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Comment by svennek | Hacker News Reader

I think basically because there is nothing interesting left to discus.

One camp (where I am in) basically believes it is an environmental disaster, unsuitable for its stated purpose and most likely as scam by the "whales" manipulating the price, and with a potential 51%-disaster.

The other camp believes that it is the future of money, untraceable wealth storage and inflation/"confiscation proof" and that all the environmental impact is just a temporary problem, that is solved when proof-of-stake is ready (which IMHO will never happen).

The tech itself is quite simple in concept with a few novel key insights in the old days (which by now are generally accepted).

So all in all, it is back to good old politics and do you believe in "it" nor not.

I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it - but I am not sure whether I just project my own skepticism ...

EDIT: typo proof-of-state -> proof-of-stake

View on HN

In fairness to the present, the first post on HN about bitcoin[1] had 3 comments:

1) this is amazing and will save humanity

2) this is dumb no one will ever use it

3) this is confusing

That ratio doesn’t seem that much different than recent posts.

I think you’re right that most people at least on HN have decided what they believe when it comes to bitcoin.

Ultimately money is a belief and not just any belief but one so central to our identities that we often organize our lives around how we can get enough money.

Strong beliefs get tied into our identities so that threats to those beliefs will be viewed as many as attacks on their identities.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

Is there a place for the #1 group to go for curious conversation? (Curious conversation requires subtracting out the speculation about price and money)

I've been following Alex Gladstein[1] on Twitter and there's been lots of interesting podcasts and other discussions worth checking out.

[1] https://twitter.com/gladstein

Thanks for the suggestion! Looks like a great rec, I see he retweeted some kind of debate that looks interesting.

I'm pretty dubious of Twitter as a platform though. There's so much other stuff, and Twitter injects its own crapola into the feeds too. I've bookmarked his profile instead, look forward to checking it out.

If you're interested, but want to skip the noise on Twitter, uou can read most of his work in regards to Bitcoin and its humanitarian impact here: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein

Thanks! I had not realized bitcoinmagazine could be a good source. I had grouped it in with other crypto media junk like cointelgraph.

I disagree. There is a lot of interesting things to discuss. But all of them start from the premise "blockchain works as a distributed ledger". People in the camp you are in are not that interested in those discussions, because you disagree with the premise.

These interesting things are about how to do privacy, build second layers, make other smart functionality, etc. In general there are actual cryptographic innovations coming out of these systems. Zcash was truly positive to research into Zero Knowledge Proofs.

At the same time, discussions often get muddied by a few vocal people who are trying to hype up their investments. I imagine some of these people are just hyping, and others have bought into the believe, and cannot handle the cognitive dissonance of 'maybe there is something wrong with this'.

Oh, it works as a distributed ledger (that is already proven).

I just fail to see how it is better than so many other alternatives on a case-by-case basis... mostly on efficiency...

And just because I don't believe in the idea itself, I acknowledge that some good can come of it..

See for example wars, where most cutting edge innovation happens. I think wars are bad (but sometimes necessary), but we are reaping the benefits of generals wanting to throw more cannonballs further (If you are unsure I mean our computers where developed mostly because of that), also microwaves, the internet (a cold war though) and lots and lots of other stuff...

Yeah, I'd say your entire approach is antithetical to healthy discussion: insinuating anyone who is interested in crypto is technically inept, and turning the discussion into a 2-sides polarization. There's no use in talking about crypto in a sincere way now because of the way its been politicized.

I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance), in a purely theoretical sense - but they just kept making disgusted faces and saying bitcoin is a scam (?). I'm not sure there's any rational energy behind any of it, it seems to me like any other political "issue" since 2016, like the Rittenhouse trial.

> I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance)

There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be done. It is very hard to discuss that maybe X wasn't done before not because of technology, but because of other issues.

For example, the problem of transparency and enforcement in governance is not that we lack the technology: it's that we lack the initiative and the detailed procedures. I also see a lot of discussions around NFTs being used to sell used digital games: again, it hasn't been done not because tracking ownership is difficult but because allowing that would take a large bite of game sellers/developers profits. 99% of the applications I see discussed can be done without blockchain, but people never seriously ask themselves why is that and instead say that crypto will solve it.

You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: As a response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.

Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide.

Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.

Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.

> You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: A response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.

You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code?

> Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority.

Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate.

> Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.

That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.

I don't think you quite grasp that people are already building blockchains for government use. You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now.

Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.

> You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now.

