I spend a lot of time on Ethereum and wanted to respond to your points.

1) Yes, proof of work is terrible long-term, mainly because its cost scales with the market cap of the cryptocurrencies it secures. Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, which uses a normal amount of electricity and forever solves this issue

2) There are also a lot of excellent ideas and projects. For example, Gitcoin, quadratic funding, quadratic voting https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656

3) It's true that there are many scams/crimes in crypto, and that many or most holders of cryptocurrencies are speculators. What makes crypto different from tulips is that many speculators believe that crypto will come to power large portions of the world's financial and economic infrastructure.

4) Whether a random crypto startup is likely to be a scam depends entirely on your filters and definition of "startup". If you limit your population to projects or tokens with some level of social validation, such as being top-ranked on coinmarketcap or backed by in-industry VCs, then there're hardly any scams at all. Ethereum now has hundreds of quality teams working on many different parts of the ecosystem. For example, the DEX space (decentralized exchanges, eg. https://uniswap.org/) is very different than the layer-2 scaling space (eg. https://optimism.io/)

5) [It's a wild west...] Respectfully, this is an unkind or perhaps bigoted statement. I have many friends in crypto who are thoughtful, kind people. They think deeply about the ethical implications of the systems we're building. The same is true of many leaders in the space.

> Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, which uses a normal amount of electricity and forever solves this issue

This has been said for a few years now. The originally deadline for this was January 2020. Suffice to say, it didn't happen. I'll believe it when I see it.

Ultimately, Blockchain seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem. There are a lot of issues with the current implementations, and a lot of words about how to solve them, but these are hard problems, and there's no guarantees they're going to be solved, and they are often problems that our current financial tech industry just doesn't have.

> This has been said for a few years now. The originally deadline for this was January 2020. Suffice to say, it didn't happen. I'll believe it when I see it.

Definitely not the first time a tech product has been delayed!

The beacon chain (first phase of the PoS transition) is on it's final testnet right now and operating well. The community is hoping for a mainnet launch in November.

> Definitely not the first time a tech product has been delayed!

True! But in this case, the issue for most part wasn't just a delay because work took longer - but the question of whether or not it can be mathematically proven to work was open (and if it can't be proven to be possible and working, there's no point in trying). My intuition told me the result will be "it's not possible; waste in PoW is fundamental to these kinds of structures". I'm relieved to see I was wrong.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I'll preface with saying that I listed my points as a contributors to the source of feelings I have about the crypto space - they're observations subject to selection bias.

RE 1. I keep hearing this for years now; I'll believe in PoS when I see it actually working.

RE 2., I just tend to keep finding (or being approached with) really bad ones. Last time I got excited was with FileCoin, but that seems to be... not moving too fast at all. I'll look into the quadratic funding/voting thing; it looks interesting, but from the brief overview, it's not necessarily crypto-specific.

RE 3. That belief is what I consider naive - or just perhaps I strongly hope it's wrong, because of point 1.

RE 4. That's true. I just keep hitting the obviously scammy ones - but that's perhaps because I'm an outside observer. Honest people who are knee-deep in crypto are definitely able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

RE 5. I don't doubt your friends are thoughtful and have strong moral compasses. But in that last statement, I was talking about trading these currencies in general - which counts in scam coins, bullshit "crypto! AI!" startups, and various criminals using cryptocurrencies for illicit trade. I would think this point is self-evident - an unregulated space with features that give more utility to criminals than to law-abiding citizens will, by definition, attract disproportionately more of the former than the latter. Also, when I say "disproportionately more" I really mean it, it's not a code for "everyone is bad".

Thanks for your reply!

You might be interested to check out

https://medalla.launchpad.ethereum.org - this is a public testnet of Ethereum proof of stake

https://beaconcha.in/ - this is an explorer for the proof of stake testnet. The proof of stake chain is called the "beacon chain". If you want to believe in PoS when you see it actually working, this site is actually that! The public testnet launched in the last month or so. They are hoping to launch mainnet later this year.

