Comment on Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

• dhork@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The whole point of mining is to arrange transactions into blocks, and then generate a cryptographic hash of the block that meets some difficulty criteria. It costs some small amount of computing to do that. But an astonishingly large number of hashes won’t meet that difficulty criteria, which is why miners have to try a gazillion times to find one that works.

  However, once a block has a valid hash, it is added to the chain. Then, the hash of that valid block must be used in the next block, which will be equally hard to find.

  By “security”, what is really meant is “How can I be sure that a transaction can’t be undone once it is committed”? And it’s because all these blocks are stacked on top of each other, and cryptographically related. Once a transaction appears in a block, and a few blocks get mined on top of it, it becomes extremely difficult to un-do it, because someone would have to put in the computing power to re-authenticate a string of blocks, all while the rest of the network is adding blocks to the valid chain.

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  • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The security of this whole arrangement has so far been working good as well.

    In order for someone to try and perform a 51% attack, they’ll need to either compromise a large swathe of existing miners (e.g if the government seized control) or create/acquire hardware totaling more than 100% of the existing network today plus growth while you attempt to build more than 100% and then maintain growth over the rest of the network.

    As the network grows that becomes exceedingly more difficult to perform.

    I have really high hopes for something like proof of work, but it’s not without it’s own problems either, and with Ethereum, it’s the first massive scale test, so it’s not as battle tested as proof of work yet, although it’s been used in smaller projects so there has been some testing. With more money on the line though, comes more will to try and break it, or use an exploit you may have held back beforehand.

    One interesting difference with POW/POS is that if a miner/entity does somehow perform an attack, they keep the hardware and can continue to try. With POS, they should get slashed in which case the money is gone. But with POW you have the barrier of actually acquiring the correct amount of hardware, meanwhile in POS, you just need the money so there’s no manufacturing/lead time.

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    • TypicalHog@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Bitcoin has literally 2 pools who have more then half of the block production. Also not all PoS systems have locking and slashing btw.

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      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Pools that people could leave if something suspicious was happening.

        Very different than an individual entity.

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    • dhork@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My main issue with Bitcoin isn’t even the POW vs POS angle, it’s the fact that the core devs see no problem with their current POW algorithm, which is not designed to put any bounds at all on energy consumption. But I also think they should have increased the block size, and you can see where that discussion went.

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      • TypicalHog@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I sometimes have a weird vibe like someone somehow crippled Bitcoin by making it not able to evolve and develop. I mean… If I wanted it gone and couldn’t just destroy it, I would cripple it. Idk, just feels sus.

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      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Fuck the core devs is really all i have to add to that without going into it…

        Luckily something like Ethereum and others were born due to them.

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      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I have really high hopes for something like proof of work

        I just realized I wrote the above, but if it wasn’t clear, I meant proof of stake.

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• mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  the power reqs keep the plebes out.

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  • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I remain convinced that crypto is just tech bros trying to redo the early days of the stock market so they end up rich instead

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    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      not a bad assessment.

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