[willbudd]

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree.

Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

[kevingadd]

Point to a real production cryptocurrency using proof-of-stake right now. All the big ones are still using PoW and we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency?

Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof of stake in December? Things like that are progress but don't do anything to put a dent into the massive electricity and resource squeezes being created by cryptocurrencies.

[djamrozik]

Eth 2.0 will be fully PoS (released fully in the next year or two, but staking is possible now).

Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot are a few protocols that are PoS but are still very early in their development.

> "we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency"

I would argue that's not long at all. The internet was technically invented in the 1960s (ARPANET) and TCP/IP went global in the early 1980s. Took a while for things to get to where we are now.

[willbudd]

Ripple, Nxt, etc have been around since 2012-ish or earlier. Ancient technology, basically.

[kevingadd]

Wasn't aware of those ones, thanks. It's a shame they're not even in the top 100 by volume.

[saltyfamiliar]

Ripple (XRP) has the 5th highest market cap and volume of any cryptocurrency, but it's very unpopular on a cultural level because it's basically centralized.

[kevingadd]

That's fascinating, I ctrl-f'd for Ripple on a couple charts since I hadn't heard of it and it wasn't on them. Do crypto sites omit it because it's unpopular or viewed as not a blockchain due to being centralized?

[Nition]

It's near the top on all of them, but you need to Ctrl-F "XRP".

[cardanome]

Ripple has still the fifth biggest market cap.

If you look at the five biggest coins by market cap (excluding USDT which is just digital Dollar) then three of them use proof of stake, Cardano, Polkadato and Ripple. Ethereum is actively transitioning to proof of stake.

Bitcoin is the ONLY outlier. Though also the biggest market.

[galangalalgol]

I'm old and clueless. Is proof of stake related to anonymity in any way? I read something about dealers in contraband switching from btc to monero among others for that reason.

[hulahoof]

No, anonymity for the users is generally separate from the consensus algorithm. XMR, at least when I was mining it many years ago, was more about preventing leakage of wallet, funds info to every person you transacted with - and is probably the gold standard in anonymous transactions - which is why it's price is so stable.

[Geee]

Ripple is not proof-of-stake. It uses traditional consensus with trusted validators. It's basically a fiat currency that is run by a corporation to benefit them.

[ROARosen]

Ripple (aka XRP) is number 5

[wmf]

Avalanche isn't that big yet but it's in production and running DeFi.

[intotheabyss]

They also recently had network issues for three days

[xur17]

Tezos uses proof-of-stake and launched a little over 2 years ago.

[coolestguy]

It really is pretty bewildering how many top comments here show almost 0 understanding of the technology.

How many other topics that get posted here have the same thing happening??

[notjtrig]

That's a very good point. It is sort of demonised in the media but tech people understand encryption and cracking, phreaking, p2p networks, finge topics are our speciality. An intrested mind does not sit in front of a powerful research platform to claim ignorance year after year. People in tech disporportantly ignore crypto and it's a shame.

Why would we want to create another currency system when we feel enslaved to the first one but at the same time aware we are the minority of people, and hold an incredible privilege.

It's easier to pretend you don't understand, or just don't think about it, look the other way and suck on those corporate titties to the tune of 250k USD/year because that's the attitude that got us to the top.

[SuoDuanDao]

I have a theory that Hacker News is sufficiently influenced by the investor class that anything disrupting their business model gets special treatment quite outside the site's usual techno-optimist repertoire.

[hddu]

Wow it's almost like the media is all propaganda and lies, people on the internet claim to be smart while they don't really understand what they are talking about, wow who knew. (Yes I include myself in the pulling shit out my ass on the internet group)

[Nition]

That fact just makes the enormous use of power on Bitcoin look even worse though. The main rebuttal to the Bitcoin power complaint is "but it's useful as a decentralised currency." If there are other cryptocurrencies out there doing the same thing using orders of magnitude less power, where does that put Bitcoin?

We have a technology that takes thousands - by some measures hundreds of thousands - of times as much power as existing networks for one transaction, that isn't used in a practical day-to-day sense anywhere, and many people are still defending Bitcoin specifically as a successful currency. How much power does it have to consume, how few real-world uses does it have to have, before everyone agrees it could really do with some improvements?

[hulahoof]

Bitcoins usefulness is not just in its utility, but also it's creation and governance. When you highly value a decentralized, trust-less environment it's hard to look past the decade long success that the Bitcoin experiment has been.

Convincing users to migrate to 'alt coins' requires longevity of these chains, amongst other qualities, to prove they can be successors.

[Nition]

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the arguments in these threads mostly go like:

* User A: Bitcoin is bad, it uses tons of electricity.

* User B: Bitcoin is great, and [other thing] uses just as much electricity.

And I'm just confused why User B never says something like "Bitcoin is great, but I agree it really needs to use less power and allow for more transactions."