Yep, and we have seen some government bodies using Github or other platforms to publish open data, or to be more transparent on procedures, and yet most of them still don't do it. Which is my point: the problem is not lack of technology, but lack of motivation/human capability/initiative to do it.

> Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates.

I'm sorry but this looks incredibly naive. I can tell you a very real example: in my country, Spain, we have papers proving that, among others, a certain M. Rajoy, of the PP party, received money that came from illegal donations. The prime minister at the time, Mariano Rajoy from the PP party, denied that it was him on the papers. He didn't face any legal consequence.

There have been so many times that a central authority has clearly gone against the protocols of the system without it disintegrating... You can't apply tech solutions to a problem that's not at all about tech.

I don't dispute that this is mostly theoretical. But I wouldn't say it's naive, because we know that when people buy into systems they follow the rules as best they can. The problem occurs when others take advantage of the system to game it with plausible deniability, within the confines of said system. That's the entire point of "the emperor has no clothes" allegory. When people buy in to a broken system, broken things happen.

That's why you get papers "proving" someone's guilt, but no action taken because the handling of such situations lies outside of the common understanding of the system. I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"

Obviously one major problem is how to build a system which handles all of the edge-cases that crop up? One possible answer is to use a DAO which can modify itself through whatever means (usually democratic).

> I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"

Or people think to themselves "well, the papers are authentic but the meaning is open to interpretation" or "well, it's not such a bad thing" or "well, but the others are doing worse", or a myriad of things. All of those are real arguments I've seen made.

It is naive to think that you can codify everything into a system in a way where there's no open interpretation possible. It is naive to think that people will trust the system instead of what they heard the system says, or that people will trust the system over leaders, or the the people responsible for enforcing the system decisions and feeding the system information won't find a way to elude responsibility.

In general, it is naive to think that the problem of corruption, which is a problem about trust (if the person I like says he didn't do it or did it for a good reason, then I trust him above all else), enforcement (the ones responsible for enforcing the rules are the ones breaking them) and tolerance (people don't care that much about corruption if it doesn't harm them) will be fixed by a solution that at most will help a little bit in the enforcement part.

I think of it more in terms of a highly secure and decentralized online videogame. Most people will be happy just to play the game, some people will start guilds and min/max, some people will try to cheat. When someone is found cheating, the system gets patched to prevent others from doing it. The dynamics of a game nudges people into behaving within the incentive structure of the game mechanics - even though technically they could strip naked and /dance for a month straight.

In any well designed online game (please don't use shitty ones against me), cheaters aren't able to hijack the entire system or ruin an economy. Their exploits break the game temporarily and most of the time it doesn't affect that many people. In bad cases, the state gets rolled back, the exploit patched, and the game continues. Sometimes things are just unavoidable, and everyone counts their losses.

I think blockchain has the potential to make fairer and more resilient systems, and with new incentives as well. We can use game theory to try wildly different societal structures, and quickly switch to another one if one doesn't work well.

On some level, trust always has to be present. If we make the rules trustless, enforcement becomes the bottleneck (until Robocop?), but it's still potentially better than what we have now where we simply have to trust millions of other people not to fuck with anything too much.

> You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions.

This is useless and unconstructive generalizaton. AFAIK many non-tech problems were solved with technical solutions.

It's a basic fact. If a problem is caused by something that is not related to lack of technology, you won't solve it with a technical solution. This is obvious in any other field (for example, you won't see a doctor that says that drugs could fix poverty) but a lot of tech people don't seem capable of admitting that some problems cannot be solved by technology.

But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology? Not enough food? Invent agriculture. Or invent the spear and the sandal so you can hunt further afield.

Technology is not a field. Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives.

> But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?

Not at all. I mean, to take your example:

> Not enough food? Invent agriculture.

Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.

Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives when they don't have a way to do something. Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues... Having the technology is far from enough in most cases.

The idea that "technology solves everything" permeates HN and you'll see it all over the place in threads about education, politics, corruption, music, math... Funnily enough, when the people who actually know about the topic show up in those threads, most of the time they end up explaining why the problem at hand is not at all technology related.

> Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.

Perhaps we could invent a new thing to solve that too? Improvements to crop technology, breeding, farming methods continue to happen every year. Inventions like the Internet bring information to people in rural areas who might not otherwise have had access to it. Why can't we solve all these things with technology?

> Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues...

But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?

It seems anything humans invent is just one more tool we accumulate as a society. Once it was language, then writing, then mass communication, now perhaps it'll be a secure economy.

