Hacker News Reader

Comment by lxeiqr | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, Bitcoin's Proof of Work is the biggest downside of that cryptocurrency (mostly due to extreme power consumption of the network). Moreover, the conservative approach of its developers to new concepts means that it's quite unlikely that the situation is going to change in coming months or years. Regardless, I wonder whether there are alternatives that could significantly reduce power usage of the whole network without making it more susceptible to various attacks. I've heard of Proof of Stake (Ethereum is planning to switch to it) or alternative PoW algorithms (such as Monero's RandomX), but I'm not experienced enough to tell how would these solutions scale for a cryptocurrency as big as Bitcoin today is.

View on HN

Precisely the opposite, Sir.

Employing PoW to protect against Sybil attack in anonymous network is the very invention that made Bitcoin possible.

Without PoW you must ID participants, which makes system trivial to regulate or shutdown (see Facebook Libra, or security fraud case against Ripple). And no, PoS isn't the answer, because PoS implies a handful of biggest exchanges control the coin, because they genuinly stake the most.

If Bitcoin was PoS, Mt Gox would run Bitcoin to this day!

Proof of Work and Proof of Stake are not too different in terms of what it would take in order to control the network. Stake and access to computing power are both just functions of being able to assemble sufficient resources so as to represent a sizable enough portion of control.

What's interesting is that all of the magic of crypto comes from:

- Signed transactions being broadcast onto a p2p network

- This network being visible to anyone who is interested

The much less important part of crypto is exactly how the shared ledger is assembled. So long as these transactions are put together in a relatively timely manner, and no transactions are being willfully excluded, whatever mechanism used for assembling the ledger doesn't really matter that much. Proof of work is literally just a time-gated lottery for some entity to be the one that gets to say "I am submitting the next update to the ledger." They're not providing any service to the network that a single shitty chromebook couldn't provide on its own, the time-gated proof of work is literally just to arrive at a consensus. There are so many alternatives that make more sense than this.

> The much less important part of crypto is exactly how the shared ledger is assembled

No! It is of *critical* importance how the shared ledger is assembled, because Bitcoin's threat model assumes the World's governments descending upon the shit, eventually!

The part of critical importance is ECDSA (or any public/private key DSA), and p2p networks. With that technology alone, you have the basis for a functional decentralized currency.

The blockchain assembly with proof of work, while an interesting and very creative solution, is just one of a multitude of ways you can arrive at a consensus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com