[intotheabyss]

Because to change Bitcoin means to fork Bitcoin, and 2017 has shown that the community does not want to hard fork to update the consensus of the chain. A bigger question is how will Bitcoin deal with securing the chain once miners rely primarily on transaction fees; especially considering Bitcoin can't scale. Another factor is that spent addresses release public address information which is susceptible to quantum attack exploits. I'm bullish on cryptocurrency (like Ethereum) but bearish long-term on Bitcoin. However, one thing Bitcoin is used for currently is as a decentralized collateral. You can wrap Bitcoin and deposit it on Ethereum and lend it out for interest. This is a fairly good use case in the short term, but Bitcoin the blockchain is not sustainable longterm.

[Nition]

Yeah, good answer. I hope Ethereum can make a full transition to Proof Of Stake. I remember they were already talking about it being close when I was looking into it in 2017.

[akra]

As one of the clueless novices on this topic what I fail to understand is that proof-of-stake and other consensus mechanisms have been available for alt-coins now for a little while - yet BTC is still dominant. Is it just because of popularity of BTC? If so I struggle to understand how the market is rational here (not saying it has to be). And do other coins/forks issued with similar rules/characteristics cause a price decrease in BTC due to fungibility? The confusion you speak of may come because people see BTC as the successful coin and see other alternatives may have weaknesses that "are priced in". As a novice, because I assume there's no free lunch, other currencies not using PoW could have weaknesses that BTC does not have hence the price. For better or worse the most successful coin determines what people see as the successful approach to crypto at the time.

To your point I've also seen that some coins may still prefer PoW, and may have mitigated many of the disadvantages of it (e.g. made it harder to centralise mining).

[willbudd]

Imagine you have created a new social media webapp with a few innovative new features not seen elsewhere. Would that spell doom for a now suddenly inferior Facebook/Twitter/etc. Possibly, but the network effect in terms of inertia and critical mass makes that an unlikely proposition.

Moreover, the driving force behind Bitcoin keeping it ahead of the pack so far is the promise of short/medium term profit as an investment vehicle due to the artificial scarcity of its deflationary algorithm. Other cryptocurrencies are better positioned toward forming a long-term solution as a low overhead global decentralized payment platform, but what they offer is more of a collective benefit rather than a strong monetary incentive to any individual backer/investor on an individual level. (Which arguably is just an emergent property of human greed within the regime of unchecked capitalism.)

[akra]

The thing is for me, and maybe that's an opinion, is that the investment vehicle due to scarcity is the more important utility right now. Given all the QE and low interest rates across the board worldwide that is the real value prop. There is a need for an asset such as this to preserve wealth, and other assets such as gold have market mechanisms to stop them running away too far I think (e.g. gold certificates, reserve banks willing to liquidate, etc).

In first world countries for most people I would argue for all its faults the banking system is "good enough". In my local country can send money to people almost real time and pay by card quickly and easily without fees. Sure there is still room for improvement, but for most average people the need to change is low. Especially when I still need the banking system as "primary" to pay my taxes, settle my bills, etc - you know all the "real stuff".

[philjohn]

That's all well and good, but Bitcoin is the de facto cryptocurrency - the one everyone has heard of, and still the most popular.

[blurbleblurble]

It shouldn't be though, and it's gonna take influential cryptocurrency people wising up fast to divest from btc into those other projects before righteous public sentiment gets used by central banks against all cryptocurrency projects. All of their effort and hype will be entirely in vain if they don't think hard and fast about the real human impacts of what they're investing in.

[kevingadd]

The cause and effect you describe hasn't applied to significant investors in oil or coal up to this point that I'm aware of, despite the disastrous effect those two revenue sources have had on the environment. I'm not sure why Bitcoin would be significantly different when its negative externalities are effectively invisible and a bunch of the mining occurs in mystery data-centers overseas, outside of the reach of central banks.

[davidmurdoch]

Ethereum is used more than bitcoin (measured in transactions per day), so that'd make it more likely to be considered the de facto cryptocurrency, no? It'd also make it more "popular" with cryptocurrency users, though definitely not as well known by the layman.

[philjohn]

I'd argue the one that sees the largest "value" of transactions per day.

[davidmurdoch]

Ethereum is used as a computer, but it can also be a way to transfer value. So I don't agree on using that as a that metric.

It would seem that Bitcoin is more popular amongst those who don't use cryptocurrencies, and Ethereum is more popular amongst those who are. Just a thought.

[tromp]

> There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work

And they don't have a fair distribution mechanism. They exist primarily to make their creators rich.

[willbudd]

Those two statements capture perfectly what I think of Bitcoin too with its ridiculously deflationary block reward-halving algorithm.

Anyway, yes, I agree that 99% percent of existing cryptocurrency implementations are at least partially affected by short-sighted greed.

However, I think it's important to note that there is no technological constraint preventing the potential success of more egalitarian implementations. In that sense, it's at least disappointing to see technological potential for societal benefit being so categorically dismissed due to the flaws of early prototypes such as Bitcoin.

[tromp]

I agree reward halving help to concentrate the wealth on early adopters. The simplest and arguably fairest emission would just fix the block subsidy. I'm aware of only one coin that has adopted such an emission.