> A few things jump out at me as I read this proposal > > First, deriving the hardness from capex as opposed to opex switches the > privilege from those who have cheap electricity to those who have access to > chip manufacturers/foundries. While this is similarly the case for Bitcoin > ASICS today, the longevity of the PoW algorithm has led to a better > distribution of knowledge and capital goods required to create ASICS. The > creation of a new PoW of any kind, hurts this dimension of decentralization > as we would have to start over from scratch on the best way to build, > distribute, and operate these new pieces of hardware at scale. While I have > not combed over the PoW proposed here in fine detail, the more complicated > the algorithm is, the more it privileges those with specific knowledge about > it and the manufacturing process. > > The competitive nature of Bitcoin mining is such that miners will be willing > to spend up to their expected mining reward in their operating costs to > continue to mine. Let's suppose that this new PoW was adopted, miners will > continue to buy these chips in ever increasing quantities, turning the > aforementioned CAPEX into a de facto OPEX. This has a few consequences. First > it just pushes the energy consumption upstream to the chip manufacturing > process, rather than eliminating it. And it may trade some marginal amount of > the energy consumption for the set of resources it takes to educate and > create chip manufacturers. The only way to avoid that cost being funneled > back into more energy consumption is to make the barrier to understanding of > the manufacturing process sufficiently difficult so as to limit the > proliferation of these chips. Again, this privileges the chip manufacturers > as well as those with close access to the chip manufacturers. > > As far as I can tell, the only thing this proposal actually does is create a > very lucrative business model for those who sell this variety of chips. Any > other effects of it are transient, and in all likelihood the transient > effects create serious centralization pressure. > > At the end of the day, the energy consumption is foundational to the system. > The only way to do away with authorities, is to require competition. This > competition will employ ever more resources until it is unprofitable to do > so. At the base of all resources of society is energy. You get high energy > expenditure, or a privileged class of bitcoin administrators: pick one. I > suspect you'll find the vast majority of Bitcoin users to be in the camp of > the energy expenditure, since if we pick the latter, we might as well just > pack it in and give up on the Bitcoin experiment.
Keagan is quite correct. Ultimately all currency security derives from energy consumption. Everything eventually resolves down to proof-of-work. * Proof-of-space simply moves the work to the construction of more storage devices. * Proof-of-stake simply moves the work to stake-grinding attacks. * The optical proof-of-work simply moves the work to the construction of more miners. * Even government-enforced fiat is ultimately proof-of-work, as the operation and continued existence of any government is work. It is far better to move towards a more *direct* proof-of-work, than to add more complexity and come up with something that is just proof-of-work, but with the work moved off to somewhere else and with additional moving parts that can be jammed or hacked into. When considering any new proof-of-foo, it is best to consider all effects until you reach the base physics of the arrow of time, at which point you will realize it is ultimately just another proof-of-work anyway. At least, proof-of-work is honest about its consumption of resources. Regards, ZmnSCPxj _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
