Children Playing Blockchain
jott.live
jott.live
This is the story of every proof-of-work cryptocurrency. After a certain point, they only serve to make the rich even richer. Look at Bitcoin for example, where over 50% of the hashing power is controlled by big Chinese mining operations.
IIRC it didn't work for long (the of promoters of these tokens were likely well aware of this), and ASICs for them appeared anyway, once an ROI probability threshold was reached.
The example you gave has nothing to do with changing the PoW function to counteract ASICs. Both Bcash and bitcoin classic were forked because of completely different reasons, and had people who believed in those reasons defend the new forks and run the node software etc. For example XMR has been doing ASIC-deterrent forks for years now with great success.
Also it seems clear that Monero’s purported “ASIC resistance” is very much a social contract — requiring constant vigilance to uphold — one which isn’t guaranteed to be strictly adhered to over the long run, particularly as the cost/benefit analysis gets murkier.
Just like the rest of the cryptos that require all the participants to use specific protocol and software and agree on specific rules.
If one has control of 51% of the network it's in one's best interest to keep that network going successfully. Sure, there's suicidal malcontents and those that just want chaos. But barring some brain cancer it's very difficult for individuals to throw away billions of dollars. Because if a 51% attack works it's not going to work for long, the corrupted blocks are going to be immediately known, and everyone else will just fork off and leave that 51% attacker holding the bag.
It’s the people insinuating impropriety of Proof-of-Work mining in the hopes of less than transparently promoting a competing premined/ICO’d Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency sans any form of disclosure statement. You know, the sort of thing that’s been plaguing the cryptocurrency space for a good, solid decade now?
Anyway I'm not talking about direct competition, I'm talking about parasitism.
Much if not all of the anti–Proof-of-Work narrative and the debunking thereof can be characterized by Brandolini’s law [1]. ITT “Sure, the overwhelming majority of `$COIN` was premined by insiders or sold to prestigious investors for pennies in exclusive pre-ICOs, but look over there — Bitcoin mining is oh-so-unfair. Disclosure statement? What’s that?”
All the financially-motivated disbursal of misinformation takes a considerable amount of time to debunk, hence the parasitism component.
I would be ok with Bitcoin having had a 10% pre-mine if it also had a pre-sale, rather than limiting it to those technical enough to mine it on day one.
“On day one” it was possible to CPU mine Bitcoin on any ordinary Windows PC using a freely available open source GUI application.
If they held bitcoin would their opinion matter more or less? Why should it matter?
I guess in a way comments like these are actually a really good indication that PoS is superior in virtually every way.
(Of course that's pretty much the point of the analogy.)
Your cost basis in the underlying coin is by far the largest determinant of ROI.
It’s like the old real estate adage: “money is made on the purchase, not on the sale”.
Fairness of mining has always been virtually irrelevant to ROI.
(Except insofar as accusing competitors of shades of mining “impropriety” supports a narrative — and invariably a narrative which disproportionately benefits investors with an ultra low cost basis in a benefactor to said narrative.)
“China miners, special deals” etc — it’s a trope that’s been going around for about a decade.
Virtue signaling aside, judging by the raging bull market for ICO coins amongst cryptocurrency investors, clearly no one is concerned with fairness whatsoever. These things are majority premined by insiders and/or sold to prestigious investors in pre-pre-pre ICOs (yes, there are “levels”). What happens is the general public gets sucked into these coins then adopts narratives which suit them. That’s what you’re seeing here. Not that anyone cares.
(Disclosure: I’m invested in a true hybrid PoW/PoS coin, and I’m rather familiar with the downsides of both PoW and PoS mining.)
Proof-of-Work miners have ongoing variable expenses to contend with — electricity cost being the major one.
Conversely, in “Proof-of-Stake”, mining is virtually costless, because it's enough to show you have money to then earn money with your money.
(Disclosure: I’m invested in a true hybrid PoW/PoS system, so I’m familiar with the downsides of both.)
That's certainly true with a very simple PoS mechanism. I don't think that type of PoS is used in practice with any major cryptocurrency (please correct me if I'm wrong though).
The one I'm most familiar with (Cardano) uses delegated proof of stake, so users delegate their stake to a stake pool and share in the rewards. The platform supports, encourages, and enables this for users with only very introductory understanding of Cardano.
Stake pools also suffer a penalty when they amass too much stake (their rewards decrease), so decentralization is encouraged and no one would be able to get, say, 50% RoA by owning of 50% of the Cardano currency (ADA)
Longer answer: The most you can get from staking is an annual 6-7% return on your stake. I don't fully understand how their saturation parameter works, but here's the general idea: Currently a stake pool with .2% of all ADA staked is considered 'saturated'. This means (in my working understanding, I suspect things are a bit more nuanced) that ADA delegated to them beyond that .2% doesn't receive additional rewards. Therefore it's in the delegators' interest to avoid delegating to pools with greater than .2% of all ADA, and oversaturation works against the stake pool operators as well.
