> Also, if the PoS staking rewards are too low, you are vulnerable to the exact same 51% attacks as PoW.
"We all theoretically agree that I could have burned the most oil today (and in so doing, I will not be able to do something I could otherwise have done as my funds are locked up, which feels like a waste)" is a way way way way better scenario than "I guess we will all have to burn a bunch of oil to make sure I'm right (and in so doing we destroy our habitat, which more than feels like a waste)"... it really doesn't matter if it provides a better result than proof-of-work as long as it doesn't provide a worse one and has fewer externalities (if nothing else, as the people willing to play this game at all will have a selection bias for people who don't think the environment is important; we are already at the point where 1% of humanity's CO2 impact is from cryptocurrency mining, which is insane: "the economy is moving 1% slower as we are locking up capital in silly ways" is roughly harmless in comparison).
note this argument only works if the costs of burning oil (habitat destruction) is being externalized. thus, this is more of a problem with externalization than a pos vs pow issue.
If you got 2 out of (USA,EU,PRC) to do it, and those countries all put big import tariffs and other sanctions on other countries that didn't, that would switch over the world economy to lowering CO2 emissions.
> Including the most corrupt, war torn, and penniless places in the world?
Corrupt and war-torn places still interact with the global economy. Penniless places aren't going to have enough of an economy to emit much CO2.
> And what about the deep state? [...] Would they think twice about mining PoW?
If there is a worldwide effort to shut down PoW cryptocurrencies, they will become useless and the deep state won't be able to achieve anything with them that it couldn't do more easily by other means.
> If there is a worldwide effort to shut down PoW cryptocurrencies, they will become useless and the deep state won't be able to achieve anything with them that it couldn't do more easily by other means.
The whole discussion is about whether PoS is equivalent to PoW in terms of environmental harm, and I'm arguing that PoW is more costly. I don't understand what your general point is. Do you think PoW is more harmful than PoS or not? The parent was saying that it's an externalization problem. I don't think it's realistic to think that the damage to the environment could be charged back to the miner in every case, therefore PoW would always be more dirty than PoS. Could you clarify what your main point is in light of this?
it's wrong question anyway because it implies PoW necessarily causes environmental harm. PoW is consumption of energy, just like vast majority of other human activities. consumption of energy is not what harms the environment, at least not as directly as production of energy. the two are only closely related because of unwillingness of political elites to punish harmful producers, because those producers are the political elites or are closely related to them.
That’s like saying that in the US where factory farms are the norm, a new game causing people to buy as much veal as they can and throw it in the garbage has absolutely no responsibility for how many calves are raised in terrible conditions, because they COULD have been raised in good conditions, regardless of how many there are.
The fact is that human production capacity for energy is finite. The more pressure you put on this production capacity, the more it will cause companies to pop up and produce more energy. AS LONG AS the proportion of FOSSIL FUEL sources among these new companies will be high, you are indirectly contributing, via induced demand, towards more CO2 pollution. Yes if the world had moved to 99% sustainable energy then Bitcoin and Ethereum would not be contributing to the CO2 pollution problem in a meaningful way. But the current disitribution of energy production is relevant in assigning responsibility.
Just as if we all moved to fake lab grown veal, then maybe the game of throwing veal in the trash would not be harming animals in any meaningful way.
I think you misunderstand PoW. Energy is not wasted, energy is spent to provide the security level that is demanded by the market. Nobody will spend a joule mining bitcoin unless it is profitable.
> At least Siberian homes using mining to heat their house in the winter have a good side effect
This is actually a bad thing, because it means mining is inefficient. Primary purpose of mining is to convert energy into PoW, if you get heat doing that - you’re not getting as much PoW as you could’ve got.
Look, I can come up with a terrible sorting algorithm and get everyone using it as a requirement to participate a network protocol that will never change and then say look, it’s useful, it’s sorting stuff.
People have long invented far better things than PoW to secure distributed BFT systems. The transcations they can handle even scale with the number of machines, which is the case with the vast majority of applications on the Internet. If there was no alternative then MAYBE it wouldn’t be a waste (I think it would still be a bad trade-off). But you can literally just have a coin on another protocol which doesn’t use PoW arms race.
I don’t know if a single system where mutually untrusting parties can find consensus in distributed ledger other than PoW or it’s energy (but not complexity) equivalent PoS. If you do - make a money out of it and be a trillionaire, nobody is stopping you.
So far the only thing that probably works is PoW.
Besides, your argument cuts both ways - if you think PoS are so much better and PoW will eventually be worthless, show me how much BTC you shorted today or ever. I bet it’s zero.
Anyway, you have yet to prove the core of your argument, that any current PoS system can be defeated by an equivalent amount of work as a PoW system through grinding. Again, this is a bold statement. Can you at least begin to try to defend it?
Second, stake grinding is an attack. You’re the one who has to prove your PoS system is not affected by it. As far as I’m concerned cost of attack is the same as in PoW except PoS shifts costs into political spectrum via totally redundant layer of complexity.