> Why can't we solve all these things with technology?

Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.

> But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?

No, I don't think you can. You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech (unless you want to create a slaving machine, and I don't think that's the idea), you can't make tech that magically eliminates energy requirements to transport or build things, or that eliminates costs. I think we need to be at least a little bit realistic when evaluating the problems.

I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. It's like someone saying that you only need a hammer for woodworking.

> You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech

At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience.

> I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology.

Who said that all problems can be solved by technology?

> Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.

Technological progress often goes against the will of governments. See Twitter-triggered revolutions.

The commenter above just said "But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?"

This looks like another useless generalizaton to me.

Actually I agree with you that a "blockchain of law" would be great..

But that could also be done just by putting all law on somewhere public like github...

Or by having a block chain with a hard limit of 10 khashes/second per country (detecting cheaters is easy as far as I understand) and you can have a network of 200 raspberrypi zeros running it for around a single kilowatt..

It seems many of these ideas stem from failures of USA's political system. That is entrenched players fighting against government breaking their hold on their profit models even if that would be net benefit for general population. See taxation and even access to law, which I heard cost something 650$ a month from private provider.

For example Finland already have laws online accessible for free: https://finlex.fi/en/

And Finland probably isn't only country doing this.

Hello fellow scandinavian.

Well, it is the same in my country (Denmark), we have retsinformation.dk (litterally "information of the law"), but that does not hinder a corrupt state from altering "history" as they see fit.

Also, my mother was a german teacher and her ex-DDR speakers (many who were quite some time in prison) told us that, that basically all of them where enprisoned with due process. Their problems were, that the laws where constructed so you were a criminal if you did X, but also (due to a different law) if you did not do X.

It is the basic catch-22, that you cannot escape.

You are intimately dependent on the benevolence of your state/society, and if your state/society is not benevolent you can only throw your life at trying to change it (for everybody else)... You will the most likely fail (and be dead) unless a lot of (by definition) uncoordinated action happens at once.

Even in my country that boast of being a free and civil society we have problems once in a while.

In the 1990 we had a police chief should (sadly for him on camera), "shoot at their legs" (police shooting at citizens is very uncommon in Denmark) at a somewhat violent demonstration.

And we have what is called the Tibetian case where our police mislead protesters so that the visiting Chinese gov people did not have to look at the (otherwise legal) demonstration...

Did they ask you to explain it? Did you talk about shortcomings of it?

Most of the crypto related posts feels like advertising/preaching. Issues with their proposed solutions are rarely focused on and when they're brought up, hand waving begins.

I think this is a consequence of crypto proponents using mostly same talking points, usually decentralization/some libertarian dream. Technical discussions are rarely initiated. I've been following this since early days of BTC and I'm so tired of it. I don't see anything in it that would help our society. Maybe due to your political leanings you do.

No, they didn't. Most people just make inflammatory comments or make extremely complex "gotcha" claims that aren't true, which need both parties to be cooperative to resolve. I was busy trying to make arguments against wild claims, and ended up saying dumb things like "Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does"; things that are technically true but don't resolve the attacker's underlying unease - and so are unhelpful.

Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc.

These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.

Out of curiosity how do you estimate this comparison:

> Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does

I actually looked into it and got the quote wrong, it's not Amazon Alexas globally, it's all "always on devices" in America; including computers, gaming consoles, etc.

From googling and "This Machine Greens" docu:

> American always on devices: 1375 TWh per year

> Cruise ships: 250 TWh per year

> Bitcoin: 116 TWh per year

> Online advertising: 106 TWh per year

> American Alexas: 1.52 TWh per year

That is almost 630 watts per person (250 million people, 24*365 hours per year)... That seems like a lot...

As a north european techie spending power on quite a few always on things (respberry pis, a nas, a router, wifi, ps5 etc)- but also freezer, fridge, cooking - and lightning for half the year and a little extra heating, I have used around 2500 kWh year to date, which is roughly 320 watts in total (or half that stated figure for always on devices alone...)

EDIT: I remembered the american population size wrong, the right figure is 475 watts @330 Mln people, but my point stands..

I would say less technically savvy people probably use more electricity, not less. And you're assuming that you're the average American consumer. There are probably old toasters and electrical heaters that contribute significantly to that figure. In any case, the conservative estimate is still several times that of Bitcoin's usage.

I'd also say cruise ships are more egregious, which no one seems to care about despite them definitely not using clean energy or being remotely useful, using 2.5x the amount of energy as Bitcoin - or as much as Spain!

