Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Point to a real production cryptocurrency using proof-of-stake right now. All the big ones are still using PoW and we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency?

Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof of stake in December? Things like that are progress but don't do anything to put a dent into the massive electricity and resource squeezes being created by cryptocurrencies.

View on HN

Eth 2.0 will be fully PoS (released fully in the next year or two, but staking is possible now).

Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot are a few protocols that are PoS but are still very early in their development.

> "we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency"

I would argue that's not long at all. The internet was technically invented in the 1960s (ARPANET) and TCP/IP went global in the early 1980s. Took a while for things to get to where we are now.

Ripple, Nxt, etc have been around since 2012-ish or earlier. Ancient technology, basically.

Wasn't aware of those ones, thanks. It's a shame they're not even in the top 100 by volume.

Ripple has still the fifth biggest market cap.

If you look at the five biggest coins by market cap (excluding USDT which is just digital Dollar) then three of them use proof of stake, Cardano, Polkadato and Ripple. Ethereum is actively transitioning to proof of stake.

Bitcoin is the ONLY outlier. Though also the biggest market.

I'm old and clueless. Is proof of stake related to anonymity in any way? I read something about dealers in contraband switching from btc to monero among others for that reason.

No, anonymity for the users is generally separate from the consensus algorithm. XMR, at least when I was mining it many years ago, was more about preventing leakage of wallet, funds info to every person you transacted with - and is probably the gold standard in anonymous transactions - which is why it's price is so stable.

Ripple is not proof-of-stake. It uses traditional consensus with trusted validators. It's basically a fiat currency that is run by a corporation to benefit them.

Ripple (XRP) has the 5th highest market cap and volume of any cryptocurrency, but it's very unpopular on a cultural level because it's basically centralized.

That's fascinating, I ctrl-f'd for Ripple on a couple charts since I hadn't heard of it and it wasn't on them. Do crypto sites omit it because it's unpopular or viewed as not a blockchain due to being centralized?

It's near the top on all of them, but you need to Ctrl-F "XRP".

Ripple (aka XRP) is number 5

Avalanche isn't that big yet but it's in production and running DeFi.

They also recently had network issues for three days

Tezos uses proof-of-stake and launched a little over 2 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com