See also https://beaconscan.com/

It's another useful explorer.

There's also https://eth2stats.io/medalla-testnet

It's not an explorer, but a way to keep tabs on your (and others') nodes when it's not handy to e.g. connect with ssh. Only a small number of node operators are currently reporting to eth2stats, but hopefully that number will grow over time.

Thank you! This looks like the significant development I was waiting for.

If by trading you mean people trading these tokens on exchanges, they almost certainly don't give a crap about whether or not something is a scam and are not looking for scams. They simply look for the required correlation, volatility, etc.

Compared to stonks, crypto exchanges have APIs that you can use to access them directly without a broker and lower and simpler fees (i.e. no minimum fees per trade, so you can easily make a bot and test it with low amounts and whatnot). Some jurisdictions don't tax crypto trading profits or have a lower rate.

> such as being top-ranked on coinmarketcap or backed by in-industry VCs, then there're hardly any scams at all

I have to disagree there. Looking at the top 20, I see

  3. XRP (Market cap hugely inflated, vaporware)
  8. Bitcoin SV (This is textbook)
  9. CRO (Not obvious today but time will tell)
  11. EOS
  15. TRON
  19. NEO (Depending on your definition of "scam" and maybe it was well-intentioned initially, but having tried implementing for it, it's nowhere near living up to what they claim the current state is)

Then there's Tether/USDT, which I know is a contentious one given their history.

I'm very much a long-term believer (10y+ until ready for mainstream, and even today an important hedge to mainstream finance and national economies) but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking the majority of current volume is not what we'd like to believe it is. There's also the fact that you can have a big team of well-intentioned and intelligent people being orchestrated by a charismatic and convincing charlatan. There are multiple historical examples of this.

> 5) [It's a wild west...] Respectfully, this is an unkind or perhaps bigoted statement. I have many friends in crypto who are thoughtful, kind people. They think deeply about the ethical implications of the systems we're building. The same is true of many leaders in the space.

Its undeniable that the proportion of criminals among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is far higher than in the population at large. I don't see how its unkind or bigoted to point that out.

This is a well-articulated list, and captures a lot of my negativity towards crypto.

But as I like to keep an open mind about new tech, I always wonder if something like this could have been said about the early days of Linux:

1) Open-source is pure unadulterated theft of other peoples' work. This model cannot ever be allowed to become significant in the software economy.

2) That people who are into open source have naive ideas about how economy and society works.

3) That the main users of Linux are into other shady activities like hacking (the bad kind) and ripping other people's work.

The main reason I think the analogy doesn't hold that well is that we are now a decade into crypto with few signs of adaptability, while within a much shorter duration you could say that Linux was already showing signs that it was going to lead to a paradigm shift in the software industry.

Having just typed this I realise that one can argue that within a decade the market valuation of bitcoin (whatever that means) reached $200B which is a spectacular achievement, and one can argue that that is its way of showing that it will be a paradigm shift of something in finance.

I'll concede that points 2) and 3) could plausibly be raised in the early days of Linux. Point 1) - I don't think so. Nobody is stealing anything; people are voluntarily giving it up for free, for the benefit of the community. What could be argued is that "open source is literally communism" (therefore bad) - and I believe it was argued at some point.

> one can argue that that is its way of showing that it will be a paradigm shift of something in finance.

Judging by the recent interest of large financial institutions and corporations, I agree - there will be ripple effects of this, one way or another.

> I realise that one can argue that within a decade the market valuation of bitcoin (whatever that means) reached $200B which is a spectacular achievement

I've been on HN long enough to catch the cynicism which tells me that tech market valuations are pure bullcrap, so I'm not reading much from that number :).

> Point 1) - I don't think so.

