> The first class lost the students that simply couldn't keep up with the increasingly difficult sudokus.
This is the story of every proof-of-work cryptocurrency. After a certain point, they only serve to make the rich even richer. Look at Bitcoin for example, where over 50% of the hashing power is controlled by big Chinese mining operations.
Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it - holders can mint new blocks. With proof of work there is actual work involved tol, not just minting money with your capital.
But at the end of the day, PoW is simply a fee that users of the network pay (in the form of inflation) to secure the network. I'm not convinced it's really a distribution mechanism.
Ideally it would be as a Service Worker that pulls pages and transforms them into HTML, so you could serve your Markdown directly, without a separate build step.
Honestly it just seems like a beginner's weekend idea rather than something useful.
If I squint, I can almost pretend I'm insulted that my browser/Javascript had to render the Markdown instead of their server doing it.
I can't see how their infrastructure is making any real savings by doing this. There are usually more reasons to just cache the HTML next to the input Markdown. e.g. You can then make money breaking changes to the transformation without breaking old posts. Not to mention it now kinda pointlessly needs Javascript to do something trivial.
Unlike what seems to be the prevailing opinion on HN, I'm quite pro-Javascript and pro-SPA. I never saw the need to damn webpages to server-rendered HTML just because it's the only client/server system with the quirk of being able to send markup from the server.
But this sending Markdown over the wire with a 24kB Markdown script + `<script>$('post').markdown()</script>` is just cheeky. ;) Does it really matter though? Nah.
> The class playing Proof-of-stake has a lot of notebooks filled with doodles. The teacher hasn't provided the children with much else to do and they've become quite bored.
physical-economy interpretation: the teachers and children are lucky enough to live in a rich society where only a fraction of the population are required to do productive work such as growing food, distributing clean water, building and maintain housing and providing healthcare services. the teachers and children are freed from the burden of contributing productive work that benefits society and can instead engage in complex art / ritual / prayer activities involving plastic bricks, dice and sudoku.
In the proof of stake class, the people that get rich in dollars are the old timers that collected a lot of bricks during the first year, and now can sell the bricks to the newbies that want to enter the game. (And the teacher, that also saved like the 5% of the initial bricks for ... pedagogical purposes.)
In the proof of work class, the people that get rich in dollars are owner of the owner of the stationary that can sell better pencils, sharpers and erasers to the students, the writer of a book with tips about solving Sudoku, the person that writes a Sudoku solving program. Newbies can just buy the solver program, and participate without paying the old timers.
Except transitioning back to the real world proof of work situation, it’s dominated by players who make their own ASICs and have access to the most heavily subsidized electricity. Newbies can’t even break even anymore.
A third class plays using a consensus model based on explicit relationships of trust.
Each student keeps track of which of the others they consider trustworthy. Since they all play together everyday, they know who is nice, and who is naughty.
When a supermajority trusts the student placing a new block, that student is allowed to place it anywhere.
When not enough people trust the student placing the block, they prevent that person from doing so. That person may try again, but until they're willing to play nice and act trustworthy, they cannot place any blocks. They sit in the corner and pout until they come to their senses.
No one has to solve any puzzles, or roll any dice.
The tower is built efficiently, and all sorts of interesting designs are made by the creative energy that would have otherwise been wasted on busywork.
I could be misunderstanding, but I think the problem with this approach is the lack of permanent identity. What's a "supermajority"? Could I get it by making a bunch of fake identities and having them all "trust" me?
Alternatively, we could ask for a supermajority of coins, and then I think we've re-invented proof-of-stake.
This is what I expect post-hype / tech-novelty. There are interesting pieces being built in the blockchain space, they can be assembled in more interesting ways if you think about trust and rule making differently (more traditionally?)
The first class was a public class & anybody could join in at any time. The second class had reserved early seats based on the initial supply of the dices; without investment in the initial dices the game doesnt start, whereas sudoku generation is free.
In the PoS game, the stakers must be trusted to report their dice roll accurately. To overcome this, you would need some kind of random oracle which can't be influenced by any of the participants.
The best random oracle we know is of course, Proof-of-Work.
The first one was only accessible to wizards who knew the magic spells to generate gold. The second one was accessible to anyone willing to risk losing a little bit of gold on an idea.
Can someone continue the staking analogy? What exactly is being staked? You put a bunch of bricks in the center and randomly choose one, then return the remaining bricks to their owners?
What's being staked is ETH (or any other units of PoS-based cryptocurrency) itself. The lock-in, and therefore any opportunity cost associated with the locked-in value, is the price to play.
The analogy, to my understanding, is not 100% faithful to how PoS works, at least in Ethereum. There's no choosing one of the bricks, or one of the units of currency or anything. You simply lock in your units as collateral for your right to take part in the dice roll selection where, if chosen, you get to add a new block to the blockchain. If you append a block without cheating, you are rewarded with new units of the currency. If you cheat, your collateral is taken away. You may choose to keep your stake in as long as you want.
It falls a part a bit. You don't need to stake to use a proof of stake system, much like in bitcoin you don't have to mine to use bitcoin.
But generally the bricks you have in play can be lost if the network thinks you are cheating, even lying by omission (downtime) is penalized. So to try to change the blockchain (to allow double spending or zero someone's zccount) or even not to vote for the valid blockchain can be penalized by losing your staked bricks.
Another detail lost on the analogy is people get more bricks, just before being a good network citizen by helping the network and staking your bricks.
I'm new to the concept of PoS. Would the underlying mechanism of Burstcoin be proof of stake, i.e. large amounts of HDD space instead of computing the solution hash problems? Or is Burstcoin still proof of work? I'm just curious because the proof of space model seems much more environmentally friendly instead of solving random problems with massive amounts of computation.