What this means in practice, is that this theoretical group owning 50% of ADA could set up 250 stake pools and fully saturate them for maximum profitability. However, other users can also delegate to those stake pools and share in the rewards. While the operators may receive 1-2% more rewards than non-operating users (there's a limit to how much 'extra' the operators can take, but this extra percentage is intended to incentivize running stake pools), at a certain point of oversaturation (if their pools are profitable enough), it would make more sense for them to just add more stake pools to (or delegate to other pools which are under-saturated) rather than let their existing pools be significantly oversaturated.
cardano.org has an insightful blog post: https://iohk.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/900004671183-Chan... and a useful calculator: https://cardano.org/calculator/?calculator=operator
which are both worth looking at if you're interested in knowing more
I don't consider this a problem but it's a fact that PoS works that way.
I do like that cryptocurrency platforms can put limits on "how much" leverage they get, to significantly close gap between potential "percentage" return on investments between wealthy and 'poor', and remove the ability for third parties to operate which give preferential treatment to people with high concentration of total market cap.
If you own 1 billion USD, then sure, you're going to get a larger return on investments (when measuring in USD) than someone with 100 USD, even if the percentage RoA was the same. Because of how classical economic systems work though, these are very grossly disparate. Someone with 1 billion USD may be able to generate 5-20% return on investments in a year, whereas someone with 100 USD would be lucky to get 3% (certainly, larger returns are possible with luck and wise investments, I'm talking purely in the aggregate over low-risk investments, like holding your money in an account which pays interest).
But let's assume the person with 1 billion USD and 100 USD are both getting 1% interest annually; the person with 1 billion USD is still making more money from investments because they have 999999900 more USD which they are investing.
PoS doesn't solve that latter problem, but it can close the gap on the return expressed as a percentage of investment
Ideally it would be as a Service Worker that pulls pages and transforms them into HTML, so you could serve your Markdown directly, without a separate build step.
If I squint, I can almost pretend I'm insulted that my browser/Javascript had to render the Markdown instead of their server doing it.
I can't see how their infrastructure is making any real savings by doing this. There are usually more reasons to just cache the HTML next to the input Markdown. e.g. You can then make money breaking changes to the transformation without breaking old posts. Not to mention it now kinda pointlessly needs Javascript to do something trivial.
Unlike what seems to be the prevailing opinion on HN, I'm quite pro-Javascript and pro-SPA. I never saw the need to damn webpages to server-rendered HTML just because it's the only client/server system with the quirk of being able to send markup from the server.
But this sending Markdown over the wire with a 24kB Markdown script + `<script>$('post').markdown()</script>` is just cheeky. ;) Does it really matter though? Nah.
I like to think it's fair to ask the user to donate some compute for rendering as a tradeoff for maintenance costs.
This sounds like the dream.
In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
In the proof of work class, the people that get rich in dollars are owner of the owner of the stationary that can sell better pencils, sharpers and erasers to the students, the writer of a book with tips about solving Sudoku, the person that writes a Sudoku solving program. Newbies can just buy the solver program, and participate without paying the old timers.
Anyone can build a car factory, you don't have to go to Ford and buy a lot of toy cars that they made a long time ago. You just have to hire the right people and build it.
Anyone can build a space rocket factory, you don't have to go to NASA and buy a lot of Moon rocks they collected a long time ago. You just have to hire the right people and build it.
You have to be Elon-Musk-rich to do any of them anyway.
Each student keeps track of which of the others they consider trustworthy. Since they all play together everyday, they know who is nice, and who is naughty.
When a supermajority trusts the student placing a new block, that student is allowed to place it anywhere.
When not enough people trust the student placing the block, they prevent that person from doing so. That person may try again, but until they're willing to play nice and act trustworthy, they cannot place any blocks. They sit in the corner and pout until they come to their senses.
No one has to solve any puzzles, or roll any dice.
The tower is built efficiently, and all sorts of interesting designs are made by the creative energy that would have otherwise been wasted on busywork.
Cryptocurrencies are not one-to-one with blockchain, rather one thing you can do with them.
How do you turn that into code?
Alternatively, we could ask for a supermajority of coins, and then I think we've re-invented proof-of-stake.
The first class was a public class & anybody could join in at any time. The second class had reserved early seats based on the initial supply of the dices; without investment in the initial dices the game doesnt start, whereas sudoku generation is free.