I remember having discussions online with people who passionately argued that open source software was effectively theft from programmers at large--permanently filling niches that used to gainfully employ coders. I remember a guy who had some little utility he'd been selling online, which had been providing an income stream for him for years--and then along came some little free tool (that he claimed was an obvious rip-off) that did the same thing, and his income dried up. He absolutely thought OSS was theft.

Also, SCO, MS, and other companies certainly did try to paint a lot of open source software as explicitly stolen or copied. They always stopped short of providing proof, but that sure didn't stop them from making wild claims. SCO in particular went on and on about the sheave of Unix code they'd identified in the Linux kernel (while asking the judge to extend the deadline yet again for them to have to present evidence).

Open Source didn't have as its only unique feature the ability to evade regulation.

I work in the crypto space and the ability to side step regulations that I find ridiculous is a main selling factor. Red tape has stifled not just the financial space but the entire economy. If you want to cut hair you need 2000 hours of training and tens of thousands of dollars paid to scam schools, when YouTube and brochure on how to sweep hair from the floor is perfectly adequate. How is regulation fair again?

Let me contribute a prayer for all crypto folks:

"Satoshi, grant me the serenity to accept that some regulations are good, paid for in tears and blood. Grant me the courage to work towards changing ones that are bullshit, and not just ignoring them. And grant me the wisdom to understand Chesterton's fence."

> I work in the crypto space and the ability to side step regulations that I find ridiculous is a main selling factor.

Yeah, that's my point.

> Red tape has stifled not just the financial space but the entire economy.

After 2008, that's really your opinion?

> when YouTube and brochure on how to sweep hair from the floor is perfectly adequate. How is regulation fair again?

I guess let's get rid of driver's licenses too, while we're at it? After all, if someone feels their driving skills need improvement, they could always voluntarily apply for lessons or download an app or something.

> Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste

The more you pollute, the richer you get. I can't understand why nobody talks about this.

The Ethereum community started talking about this five years ago, which spawned a multi-year effort to move to "Proof of Stake" and stop using large amounts of electricity forever.

The first phase of this effort launches later this year. It's currently undergoing a public testnet. https://medalla.launchpad.ethereum.org/

Since 99% of blockchain app activity occurs within the Ethereum ecosystem, and Ethereum is dropping proof of work, we should put to bed the idea that crypto industry insiders don't care about this issue or aren't doing anything to solve it.

Exactly. And PoW systems have built-in dampening ("difficulty") that make sure you need to burn even more energy as the system gets used, just to stay where you are.

I sometimes joke that Bitcoin is the closest we've came towards defining trust as a physical quantity - with the unit being watts. You can get a good approximation of the lower bound of the energy costs of trust by just comparing it with a trustful system that is regular economy. In other words, that is how much energy is saved by not pursuing trustless systems. Trust is a very powerful optimization trick.

They do, they blabber about how it's not actually waste because people value the waste. It's effectively a logical extension of the marginal value theory applied to ignorant self-destruction.

While they will talk about marginal value, they don't talk about entire systems incentivized to operate by creating value destructively, aka externalization at its finest.

If there is a geothermal source of energy in a location that is impossible to transmit electricity from, and you use it to mine bitcoin, is this immoral and a “waste” of energy? This literally happens in Iceland.

Yes.

Not only that, the Proof-of-work system also is prejudicial to holders. Miners are constantly dumping their newly mined coins to pay for there astronomical electricity bills. (constant selling pressure isn't good for the price)

Also, most of the mining power is always in china, so that isn't good. Mining is very centralized, miners can just join forces and 51% attack the network, which seems unlikely but not out of this world. It surely can happen, specialy if they find a way to be very profitable. 51% attack a network, or using exploits isn't illegal.

> 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way to work.

Proof of Work gets a bad reputation because people have a hard time wrapping their heads around why it is useful. People don't complain about all of the energy that goes into making concrete, or transporting people around, or making houses cooler, because the impact of these things is more direct and less abstract.