Maybe you just failed to explain to that person what the roadmap of going from coin to blockchain powered book of law looks like, because it's quite the road.

It's inherently a political, not a technical, question. I think people on the whole recognize it as such, but it's often easier to try to invalidate the stuff on technical grounds, because for crypto to be beneficial it must satisfy BOTH the political and the technical requirements.

Even if you completely agree with the political aims of crypto, if there are technical flaws it catastrophically ruins everything crypto hopes to achieve.

Even if you completely agree with the technical side of crypto, if the intended end-game horrifies you, you're not gonna want to see it proliferate.

> cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance)

Would 51% attacks spoil the party with that? The incentives would be enormous to do such a thing, it might even become a polarized political imperative to try to do these attacks.

It might also be like replacing the one citizen, one vote system with a one gpu (or future hardware item), one vote system. Would that remove political power from citizens?

We don't really know. A lot of work has gone into trying to minimize incentive for 51% attacks though, and it continues. "Fork off" is a classic argument, that the attacker may take over the chain but then cause a fork where they're left with a worthless system anyway - meaning the 51% attack would only be profitable for a short duration before a fork devalues their winnings and everyone continues on the new system.

Vitalik Buterin is involved in a lot of the theory in handicapping plutocrats, and enabling fair representation/voting in the blockchain space. Check out his blog.

I think Ethereum (as in its contracts) is interesting, there's just too much get rich quick fud, SNR too low, for me to confidently be 'actively interested'.

Some kind of novel things could be done with it, like that distributed storage thing is sort of interesting. There's a peer to peer betting thing based on (somewhow the outcomes are available to the program?) it I saw on HN a while ago which is sort of interesting.

A way to decrease the noise would be most appreciated.

I'm confident there's lifetimes worth of signal, even in crypto developments in the last year. But there is an ungodly amount of noise over price, outrage, etc.

I asked in a new thread about where to go for curious conversations about cryptocurrencies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297611

I think this is pretty much the same question that was discussed a couple of weeks ago. Worth a read, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139813

Oh wow missed this! Will link to it from the thread I started as well. Thank you!

For anyone else who reads that thread -- the good links and suggestions are near the bottom of the thread.

There is a 3rd camp I count myself in that sits somewhere in the middle and stays out of most HN CC discussions because there seem to be almost only extremists discussing.

I actually belong more to camp three than the "no/scam" camp... But I do lean towards no real purpose, that cannot be better (i.e. more efficiently) done otherwise...

Indeed, which is why the inefficiency in Bitcoin is deliberate. People seem to overlook that. If you goal is simply to send numbers around the world, of course there are better methods.

Interesting comments! Do you mind sharing your thoughts on why proof of stake won’t happen?

IMHO because it depends on uncloneability of digital assets.. Which I believe is not possible.

The whole thing that makes cryptocurrencies work now is the un-cloneability of the amount of work done (which is why the 51% problem exists in the first place).

The only good way of doing it would be through a cartel with strict enforcement of hashrates etc.. And welcome to the financial banking system...

I'm also curious about this but don't really understand this explanation.

Can you elaborate more on what "uncloneability of digital assets" means exactly and why it's a pre-requisite of proof-of-stake? Happy to take some links if there are any that explains this well.

All kind of trade depends on value and value depends (mostly) on scarcity.

In the real world cloning money (historically precious metals) is really really hard (and btw. much easier with paper money that the metals that have a basket of physical attributes that cannot be emulated at once).

Digital bits on the other hand are indefenately cloneable (by design, that is one of the base properties of "digital").

Just for you to see my text here, along the way somewhere around 20 perfect copies were made by various routers (i.e. computers)..

You're confusing concepts and blockchain fundamentals. "Uncloneability" is the double-spending problem solved by proof-of-work/hashcash scheme. The 51% attack is not the problem, it's just a requirement for a PoW based blockchain to work. Just like how you have 1/3 honest node requirements in traditional BFT distributed database designs.

So cloneable cryptocoins is a thing? Where do I sign up wink.

IMHO cloneablitiy IS the problem, PoW is just a (very, very unfortunate) solution to that. PoS (stake as in possession, not pledging) is IMHO inherently impossible, so PoW is all we got, now and for ever...

Proof of stake is already happening. It's on Ethereum (though they haven't switched over to the beacon chain from proof-of-work yet), and it's on many others.

