> Cryptocurrency is a beautiful technology
On the surface, ya, but the proof-of-waste at its centre should be reason enough to consider the technology more harmful than not.
On the surface, ya, but the proof-of-waste at its centre should be reason enough to consider the technology more harmful than not.
Inadequate energy supply (not enough at the right time in the right place) results in deaths. Energy consumption isn't bad ipso facta.
Developing a monetary system independent of government control and monopoly may be one of the most important human 'machine' systems ever built, at impartial price signaling at a societal scale enables people who don't even know each other to collaborate to solve common problems. Thus bitcoin's energy consumption may actually be one of the best uses of energy to date. Its certainly less destructive than the military power and state/central-bank coercion underpinning existing fiat monetary systems.
So while not there yet, it's on its way to becoming proven technology. A big test will be how it handles general transaction processing. The Beacon Chain is limited to finalizing Ethereum PoW chain blocks at the moment.
https://viktorbunin.medium.com/proof-of-stakes-security-mode...
Tezos smart contract ecosystem has grown to 10% of Ethereum and it's gas prices are pennies (and will continue to be).
Ah if the market was logical.
As long as adoption increases it will be fine in the end since all that money that PoW chains spend on those power plants and GPUs goes straight into the pockets of Tezos holders. And the foundation has enough money to support the development for a decade or two.
Look at the distribution curve of people and their funds that can be put at stake and compare with the people with access to cheap energy and capital to operate a mining rig, then come back to tell me which one is the real oligarchy.
How is it different from proof of work? People with access to ASIC miners and cheap electricity call the shots, guess who those people are?
Proof is stake actually more fair since you cannot move your investment in the network - you are locked-in and need the network to succeed to not lose your position. With proof of work you can switch all of your investments to a different network at the snap of your fingers.
Proof of stake is naturally designed to produce benevolent leaders since their success is directly tied to the success of the network.
In contrast, it's not possible to steal a majority of PoW mining power, and sit on it for an extended period, without (a) foregoing a large profit, and (b) risking that others acquire more mining power than you have.
One of the Cardano whitepapers [1] contains a good summary of the advantages of PoW over PoS in Section 5.1.1 under "Consequences of PoS vs PoW":
A crucial difference exists between PoS and PoW at the network layer, with significant design consequences: in PoW-based systems, proof-of-work itself gives honest nodes an advantage over adversarial nodes (as listed below), and this enables system designs that are simpler and more modular. There is no such advantage for honest nodes in PoS-based systems such as Ouroboros.
In PoW systems:
• The number of different block headers with a valid PoW that can be constructed (over any given period of time) is bounded by the total available hashing power in the world. In Bitcoin for example this is one header every ten minutes on average.
• The header PoW can be checked with little computational cost. This does not require any significant or recent state, only a vaguely-recent lower bound on the hashing difficulty value is needed.
• Such a cheap and simple test can be easily integrated into existing distributed algorithms such as broadcast algorithms.
By contrast, with PoS in Ouroboros:
• There is no equivalent of the PoW check that is expensive for the adversaries and cheap for the honest nodes: adversaries can create many apparently valid or actually valid candidate headers or whole chains.
• Block headers can only be fully validated with access to a very recent copy of the full ledger state, and the other preceding headers – which is not a simple stateless check.
• Having the full ledger state relies on the other two pieces of Ouroboros functionality: chain validation and chain selection
[1] https://hydra.iohk.io/build/6684352/download/1/network-desig...
sorry, energy usage is great and we should be doing more of it. energy production can be bad, so go rage at dirty energy producers.
Edit: oh and by the way, you made it very obvious that you're biased and can't think straight on this topic by using the term "proof of waste", there is literally zero waste in proof of work.