But proof of work has a massive benefit that - as the market shows - well outweighs the cost. Thanks to proof of work, a group of counter-parties that are all fully mutually distrusting can interact with eachother without electing a mutually trusted subset or finding a trustworthy third party to facilitate the transaction.

Within the rest of society, trust is extremely expensive. Large financial institutions are only able to operate within the context of a massive court system with a massive law enforcement arm and necessarily privacy violating technologies like KYC. Proof of Work allows us to throw all of that away and use something much simpler and more privacy preserving! You trade one expense for another, and in many cases, Proof of Work transactions are able to succeed in areas where banks could never reasonably get established. That is _massive_ value added to society. And yes, the cost is this giant proof of work engine that burns a lot of electricity. But it's not _waste_, it's serving a key purpose that nothing else is able to serve.

In areas where trust is cheaper than Proof of Work, you should use trust instead of PoW. But the world is full of places and opportunities where PoW is by far the cheapest way to get something done.

I haven't done the exact math (I'm sure somebody did, though), but I based on some rough estimates I do believe that for widespread use as currency, trust-based systems beat trustless systems significantly in terms of energy efficiency. Partly because scaling factors - trust scales sublinearly with the number of participants (like average path between two arbitrary vertices in an acyclic graph). PoW energy use scales superlinearly. On top of that, energy use in trust-based systems is upkeep - it's a waste that participants have to pay out of their pocket, so everyone has strong incentives to minimize it. Whereas in PoW systems, energy waste is network security, so the incentive is to maximize it.

"Massive court system with a massive law enforcement arm" doesn't exist just for the large financial institution. It's the baseline, arguably the core piece of social infrastructure. Beyond finances, it serves to protect just about any kind of dealing that involves more than two people. It allows society to coordinate. So if you want to count that in, be sure to limit the scope to just the impact on securing financial deals - otherwise, you'll have to include on the crypto side of the ledger the costs these institutions incur so that crypto developers can spend their days developing financial systems, instead of hunting animals for food with rocks while hiding from the local warlord.

> PoW energy use scales superlinearly.

Citation needed? I don't believe this is true. And techniques like payment channels allow you to stretch a significant amount of mileage out of a single transaction. The Sia network for example has payment channels that have over a million payments made per on-chain transaction.

> ... It allows society to coordinate.

That's also the role of prices - they are signals for people to take action, provided the actors are free. Prices as an information signal simply fail to work when entities like the government use coercive force to interfere. Prices also fail if the markets are based on coercion or violence towards others.

That's true - but arguably orthogonal to the topic of fiat vs. crypto. Yes, the government uses coercive force to interfere, but that's very often to counteract various failure cases of the free market. Another thing that makes prices fail is information asymmetry - which, in reality, is a constant of trade.

Crypto or fiat, there will never be a totally unregulated market that works.

In a way, it's like Star Trek TOS epispode "A Taste of Armageddon" - you can't replace war with a simulation (and then voluntary euthanasia). You won't resolve international conflicts through a friendly match of Q3 Arena. It's an unstable situation, because anyone who disagrees with the result can just pick up a club, or a gun, and force their own result - at which point you're back to square one. And so it is with unregulated markets: someone feels cheated, picks up a gun, and you're back to some form of governance.

> 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way to work.

> 3) The main users of cryptocurrencies are (AFAIK) criminals and amateur financial speculators.

The problem is that to fix this, we need governments to wrap their heads around this.

Cryptocurrencies exist as a thing that allows people to engage in pseudonymous financial transactions over the internet. It's going to be really hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Particularly for black market transactions, because then you can't even ban the currency since they'll just ignore the ban on the currency at the same time as they're ignoring the ban on the product the currency is being used to pay for.

Which means that the best thing we could do is out-compete it using a more traditional financial system. When the existing KYC laws have already been voided by the use of cryptocurrency, just admit the loss, stop yielding a competitive advantage to the system which is destroying the environment, and let people have pseudonymous bank accounts and smart contracts and so on, in ordinary banks and based on the trust in ordinary banks and governments rather than the trust in proof of work.