If you look at the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, maybe bitcoin and 1 are 2 others are proof of stake. There are a bunch of 'tokens' cryptocurrencies which exist on top of another blockchain, but the remainder of the layer 1 blockchains and all of the layer 2s that use a consensus mechanism are using proof of stake now.

Arguing against crypto because of proof of work is like arguing that computers won't see mass adoption because vacuum tubes make them impractical to fit inside of a typical home.

Last I looked the so-called proof-of-stake was more a system where somebody put up a stake to be witnesses (in lack of a better word).

When I say proof of stake, I mean it in the way of "proof of possession"

Proof of stake is a decentralized consensus mechanism that is (usually) trustless, and prevents attacks like double spending.

Most notably, Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Avalanche, Terra, Algorand, Polygon, Elrond, and Fantom are all using permissionless networks where nodes which have some amount of the native token of those blockchains staked produce blocks and validate transactions

Your answer reads like a marketing blurb and only tells about the goal (on which we agree) and not the mechanism (where we disagree). I tried reading a few of the coins you mentioned and all of them were witness ("validator") based...

They still do not prove that they have something in possession, they stake their own coin on being honest... BIG difference.

Do they allow you to prove that you (and you alone) have possession/control of the coin itself, and if so, how? (That is the part that I consider impossible).

The whole problem is that proof-of-stake has been redefined by the new PoS networks and does have the original meaning of "stake" (i.e. sole possessor) anymore.

I can prove to you that I have access to a gold coin by taking it out of my purse and showing it to you. You can do three simple tests (weight, volume and ringing) that ensures that it cannot be any other material than pure gold (due to any material that is both cheaper and heavier than gold is tungsten and that does not ring). You can also be sure that it is not a clone of another coin so that it "just disappears" or gets double spent.

There is also no witness/validator that can break your trust and betray you.

Every POS network I have ever looked into (and I admit that it has been a while) relies on witnesses. And that removes my way of knowing whether the witnesses lie or not.

Is there any of the socalled PoS networks that actually allow you to prove that you have exclusive possession/control of the digital coin in question without any witnesses ('validators')?

If so, their founders can already book their ticket to the Nobel Gala next year, as that would AFAIK be a feat in the same scale as disproving gravity...

Just to point out, you're using a common term very differently than others in cryptocurrency who say "Proof of Stake". This will add friction to your conversations.

You are right, we disagree about what PoS means...

I believe I use it in the original meaning from around 2010, but I might be mistaken.

I do fail to see how the current use of the term PoS guarantees anything against a cartel of bad actors...

With "Proof of Stake" to mean a consensus system, are you saying the Ethereum Proof of Stake implementation doesn't do anything to guarantee against a cartel of bad actors?

My understanding is "slashing" may be one such mechanism. This is where staked funds are taken away from bad actors. ie if you propose a block with bad transactions, the 32 ETH you have staked will be reduced by some fraction as punishment. When your stake is slashed down to 16 ETH you are booted from the system. So that us a clear punishment against a bad actor, though I'm not sure what a cartel means i this case. Perhaps you know about this already however.

A cartel is a group of bad actors working together with full, but hidden coordination....

Proof of Work is not resilient to a sufficiently large 'cartel' either in this case. If your cartel is 51% of bitcoin miners by hashrate, they can agree to let each other spend their bitcoin twice. Of course, this is sufficiently hard to do with proof of work, as with proof of stake, as to make it infeasable, perhaps even moreso with proof of stake.

As an example with bitcoin specifically, it would probably be cheaper to buy enough mining hardware to constitute 51% of the bitcoin network than it would be to buy 51% of all bitcoin.

Of course, both would be very expensive endeavors.

lots of PoS chains are live today.

As I regularly post whenever it comes up, SPL USDC is a dramatically better payment experience than wire transfers or debit cards or whatever, and I wish I could accept all payments this way and pay all bills this way.

I basically agree; but this oversimplifies the diversity of opinion in both camps. For example, it might well be worth the environmental damage to shift control of international monetary flows from the US government to a true free market.

Although the US has been as good a steward as can be hoped for no entity should have that much control over international finance.

Sure it oversimplified (most opinions that are somewhat transferable are).

I agree with the hope for a better stewardship, but as all people end up moving cryptocurrencies in and out of the "old" financial system (creditcards, swift etc). I fail to see how crypto would help me..

I for one cannot pay for my rent, food, heat, water, power, internet with crypto, can you?

I can't pay my rent in US dollars, that doesn't make them worthless.

