem solving rather than scammy marketing).

I’m surprised that Ethereum is convinced that they can „just move“ from proof of work to proof of stake. Should be possible for Bitcoin too then, shouldn’t it? (Maybe I’m missing something about this transition.) Nano required a whole new development.

Ethereum's social contract has evolved to become much more "fluid" and open to change than Bitcoin's. Mainline Ethereum today is is very different in many ways to what it was two years ago. There is even a proposal with a lot of support to have transaction fees mostly burned rather than mostly given to miners. Aside from minority forks, something like that would never happen in Bitcoin in a million years.

So, while Bitcoin techinically could switch to proof of stake, it probably won't.

Tezos is up and running and working just fine.

Plus Cosmos, Polkadot, Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, NXT, and probably others I'm forgetting. There are plenty of PoS systems in production these days!

As someone who hasn't been watching closely for a while, any thoughts on which of those seem most interesting?

To me Mina and Zcash are interesting since they (plan to) use cryptographic arguments to show that chain states are valid, which leads to some nice features, such as better light clients. I'm probably biased since our own startup was influenced by them. Besides that, I'd say NEAR since it seems like the most promising sharded chain that's in or close to production.

(They weren't on the list since Mina hasn't launched quite yet, Zcash isn't PoS though it might switch, and NEAR isn't PoS in its current form, but will be soon.)

All of those are run by a singular entity. This makes it trivial for them to implement PoS.

That's not the use case something like Bitcoin is built for.

That's flatly untrue.

How can that be controversial? They all had an ICO to begin with. Some of them have even registered a company or organization to back it up.

The controversy is in the language "started" vs. "run."

Tezos, as an example, is governed by voting and on-chain governance. It isn't "run by a single entity."

Ripple or Tether are, though, sure.

Governance is more than a voting protocol. Tezos is not governed by equal actors.

There is a "Tezos Foundation". They control 30% of all staked XTZ. They checkpoint the blockchain regularly to provide correct history.

It seems to me that admin rights to the bitcoin core github repo count for a lot more than a 30% vote.

You can make near-zero-cost ETH and ERC-20 transfers right now using L2 solutions like state channels and rollups. There are also a few POCs of applications like Uniswap running on L2.

> I think a lot of nuance is missed when discussing Bitcoin and its consensus mechanism as the only way of running a blockchain

Bitcoin holders are financially incentivized to steer everyone else toward Bitcoin.

As long as early adopters are financially invested in alternative currencies failing, we’re going to continue seeing a focus on Bitcoin.

Proof-of-stake distributed ledger technology is extremely efficient. Hedera Hashgraph uses a gossip protocol and has extremely high transaction-per-second support with finality. Already being used by major corporations.

https://hedera.com/

Proof of space, too. See e.g. https://www.chia.net

Ugh, that seems like it just exchanges one form of waste for another. If it takes off the price of storage is likely to rocket in the same way GPUs have.

Let's not shoot ourselves in the foot, again, for another digital gold rush?

IIRC some Proof of Storage algorithms allow you to store actually useful data, and there shouldn't be any incentive to get fast storage, so it should have less of an effect on the average person.

True, and I understand this is how projects like Sia work. But IIRC Bram Cohen's proposal was effectively PoW but with storage.

When is that rolling out for Ethereum

It's a really complicated transition, but it's already started. The estimate is that there's probably about $1.5B worth of transactions left to mine, but most transactions will be switching over to PoS in the coming year. No one knows for sure when the full transition will occur, it's more of a gradual phase-out.

I like Ethereum not just because of the more responsible PoS but also because mining is currently asic resistant. A lot of the waste going into bitcoin right now is building specialized miners that will go into a landfill after a generation or two. Eth can still be mined with hardware you already own.

It's coming with Ethereum 2.0. The transition process to Eth2 is on the way, it is estimated that they will finish by 2022.

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