The realization of that sort of idealism is so far fetched it doesn't change the argument. Sure, you could possibly get the USA to create laws to stop externalizing the costs of co2 production, but everyone, everywhere? Including the most corrupt, war torn, and penniless places in the world? And what about the deep state? They once sold cocaine to us citizens in order to raise money for black ops. Would they think twice about mining PoW?

> Sure, you could possibly get the USA to create laws to stop externalizing the costs of co2 production, but everyone, everywhere?

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.

I can see your argument up to this point:

> 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?

> The whole discussion is about whether PoS is equivalent to PoW in terms of environmental harm

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.

This is not strictly true.

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.

Nothing is strictly true except truisms, but I still disagree. Unless bitcoin consensus rules necessitated energy source that is harmful for environment, it is not fair to blame energy consumer for environment impact. Energy producer is the villain and spineless politicians that won’t enforce punishment for harmful energy sources.

I disagree, just as in the food example. Consumers are also to blame. If you know that your induced demand will be filled in the same way that current demand is being filled, then creating more demand is irresponsible, if it can be avoided. What benefit does wasting so much energy have? At least Siberian homes using mining to heat their house in the winter have a good side effect.

> If you know that your induced demand will be filled in the same way that current demand is being filled, then creating more demand is irresponsible, if it can be avoided. What benefit does wasting so much energy have?

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.

You always create heat. That’s where the energy goes. Google “reversible computing” for theoretical approaches for computations that release zero heat.

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.

You always create heat but at different efficiency levels. If you create enough heat with your miner to keep your siberian home warm it’s fair to say you’re not being very efficient at computing.

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.

Tell me again what’s wrong with Ripple or Stellar? How are they centralized?

So rather than addressing my points you start the cycle again by suggesting implementations of PoS coins? What’s wrong with Ripple and Stellar is that they are PoS coins. PoS doesn’t address any existing issues but adds layers of complexity. And both are centralized pre-mine scams anyway.

You made a pretty bold statement saying that no Proof of Stake systems are not immune to grinding, although they're are some currently major ones in existence, EOS, Carsano, etc. If you can grind away at these systems, why don't you do that and make a trillion dollars yourself?

Just because something can be attacked doesn’t mean it can be attacked cheaply.

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.

I think PoS is much more environmentally friendly than PoW. That's not the same as whether I think either will increase or decline in the short term, which is a different question entirely.

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?

First, talking of environmental impact of PoW is misguided. It’s producers of energy that do harm, not consumers.

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.

No, it's the chemical reaction that the oil plants use, not the owners of the said plants. See how silly that sounds?

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.

> No, it's the chemical reaction that the oil plants use, not the owners of the said plants

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.

>> No, it's the chemical reaction that the oil plants use, not the owners of the said plants

> 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.

Who is to blame for environmental harm is not a philosophical question. Act of consumption is not harmful, act of production is harmful. The fact that demand creates incentive to produce from shitty sources doesn’t change the actor that is doing harm.

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.

Ripple and Stellar are NOT based on PoS. They use a different consensus called PoC. Have you looked at their design at all?

oh yeah, ofc, those two are just centralized pre-mine scams. that's even worse than PoS imho. the biggest question is why do people even consider them cryptocurrencies.

Ripple and Stellar are completely centralized. It's simply a web of trust. If one of your peers that have given you “trust”, such as a bank in which you have an account, decides they want to freeze your funds and prevent you from spending your money on the Ripple network, they can do so. With Bitcoin, this can't be done.

That’s totally false though. Only if the majority of your peers colludes, then you don’t make progress, but then you just change your peers and make progress.

I haven't looked at ripple in awhile, but I thought the idea was that if Alice agrees that she can float Bob $5 and Bob agrees that he can float Charles $5 then as long as you trust Alice with a $5 debt, you can trust Charles with a $5 debt, even though you don't know Charles.

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 think you are thinking of RipplePay, which was like 10 years ago. Since then Ripple introduced the XRP distributed ledger which is what we’re talking about

> Do you think PoW is more harmful than PoS or not?

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.