Although, to be fair, I did pay a security deposit in bitcoin 6 years ago.

Actually, in El Salvador, Bitcoin is now the national currency, so I suspect a lot of people are paying their rent in bitcoin

Isn’t El Salvador completely dollarized? It wouldn’t be surprising if most landlords still demanded rent paid in dollars rather than bitcoin (a difference in “the” national currency vs “a” national currency).

It's illegal to conduct business and not accept bitcoin in El Salvador.. it's the national currency now. I don't know for certain if this applies to landlords however.

Legal and enforced are also different things (especially when an autocrat is in charge). There are articles on how many poor people lack internet and are completely unbanked. That it is extremely unpopular in El Salvador. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/amp/cryptocurrency/articles/...

I think it goes a little deeper.

The whole discussion basically mirrors real life politics. One camp want's more collective action to help the unfortunate, the other wants absolute freedom for the individual.

How do you see bitcoin fit into that axis, i.e. how does bitcoin help the unfortunate (that is VERY late to the "game") ?

That might disprove my "nothing interesting to discus.

Bitcoin is an unconfiscable, permissionless inflation hedge. It's a big deal for people that live in authoritarian countries that coincidentally always have huge inflation numbers.

Until you end up in jail... sadly.

That is my point. If your country is "sufficiently bad" bitcoin will not (and cannot) help you in the long run.

Until you cross the borders and move all your wealth with you by memorizing 12 words.

Tell that to the the people of the ex-DDR, the North Korea and REALLY targeted individuals..

Sadly there exists no sure way to secure you belongings if the other party is sufficiently motivated to strip you of them (or your life)..

You can also be killed/robbed outside of your country by intelligence officers of your country...

> the North Korea and REALLY targeted individuals

There are always edge cases, where nothing helps. Fortunately, most countries are not like North Korea and you have some freedom, often enough to use crypto.

What a weird attitude of helplessness. You might as well argue against encryption because the state can always do the $5 wrench attack.

It is much easier for the government to confiscate your money from your bank account than to go after your Bitcoin. And it is impossible for the government to stop you from accepting payments in Bitcoin and to cut you off from financial system.

Maybe it is the other way around.

I live in an old and free democracy in Scandinavia (in the EU) and actually believe in my government's mostly pure motives. Our laws are solid and confiscation is unheard of outside of criminal activity.

If that changes drastically, I am screwed either way...

And it might be impossible for my government to stop me taking bitcoin but they could surely hinder me in converting them back to regular currency. And in my country nothing can be bought by any cryptocurrency.

I'm not sure how does you living in an old and free democracy in Scandinavia negate the fact that Bitcoin helps the unfortunate who are living in authoritarian states.

Obviously it doesn't, and I might be seriously wrong, but....

But would said unfortunate person have access to a passport and are they allowed to leave their authoritarian country?

Do they have anywhere to legally go, where they have the right to residence and can get into the new countries banking system? In the EU at least that is NOT easy unless you already have citizenship in another EU country....

I.e. say you are that person in that country, could you just decide to leave with your twelve word password, your passport and a backpack. And could you setup life in another country?

I do also see the value of storing your money in bitcoin due to inflation, if you believe bitcoin is here to stay (I don't believe that), and you can manage to buy it without too much suspicion from your state and convert it back at a later day if you decide to stay in your own country.

I'm so curious about your posts, this seems like an endless thread of gotchas. What's important to you about this topic? I have read all your posts in this thread and am puzzled. Thanks for any insights.

Complaining about "gotchas" like this so much sounds a lot like admitting defeat but desperately trying to phrase it as a win.

HN is a place for curiosity. I'm genuinely interested to hear svennek's perspective, it's coming through in a bunch of fragments throughout this post.

Further than that: one camp believes in collective action and the welfare of an extended population, encompassing the worthy AND the unworthy, and the other considers that there must be penalties for being unworthy or inferior, and rewards for being worthy or superior.

This is a genuine difference of ideology, authentically held. To insist on absolute freedom for the individual, including any penalty or consequence for any lack on any level (and any degree of reward for any superiority no matter how it's arrived at) means you do not care about the unfortunate any more than you'd care about the pile of chips produced whilst making a great sculpture. Not only is the sculpture the point, but it's actively harmful to insist on leaving the superfluous chips stuck on: some waste has to be disposed or you're just poisoning yourself/harming your sculpture.

This is a position often held by sculptures and people not often thought of as waste. People who get thought of as waste, frequently would like this assumption re-examined.