That would destroy the utility of cryptocurrency, and it could be the only way to really do that.

Proof of Work is on its way out already. Ethereum will be running on Proof of Stake soon which uses very little power.

I'm not sure the traditional financial system would ever out-compete the cryptocurrency ecosystem even if you removed the KYC etc as crypto is permissionless which is a breeding ground for innovation and efficiency. It would be impossible for the banks to keep up.

"Breeding ground for innovation and efficiency" also means breeding ground for various scams. The traditional banks have a good value proposition here, should they choose to take it: they can copy the innovations that work, bolt them on top of their product, and offer something that is both innovative and is secured by men with guns.

Yes there are scams. There are scams with any new technology and people have dealt with them in various ways for hundreds of years. I don't think that will ever change but our ability to point them out and protect ourselves from them will.

>they can copy the innovations that work, bolt them on top of their product, and offer something that is both innovative and is secured by men with guns

I don't think this has ever worked. By the time they have cut all of the red tape and finished bolting this feature onto their enormous enterprisey stack the world will have already moved on and the Ethereum ecosystem will be on The Feature 2.0. Also, if your security is provided by men with guns then those same men with guns can change the rules on you or the bank which makes your money much less secure. I'd take "mathematically impossible to cheat" over "men with guns might be angry if someone cheats" any day.

> I'd take "mathematically impossible to cheat" over "men with guns might be angry if someone cheats" any day.

This may be the point we disagree on fundamentally :). To me, "mathematically impossible to cheat" usually comes with "mathematically unforgiving of mistakes". I estimate chances that the government will cheat me out of my money to be much lower than me getting crushed under a smart contract that, in the fiat land, a human judge would invalidate based on circumstances.

Writing this, I realized I'm thinking from the POV of someone living in a democratic and relatively sane country. I guess the risk calculus is different when you truly, deeply mistrust your nation's government.

> It's a wild west. Trading unregulated money tends to disproportionately attract the worst kind of people.

It means that you have to take precautions instead of the government telling you what you can or can't do (using money they took from you anyway).

The energy concerns are valid. I hope that the cryptocurrency that ends up winning is energy efficient.

> It means that you have to take precautions instead of the government telling you what you can or can't do (using money they took from you anyway).

That's true! And I do prefer the world in which I pay the government to take care of this, because as an individual I have no chance against organized, professional scammers. Wild West is a fun thing to watch in movies (or at least the fictional recreation of it, with more shooting and less filth); but definitely not a nice time to live in, compared to today.

> I hope that the cryptocurrency that ends up winning is energy efficient.

That needs to be a structural change though; shaving off factors of the exponent in the middle of PoW isn't going to help. But 'spir here says that Ethereum cracked the proof-of-stake, which is the exact development that needed to happen for crypto to be feasible.

What’s so wonderful about voluntary society is that you can avoid the whole and others can dive right in! Different strokes for different folks.

The only thing I'll note is that Ethereum has committed to moving to Proof of Stake, albeit at a glacial pace, which * should * mostly remove the environmental destruction. The leadership does seem committed, although the rollout is slow.

Not really a fan of crypto overall (although I own some eth as a hedge in case it takes off), not contesting your other points.

Is PoS actually proven to work, the way PoW is? I keep revisiting this topic every now and then, and I always see it in the stage of "we think it should work, but we kind of don't have a mathematical proof just yet". From which I conclude it will most likely be eventually proven to not work at all, and we'll still be stuck with PoW.

Yes, PoS has been proven to work. The research problems are solved. A public testnet of Ethereum's proof of stake is currently live. https://medalla.launchpad.ethereum.org/

Thank you. I'll rethink my perspective in light of this. Energy use concerns were always my primary concern wrt. the entire crypto space (scams will diminish as the space gets regulated, but energy profile of PoW looked like an insurmountable problem in principle).

There area several currencies out there in the wild based on PoS like Tezos.