A friendly reminder that PoW runs just fine on 100% renewables. It's the job of regulators to make sure all PoW runs this way. Just like it's the job of regulators to mandate renewable energy for literally all other industries.
“Runs fine” doesn’t mean it’s energy efficient. If we can get whatever value out of a payment system with 1 wind turbine instead of 10,000, the former is obviously a better choice. And right now it’s not obvious that PoW provides anything that other technologies can’t. Bitcoin itself has shown that when PoW doesn’t produce the results people want, developers can just release code that makes users ignore the most work chain... so the system ends up just as political as any other money system, and PoW is just a clever trick to fool investors into thinking there’s some magic “decentralization” going on.
If all it's using is surplus green energy (something regulators can enforce), then efficiency isn't a concern. That energy was wasted either way.
Re: PoW, the thing it does provide that no other tech can't is Sybil-resistant open-membership replicated state machines. Anyone can join in deciding state transitions because the barrier to entry (access to mining tech and electricity) is decoupled from the system's operation -- there are no protocol-defined gate keepers. Sybil-resistance comes from the fact that votes on the next epoch of state transitions comes from an irreversible expenditure on the voter's part (i.e. you can't vote for 2 conflicting blocks in PoW without having 2x the mining power). Making the system process state transitions at a fixed pace under these two constraints is the scientific breakthrough that PoW contributes.
Of course you can mine 2 “conflicting blocks” in PoW cryptobeans, you can just tweak the clients of a fork to require negligible work for the next block and convince everyone that the most-work chain is a hostile takeover. Satoshi did not anticipate how forking clients with tweaked implementations invalidate the whole security model.
This is the same attack model that leads there being a public debate about “Segwit coin VS BCash”. It’s also what happened with the 2013 fork[0]. The system ends up needing politics and power games just like the current financial system. The technology is a distraction to fool intelligent engineers into thinking this system is different. It isn’t.
> you can just tweak the clients of a fork to require negligible work or the next block and convince everyone that the most-work chain is a hostile takeover
If I have the power to tweak any/all peers of any p2p system arbitrarily, then I already have supreme authority over what that system does. So your hypothetical is vacuous and uninformative. Wake me up when you've found a way to reliably mine two conflicting Bitcoin blocks using the same amount of PoW guesses.
> This is the same attack model that leads there being a public debate about “Segwit coin VS BCash”. It’s also what happened with the 2013 fork[0].
Wanna know something truly mind-blowing? You can fork Bitcoin at any time! And yet, none of the forked pretenders have come close to replacing the original Bitcoin. The biggest pretender by marketcap has a measly _2.21%_ of Bitcoin's hashpower [0], despite having the same PoW algorithm.
> The system ends up needing politics and power games just like the current financial system
Per the above, PoW has so far done a great job indicating which system is the real Bitcoin, and which are the pretenders. Wake me up when one of them overtakes the original.
> The technology is a distraction to fool intelligent engineers into thinking this system is different. It isn’t.
Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.
> If I have the power to tweak any/all peers of any p2p system arbitrarily, then I already have supreme authority over what that system does.
This is not my argument and is your straw man. The point is most clients run whatever the politicians tell them to. What makes it even harder for engineers to see what’s actually going on with Bitcoin is that we suck at politicking and don’t even see it when it’s happening: the shaming if you’re running the wrong version, the worshipping of certain devs to help identify shepherds the sheep should follow, the scapegoating of dissenters, etc. You’re doing it right now by calling a specific chain a “pretender”.
If PoW actually worked as advertised, none of these games would be necessary.
> The point is most clients run whatever the politicians tell them to.
What makes it even harder for engineers to see what’s actually going on with Bitcoin is that we suck at politicking and don’t even see it when it’s happening: the shaming if you’re running the wrong version, the worshipping of certain devs to help identify shepherds the sheep should follow, the scapegoating of dissenters, etc.
Woah there buddy, speak for yourself, and only yourself. You may be terrible at politics, but I can assure you, not every engineer is.
Also, you are the one who's trying to make the case that the ability to make a derivative work of Bitcoin means that PoW has somehow failed. I'd say it's just the opposite -- the fact that one chain has a lot more PoW than the other is a very strong reading of the collective affinities borne by each chains' stakeholders. That's something you couldn't measure in pre-Bitcoin p2p systems. If anything, it means political shenanigans are harder to come by -- in order to legitimately claim one chain is more well-received than another other, you have to pony up actual energy. Hype, paid followers, ad blitzes, charismatic leaders, etc. only get you so far.
> You’re doing it right now by calling a specific chain a “pretender”.
Bitcoin came first. BCash, BSV, etc. are derivative works, not the original. Bitcoin has nearly two orders of magnitude of hashes per second behind it than the rest. Each project styles itself as "Bitcoin."
These are all facts. My characterization of these other systems as "pretenders" is meant to convey these facts, and nothing more.
> If PoW actually worked as advertised, none of these games would be necessary.
Bitcoin is still Bitcoin, derivative works notwithstanding, but people will believe whatever they want at the end of the day. Honestly, I don't care, because as of right now, far more people believe that the original Bitcoin is the Bitcoin, as evidenced by its significantly higher PoW.