People who are garbage but occupy categories way beyond their inherent value really REALLY don't want that assumption re-examined…

> the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it

your network seem to be opposite of general population, where less technically apt less believe (economists, news people, etc.)

i suspect it has more to do with political leaning, i.e. more center-conformist less believe, outside center more believe

Why will proof-of-stake never happen?

Not op but will give my thoughts-

The only theory I'm aware of, which the "proof-of-stake" approach is based on, is some form of "game theory", my translation - "people won't do evil stuff since it's against their interest", which generally aligns with people being rational and basing economic theories on top of this thesis.

Every major chain except bitcoin and ethereum is proof-of-stake now. And in less than a year, ethereum will be proof of stake. People that say proof-of-stake "won't work" have no idea what they're talking about.

>People that say proof-of-stake "won't work" have no idea what they're talking about.

My understanding is every POS blockchain is centralized and not secure.

Can you name a POS blockchain that you think has achieved sufficient decentralization and security so we can test your claim?

PS: How about answering the question instead of preemptively downvoting and attempting to shutting down the conversation. If POS truly works, you should be happy to provide an example or even multiple examples. Any reluctance is a red flag...

In my opinion it's because it has not happened yet. Yes I know about the etherium experiment that has been delayed many times but may be running currently, but the crypto community seem to prefer the proof of work.

They prefer POW because it's actually more secure and decentralized. ETH POS results in a smaller group of people controlling the network, majority of fully validating nodes running on AWS, and introduces massive collusion/attack risks.

ETH POS has many of the bad characteristics current central banks have...

Agreed, there is nothing left for the HN community to discuss about cryptocurrencies. There is plenty worth discussing for others though. I posted a thread here asking where to go to find curiosity driven discussions about the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297611

paper money is also enviromental disaster. How many trees were cut just for it and how many people were paid to keep the paper money innovation going eg. bank employees siting on chairs waiting for customers while doing harm for the enviroment by producing CO2 (opportunity cost)

Paper money is not actually made of paper.

proof-of-stake already exists - we call it "traditional bank"

You could have written this summary in 2015, you're not keeping current.

> I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it

This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database, rather than really understanding the problems Bitcoin solves and why Satoshi made the choices they did. There are important trade-offs between efficiency, redundancy, decentralisation, and robustness in an adversarial environment.

The other aspect is that they just look at Bitcoin through a technological lens and judge it inferior to other networking & data storage technologies. They don't have a deep grasp of the concept of money and what properties makes for a sound form of money. Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job explaining it from that perspective [1].

It's a shame that so many, otherwise smart, people are sleeping on such a revolutionary change in the world. The idea of Bitcoin has been thought about and predicted for many years by people held in high-regard among HN readers, such as Buckminster Fuller [2], Henry Ford [3], and Friedrich Hayek [4], and they'll still dismiss it out of hand.

Such a massive lost opportunity for great skills, knowledge, and talent to be applied to what I think is one of the most important innovations of our civilisation.

[1] https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/look-at-how-buckminster-fuller-pred...

[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/how-henry-ford-envisaged-bitcoin-10...

[4] https://twitter.com/janpaul_f/status/1461596623038038017?s=2...

Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish. Sorry I don't know how to phrase it so it doesn't come as a personal attack. Most of the crypto posts sound like it.

> This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database

I think it's crazy that you feel this way, I can only speak for myself and a few others, but we do in fact fully understand it and why it works this way.

Satoshi is not some god that has come to save us. He saw something that fraction of people in society consider to be a problem and attempted to solve it. He did not consider complex ways that his solution would interact with the society. A lot of us think that crypto causes more problems than it solves.

But this is why Bitcoin works though. It's why it's important. Because it solves a problem most people have no idea even exists. That's why they get angry when people talk about it, because it seems like people are lying to them or trying to wind them up.

> Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish

That's because I strongly believe in its ability to have positive change on our civilisation... environmentally, economically, politically, and sociologically.

Any belief held strongly enough appears cultish. Ultimately, I don't really care how it appears.

But hey, I could be wrong about Bitcoin, I just hope I'm not.

If I'm wrong I look foolish and have lost thousands of dollars saved in Bitcoin. If I'm right... well, I guess we'll see.

The environmental argument is a straw man, and not really related to crypto, but actually related to our energy mix.

If crypto was mined only on renewables there is no environmental argument. Ergo, not related to crypto technology itself.