With PoS you have to buy coins before you can stake. There's no way to bootstrap your stake without spending money.
The best random oracle we know is of course, Proof-of-Work.
You, a mathematician, walk into the class to purchase a brick to label.
The first class has solved sudokus with deterministic difficulty to prove they did work to build the structure, whereas in the second class you have just dice sums & have to trust them telling you they rolled the diced only every fixed interval etc. It's distributed but not decentralized.
But generally the bricks you have in play can be lost if the network thinks you are cheating, even lying by omission (downtime) is penalized. So to try to change the blockchain (to allow double spending or zero someone's zccount) or even not to vote for the valid blockchain can be penalized by losing your staked bricks.
Another detail lost on the analogy is people get more bricks, just before being a good network citizen by helping the network and staking your bricks.
The analogy, to my understanding, is not 100% faithful to how PoS works, at least in Ethereum. There's no choosing one of the bricks, or one of the units of currency or anything. You simply lock in your units as collateral for your right to take part in the dice roll selection where, if chosen, you get to add a new block to the blockchain. If you append a block without cheating, you are rewarded with new units of the currency. If you cheat, your collateral is taken away. You may choose to keep your stake in as long as you want.
If there's no shortage of bricks, and those bricks can't be used (or exchanged) for anything other than the material for making the tower taller, then of course that would be pointless.
But that's not how cryptocurrency works. The whole purpose of proof-of-work is to protect the attribute of scarcity in a distributed way where one actor can't control (or change) the rules.
> If they add their brick to the top, other students will pay them (in bricks) to write their own names on it with a sharpie
Other students are paying in bricks? Is that supposed to be transaction fees, mining (that's the sudoku puzzles), or what? And is there any indication that a name on a brick means anything (or can be exchanged for anything)? Is there a limit to the number of names on bricks? Can those names be verified at any instant, anywhere in the world with near 100% confidence?
I know it's a simplification for the purpose of making a point; it's just that the point becomes invalid when the simplification throws out the central characteristics of the thing that's being represented.
I think the author is only demonstrating PoW/PoS and not Bitcoin itself.
> Other students are paying in bricks?
This is the transaction fees.
> Is there a limit to the number of names on bricks?
Not necessary.
> And is there any indication that a name on a brick means anything (or can be exchanged for anything)?
Pride, having taken part in building the biggest building.
> Can those names be verified at any instant, anywhere in the world with near 100% confidence?
This is only about PoW/PoS, not decentralisation. Ofcourse, PoW/PoS is meaningless if participants are not able to validate.
So, in the end it's all about the pride in being able be a part of the tallest set of bricks, hah!
It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.
I’ve mostly been coming to HN articles on crypto for the entertainment value only but it’s getting better - slowly.
Not sure blockchain fits the way PG defined "hacker." Blockchain needs to be more rigorous in implementation due to being in finance and its target preference with malicious hackers.
"It's called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant ones.
Believe it or not, the two senses of "hack" are also connected. Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. And there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking that's merely ugly (using duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space)."
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain platforms are nothing if not rule-breaking and brilliantly imaginative. They're trying to rewrite the entire financial system as code on the blockchain. Can you think of a more brilliant hack than that? Satoshi created the idea of digital scarcity. And the crypto world is running with it. That's clever as hell.
Taking a small quote from the article that aligns with what you want to be cool doesn't make it so. In the end, for most people, blockchain will be like ACH or some internal system that a bank wrote. The entire financial system is not going on the blockchain, it's not replacing the dollar. Wait to see how the Digital Yuan plays out.
Keep pumping the fantasy tho, my diamond hands can hodl quite a bit.
---
From Paul's article
Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.
This attitude is sometimes affected. Sometimes young programmers notice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to adopt some of their own in order to seem smarter. The fake version is not merely annoying; the prickly attitude of these posers can actually slow the process of innovation.
---
Maybe pause to think about why HN has changed their attitude on blockchain from 2017. Pause, listen, and think
Until the legit blockchain space can call out scams (from Iota to Tether) the entire thing is rightly tainted.
That said, you can generally get a good discussion of a type of tech (ie, NFTs for concert tickets) if you avoid the branded implementations (that are always trying to sell some crappy token for use with the idea.)
Inaccurate analogy. Miners are more limited by cheap electricity/cooling than CPU which is more generally available.
Off the top of my head, data from 2 years back(things might have changed now). Bitmain, one of the top 3 mining pools, 90% of their revenue was from ASIC sales rather than mining.
As long as Bitmain has competitors, they should always be able to put out the best ASIC's to the public.
They don't sell their latest mining equipment. Why would they? They sell the mining equipment after they have no use for it and it's costing them money to keep it running.