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Comment by Fiahil | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit of a crypto enthusiast, but I generally agree that crypto-mining suck too much power out of the grid for it's current utility level.

However, your comment is a bit short-sighted and doesn't account for the switch of Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake algorithms that is currently happening. PoS use A LOT less power and doesn't need extensive mining farms. See also: https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/

The only remaining question is: are we going to transition away from bitcoin, the largest PoW bastion, or not ? Probably, yes.

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No, never. Bitcoin will be PoW forever. PoS is and will never have the same security properties of PoW. Its bad for decentralization, its bad for censorship resistance, and its bad for the free world.

I didn't meant for Bitcoin to transition to PoS, but rather everyone using Ethereum instead of Bitcoin because it's now PoS.

Yeaaaaah i will believe it when i see it. I don't think betting the economy on changing airplane engines mid-flight is a good play. My prediction is that if ETH switches to a PoS consensus model, the value will TANK. If this happens at all. I know the PoS timeline, I think it is fiction.

Ironically, ETH switching to PoS is the reason I am holding the currency.

In the future I expect all PoW cryptocurrencies to be banned, or severely hobbled, because of their electricity usage and e-waste. I have a long bet on ETH specifically because of its eventual move to PoS. Bitcoin doesn't even have a plan, and when the legal landscape changes it will be in the worst position to pivot.

We'll just have to see what the future holds. But I got my money down.

Nah, I don't think it can be banned. At least not in the non-authoritarian parts of the world.

Even if it is, they would need to break my fingers to prevent me running a Bitcoin node. And I will get the blocks via Satellite. If there was a credible threat, we would go somewhere it is not.

If your economic thesis is based on hoping the government bans something, why are you even playing with state-resistant decentralized monetary systems?

> Nah, I don't think it can be banned. At least not in the non-authoritarian parts of the world.

Why can't it be banned? It's wasteful and closer to a Ponzi scheme than an actual currency.

> Even if it is, they would need to break my fingers to prevent me running a Bitcoin node. And I will get the blocks via Satellite. If there was a credible threat, we would go somewhere it is not.

That could be hard if many of the worthwhile places ban it :-)

> If your economic thesis is based on hoping the government bans something, why are you even playing with state-resistant decentralized monetary systems?

Most people in crypto are in it for the money, not for idealism.

As someone who has been in this space a long time, I assure you I am idealistic in my positions. Hopelessly idealistic.

What does Ban even mean? That it is illegal to run in places like the US? Very unlikely, and as more institutional money flows into it, it grows more unlikely. Some places are starting to put 401k/pension funds into it. Some places are raising it as legal tender. There is also that 1st amendment thing.

So will it banned like drinking straws? (which are still available) Or banned like drugs? (which are still available).

I feel you WANT it to be banned because it tickles your authoritarian tendencies. I am glad we live in a world, at least today, where your wishes are ignored.

This discussion is worth revisiting in 10 years :-)

How is the first amendment relevant here?

The early cryptography wars were fought over code as speech.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...

There is an argument to be made that running software that speaks a protocol is an extension of speech.

The mental position that wants to ban cryptocurrency is the same one that that wanted to ban/suppress cryptography in the 90s.

"If your economic thesis is based on hoping the government bans something, why are you even playing with state-resistant decentralized monetary systems? "

Because I want to make money? I don't see why that matters.

I don't need or want the technology to be banned. I want mining operations to be illegal in the US, and I want it to be illegal to convert to/from USD.

If you still want to use it then, enjoy.

I wonder what the economics are like for a Starship-delivered nuclear-powered Bitcoin mine in space…

Why would Ethereum's value tank when it shall be switching entirely to PoS (the PoS chain is already up and running perfectly fine btw)?

Ethereum shall also lower the block reward, lower the fees, and make more people hold on to their ETH to get the staking reward.

Why would the price tank? Also ETH is already at 1/2th the "market cap" of Bitcoin, so a takeover is definitely not unthinkable.

I'm currently staking ETH 2.0 Many people are.

Bad for the free world? That's a bit of a fucking stretch. I think you can pretty comfortably argue the power and e-waste situation created by PoW is much worse for the "free world" than a slightly stronger consensus mechanism for a speculative value store.

I haven’t dug into this, but I do intuitively sense some risks with PoS. Can anyone recommend a good, thoughtful writeup of the specific risks?

Actually PoW accentuates the concentration of miners, while in Ethereum 2 you are limited to a few mining machine, thus distributing more equally the mining power.

Actually, no, the opposite. One of the fundamental problems with PoS is that it has no externally observable metric that a block is correct. PoW is trivially externally verifiable. This is good for decentralization. There can be no lies from the miners.

Bitcoin miners per se do not control Bitcoin network. They are the backbone, but the nodes ultimately decide whether they include a mined block or not. Validating blocks is way cheaper than mining them. Expensive mining process only ensures that you can't easily flood the network with bogus blocks.

isn't the current virtual money system already a PoS system?

(i mean proof-of-stake, not the alternative inflammatory PoS)

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