> you are the one who's trying to make the case that the ability to make a derivative work of Bitcoin means that PoW has somehow failed
No, I never said this and this another straw man. The point is that the most-work chain is allowed to be ignored if the politics are done right. You just need the right people pushing for adoption of the minority chain, and to label the most-work chain as an “attack” or a “bug”. In this event, there is no protocol defining which chain gets the name “Bitcoin”, it becomes a game of power, of who has more social capital in the space and who can maneuver exchanges and users into agreeing which chain is “real” and which chain is “pretender”.
Maybe a picture will help: imagine all the existing investors who strongly insist on deflationary policy are gone in 100 years, and they get replaced with folks who care a lot less about “sound money” arguments. Imagine devs, exchanges, miners, all agree that a constant supply inflation would be preferred. Then, all they need to do is release a new version of reference software that keeps the block subsidy in perpetuity, and make a very strong case that this fork is for the security and stability of the Bitcoin economy (to make that case here is beside the point). In this example, the handful of folks who will be fussing about Austrian economics and declaring “that chain is not the real Bitcoin!” will be relegated as outcasts, even if they insist on keeping the name “Bitcoin” and release an “original Bitcoin” client, it won’t matter, because the market will have decided for them which chain the rest of the world uses. And it’s this chain that wins the political game that will keep the name “Bitcoin”.
Again, the argument for which monetary policy is best is irrelevant, and how likely you see this event as happening is also irrelevant. The fact that this hypothetical is even _possible_ and that Satoshi’s system doesn’t preclude it from happening, is the argument for why proof-of-work fails. PoW is ultimately subject to politics which means the whole system is subject to politics.
You can also look at the BCash fork itself. The events leading up to that fork were not smooth at all, and the outcome of the fork was wholly uncertain at the time. Popular blockchain analytics sites had public trackers of which ideology had more brainshare, devs drew the party lines, exchanges issued statements declaring party allegiance, miners signaled support in their blocks, users took to Twitter to unite the herd. If Roger/Gavin/Mike had been the only ones with a public platform and Core had never responded with their own campaigning, miners would’ve easily abandoned the “real Bitcoin” and Coinbase and crew would’ve easily pushed for the fork to keep the name “Bitcoin”. It is the political campaigning of the incumbent party that kept them in power and that kept the hash rate on that chain. None of these mechanics are outlined in any Bitcoin whitepaper I know of.
> The point is that the most-work chain is allowed to be ignored if the politics are done right.
If the best argument against PoW is that people can ignore it, then I don't know what to say to you. Like, don't let me stop you then: go run a Bitcoin miner that ignores PoW, and see if you can convince anyone else to accept your forked coins at 1:1 parity with real Bitcoin.
> Maybe a picture will help
I never once brought up monetary policy, so I'm just going to ignore what you wrote about it. You're answering questions I never asked.
> PoW is ultimately subject to politics which means the whole system is subject to politics.
PoW is ultimately subject to market forces. Miners regularly switch between Bitcoin and BCash, depending on what's profitable at the moment. This indicates that miners are not loyal to any ideology; they're only trying to optimize revenue. Thus the simplest explanation as to why Bitcoin has a much higher PoW than BCash is that Bitcoin has higher demand. Hate to break it to you, but the market has spoken -- there's far more demand for Bitcoin than BCash.
But, let's not mistake that for some grand conspiracy against it. No one is stopping BCash from overtaking Bitcoin; the onus is on the BCash project to convince people to value it more than Bitcoin.
> If the best argument against PoW is that people can ignore it, then I don't know what to say to you. Like, don't let me stop you then:
Your counter-argument is "try it, then!". I'm not sure why I have to say this and we can't have an intelligent conversation, but here we go: just because something is possible to do and an argument can be made for its possibility, that doesn't mean that I specifically have the means to pull it off. And talking about my capacity to pull it off derails us from having a meaningful discussion about the potential attack. You're not discussing in good faith I think...
> I never once brought up monetary policy, so I'm just going to ignore what you wrote about it
It wasn't about monetary policy, that was just the context. It was about how the hashrate just goes where the money is, and the money is subject to politics, therefore PoW is subject to politics.
but anyway if you're not going to read my comments, we can't have any meaningful exchange here... especially since you're trying to make this about the BCash cryptobean for some reason, but my point has nothing to do with it. My point is about Proof of Work being ultimately useless.
Why 100% renewables? Biofuel is renewable but also emits lots of carbon and air pollution. Nuclear is not considered renewable but is low carbon and clean air. Seems like the the term allows undue wiggle room. Might want to require that it be generated with energy that emits less than 50 gCO2-eq/kWh on a lifecycle basis or something more specific.
how would they do that practically? would require a huge surveillance state with constant monitoring to make sure you’re not mining on non allowed power
Mining rigs already require tremendous amounts of power, and there are already laws on the books that allow the government to know what you're doing with that power (i.e. for safety and environmental reasons). You can easily determine which power sinks are mining rigs, and require them to use only excess renewable power, or off-grid renewable power (it's pretty easy to tell if you're using off-grid fossil fuels with satellite imagery -- you can't hide the CO2).
Governments can easily enforce this -- simply require all blocks to be signed by a government-issued keypair to attests to the green-ness of the power used to produce them, and require exchanges under its jurisdiction to deny, limit, or tax the sale of non-green coins.