You can't assert that every PoS system is vulnerable to a grinding attack without specifying what the attack is. Every PoW system has a centralization of mining problem due to economy of scale. Now prove that isn't true.
poor attempt, try again.
> without specifying what the attack is
stake grinding, long range and other attacks are widely known. all complexities that deviate from trivial PoS system exist solely to address these attacks. are you really pretending they don't exist?
> Every PoW system has a centralization of mining problem due to economy of scale. Now prove that isn't true.
the only centralizing factor is energy subsidies. it's still a far cry from issues with PoS systems.
> poor attempt, try again.
I like how you deleted the "See how silly that sounds?" part, which is what I'm getting at. Anyway, who to blame is philosophical question and has no absolute truth, we might as well blame God for making humans greedy and shortsighted. I think we have to agree to disagree here. The fact remains though that in today's world if BTC switched over to PoS, we'd save about 1% energy usage today and the corresponding co2 production to go along with it. If BTC continues to grow, this number will go up correspondingly. Are you denying this?
> stake grinding, long range and other attacks are widely known. all complexities that deviate from trivial PoS system exist solely to address these attacks. are you really pretending they don't exist?
I'm saying they've been solved. You can see their justifications against the attacks you talk about in the white papers. If you have a specific attack against a specific coin, then we have something to talk about. Otherwise, just repeating over and over, "But there are attacks!" doesn't disprove anything they are saying.
> the only centralizing factor is energy subsidies. it's still a far cry from issues with PoS systems.
Again, economies of scale. Please at least try to address my arguments.
And it’s not 1%, so you’re wrong about that too.
If BTC switched over to PoS it would cost the world exactly the same amount of resources, shifting some energy consumption into political plane. Fiat money is 100% political plane. Going towards fiat money is antithetical to bitcoin.
You’re saying attacks have been solved without citing any sources. There is no solution to PoS attacks that doesn’t make the system less trustless or less decentralized and introduces a layer of attackable complexity.
> Again, economies of scale. Please at least try to address my arguments.
I haven’t seen an argument so far, only a buzzword.
And in practice it's usually that Alice and Bob are banks, and Charles is just a customer of Bob's bank. So, Bob can freeze Charles' money.
What you're talking about sounds more like EOS, Cardano, Ethereum Proof of Stake, etc.
I've no idea.
My point was that if enough big states decided that PoW cryptocurrencies were undesirable, they would not find it enormously difficult to prevent much electricity being used on PoW mining, worldwide.
(I misremembered this by a factor of 10: it is actually 0.1%. But I still find that ludicrously high.)
Second, “let’s all agree I can be in charge of selecting which transactions to process because I have most money, which means I could have spent most energy” is circular system where security of money is paid for using same money.
Third, CO2 impact of cryptocurrencies is orders of magnitude lower than CO2 impact of fiat money and military structures required to assert their worth. Things don’t exist in a vacuum and you have to make the right comparisons.
And how many orders of magnitude are cryptocurrencies smaller than fiat money?
You do realize that stakers in PoS earn interest (paid for through inflation) on their locked collateral?
like hashing blocks?
If you believe this is a critique of PoS then it must also be a critique of PoW
Modern PoS protocols prevent stake grinding with per-verifier VRFs and multi-round verification procedures.
So why bother and not use simplest possible system that guarantees security using the ultimate currency - energy?
Not really fiat money. You have to stake the coin in question but presumably you'd be holding that anyway. I don't see any real world costs that compare to the spend on electricity and GPUs you get with proof of work.
This is zero sum thinking. Yes, people will lock up money, which could have been invested elsewhere.
But you have to take into account the activity that happens on the chain as a result of POS, which itself will be productive presumably.
Thus the capital locked up in POS will be invested productively - because the activities enabled by POS themselves will be productive.
Of course, if there is nothing new that you can do as a result of POS - meaning, without POS you can already do all those things, then indeed there is no reason for POS. But the idea here ( which could be right or wrong ) is that POS will enable decentralized computation that would not happen otherwise.
EDIT: to downvoter: you can't say that locking up coins detracts from productive investment without evaluating what the chain ends up doing as a result of switching to POS. I mean, if you think that nothing useful will happen on a POS chain, that's a valid argument, but that's a different argument than simply worrying about locked up coins
One issue that proof of stake proponents often ignore is that proof of stake has its own costs that are roughly equivalent to the dollar cost of PoW. The issue is that you need to lock up money for PoS in order to mine it. That has a cost as you are forgoing interest on lending that money to an actually productive enterprise that is creating value. The net result is that funding and investment becomes more scarce because private investment is "crowded out" by people simply staking their Ethereum. This is the same harm caused by too much government debt "crowding out" private investment.
Also, if the PoS staking rewards are too low, you are vulnerable to the exact same 51% attacks as PoW. So it's very unsure how this would significantly reduce fees unless you are also significantly increasing your vulnerability to attack. (Now, there are caveats about the fungibility and the ease of renting PoW miners vs renting PoS tokens, but many of the same principles apply).