It's not a straw man. Yes, if the energy mix was only reliant of renewables, energy usage wouldn't be as much as a problem. But it is not, and won't be in years, decades, so we can't just brush off the energy usage of crypto as "well it's the energy mix fault". You cannot evaluate a technology in isolation of its real world, practical context.

Not to mention that even with renewables, energy usage would be still a concern. Renewables will still have issues around distribution, power peaks, energy storage, price, and crypto wouldn't be helping any of them. A discussion of how would crypto affect the rest of the people compared to the benefit it brings would still be relevant.

56% of energy used for Bitcoin mining is coming from renewable sources of energy.

Is there a source for that? Last time I checked there weren't reliable reports even on total energy usage, much less energy sources.

https://www.hope.com/content/dam/hope-assets/collateral/Mini...

That's a self-reported survey by members of a Bitcoin mining council, which represent an unknown portion of the total mining capacity, and if I'm correct the term "sustainable energy" includes "carbon-based energy with net emission credits". It doesn't seem the most reliable source to me.

That is one heck of a waste, at a time when managing the thermal runaway of our planet is a matter of great and immediate urgency.

Separating money from the state is worth the cost.

I think this is what every crypto argument secretly comes down to, this ideological disagreement.

I don't want money to be separated from the state, and especially not at a cost.

One man's crypto-anarchocapitalist utopia is another man's dystopian capitalist nightmare that we sacrificed our environment for.

Imagine telling a guy who lives in a state with over 15% inflation rate that he's destined to stay poor because some people in first-world countries think that hard money is an utopia.

I never said money in any form is an utopia.

The utopia would be post-money imo and moving money away from the state would make that harder to achieve.

In other words, 44% comes from non-renewables.

It's not like those 56 are free either, we could use that energy to run more important things instead that crypto is taking away from.

In many cases, you can't use the energy that is used for Bitcoin mining for anything else, since there are simply no consumers next to the renewable energy source.

How come you see this argument pedaled on crypto but not every other technology?

Cobalt mining for batteries?

Energy consumption for processed metals?

Oil refining from rocketry (largely used by military in practice scenarios)

This list goes on. It seems crypto is the only technology evaluated in relation to the whole environment. For all the others we shrug and ignore externalities.

If crypto was only mined on renewables and there was sufficient (and sufficiently distributed) renewable energy that the presence of crypto did not otherwise detract from our desperately overdue de-carbonization efforts, then sure, whatever, knock yourselves out melting your processors to do funny math.

But that isn't the reality we live in.

The environmental aspect is manifestly a part of how crypto phenomenon, and attempts to separate the underlying technology from the manner in which it is (and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be) used, are disingenuous at best.

I think the renewable energy is the real straw-man.

What about the non-recycable waste after "renewable" energy. Windmills have steel coated by epoxy wings, those cannot be recycled.

Solar panels is also ready for the trash-heap after 20 years, due to being a complex composite..

The only real energy source that would help would be nuclear, but even if we get that where have more efficient room-heaters and better use of the computing.. (protein folding could be one for example)

Solar panels aren’t complex composites. They are silicon with some coatings on it. You can definitely recycle them.

Renewables have environmental impact too.

Renewable are also not free. The technology of crypto (as it exists today) is more energy consuming than a single computer processing all the transactions centrally.

No matter how you cut it, that delta is waste if the additional functionality is useless.

Your argument lacks a modal operator I think.

That’s not a straw man. It’s literally how huge portions of crypto are mined right now. Were you trying to say “red herring”?

Regardless, energy is a market and even if crypto used purely renewable energy, that’s energy that wasn’t used for replacing fossil fuels in some other use case. Literally any technology that massively boosts energy consumption has the same problem.

Energy is fungible, we don't have 100% green energy and won't for a very long time, we make up the difference with fossil. Even if crypto used green energy only, it means more fossil burned.

To continue human civilization we need to stop fossil burning as much as possible, crypto is unnecessary and should therefore be stopped.

But that is solved with a price on carbon. That would make mining without renewables unprofitable.

How do you argue that something is unnecessary? Aluminum uses heaps of energy… we haven’t needed in for 1000s of years, is it neccersary?

Burning electricity as heat just so our currency is little bit more resilient doesn't really seem in anyway efficient way to do things. And any efficiency gains are negated because we will just do more of it.

Any other industry including financial one will try to minimise the waste if it becomes unreasonable. Not so with proof of work crypto.

Crypto mining is using renewable capacity that could be used for other purposes.

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