I'm not sure I see how this relates to cryptocurrency. It misses the core attributes that give crypto value: scarcity, and the fact that it can be exchanged for other things of value.
If there's no shortage of bricks, and those bricks can't be used (or exchanged) for anything other than the material for making the tower taller, then of course that would be pointless.
But that's not how cryptocurrency works. The whole purpose of proof-of-work is to protect the attribute of scarcity in a distributed way where one actor can't control (or change) the rules.
Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related.
It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.
Agreed. I think HN's general sentiment against blockchain and crypto is completely counter to the hacker mentality that PG promoted. And it's frustrating, because this is one of the most intellectually stimulating communities on the web. And I see crypto developments rapidly becoming the most disruptive technology of this decade, if not century and we can't discuss it without bikeshedding. Seems to me like there might be a market for an HN-like community that is focused on crypto tech and developments exclusively (and I don't think Reddit or Twitter quite fill the same niche that HN does).
I didn't really see it as being critical of blockchains in general. It's just comparing two blockchain technologies and pointing out that one has a more level playing field.
There's no way to save the fundamentally terrible design of guessing random numbers to verify a ledger. These are "solutions" to problems that are self created.
The top Bitcoin mining pools in China create their own mining ASICs in house for competitive advantage. You just can't compete without spending years catching up to their hardware designs.
[+] [-] ronsor|5 years ago|reply
This is the story of every proof-of-work cryptocurrency. After a certain point, they only serve to make the rich even richer. Look at Bitcoin for example, where over 50% of the hashing power is controlled by big Chinese mining operations.
[+] [-] spurdoman77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DylanBohlender|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xur17|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazypython|5 years ago|reply
Ideally it would be as a Service Worker that pulls pages and transforms them into HTML, so you could serve your Markdown directly, without a separate build step.
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|5 years ago|reply
If I squint, I can almost pretend I'm insulted that my browser/Javascript had to render the Markdown instead of their server doing it.
I can't see how their infrastructure is making any real savings by doing this. There are usually more reasons to just cache the HTML next to the input Markdown. e.g. You can then make money breaking changes to the transformation without breaking old posts. Not to mention it now kinda pointlessly needs Javascript to do something trivial.
Unlike what seems to be the prevailing opinion on HN, I'm quite pro-Javascript and pro-SPA. I never saw the need to damn webpages to server-rendered HTML just because it's the only client/server system with the quirk of being able to send markup from the server.
But this sending Markdown over the wire with a 24kB Markdown script + `<script>$('post').markdown()</script>` is just cheeky. ;) Does it really matter though? Nah.
[+] [-] foreigner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brrrrrm|5 years ago|reply
I like to think it's fair to ask the user to donate some compute for rendering as a tradeoff for maintenance costs.
[+] [-] pazimzadeh|5 years ago|reply
This sounds like the dream.
In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
[+] [-] shoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nynx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|5 years ago|reply
In the proof of work class, the people that get rich in dollars are owner of the owner of the stationary that can sell better pencils, sharpers and erasers to the students, the writer of a book with tips about solving Sudoku, the person that writes a Sudoku solving program. Newbies can just buy the solver program, and participate without paying the old timers.
[+] [-] johncolanduoni|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesgreenleaf|5 years ago|reply
Each student keeps track of which of the others they consider trustworthy. Since they all play together everyday, they know who is nice, and who is naughty.
When a supermajority trusts the student placing a new block, that student is allowed to place it anywhere.
When not enough people trust the student placing the block, they prevent that person from doing so. That person may try again, but until they're willing to play nice and act trustworthy, they cannot place any blocks. They sit in the corner and pout until they come to their senses.
No one has to solve any puzzles, or roll any dice.
The tower is built efficiently, and all sorts of interesting designs are made by the creative energy that would have otherwise been wasted on busywork.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bsmith89|5 years ago|reply
Alternatively, we could ask for a supermajority of coins, and then I think we've re-invented proof-of-stake.
[+] [-] verdverm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleer001|5 years ago|reply
How do you turn that into code?
[+] [-] kang|5 years ago|reply
The first class was a public class & anybody could join in at any time. The second class had reserved early seats based on the initial supply of the dices; without investment in the initial dices the game doesnt start, whereas sudoku generation is free.
[+] [-] dgellow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparkie|5 years ago|reply
The best random oracle we know is of course, Proof-of-Work.
[+] [-] pazimzadeh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juanitolol|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gunax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whytaka|5 years ago|reply
The analogy, to my understanding, is not 100% faithful to how PoS works, at least in Ethereum. There's no choosing one of the bricks, or one of the units of currency or anything. You simply lock in your units as collateral for your right to take part in the dice roll selection where, if chosen, you get to add a new block to the blockchain. If you append a block without cheating, you are rewarded with new units of the currency. If you cheat, your collateral is taken away. You may choose to keep your stake in as long as you want.
[+] [-] sliken|5 years ago|reply
But generally the bricks you have in play can be lost if the network thinks you are cheating, even lying by omission (downtime) is penalized. So to try to change the blockchain (to allow double spending or zero someone's zccount) or even not to vote for the valid blockchain can be penalized by losing your staked bricks.
Another detail lost on the analogy is people get more bricks, just before being a good network citizen by helping the network and staking your bricks.
[+] [-] mcbuilder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dperfect|5 years ago|reply
If there's no shortage of bricks, and those bricks can't be used (or exchanged) for anything other than the material for making the tower taller, then of course that would be pointless.
But that's not how cryptocurrency works. The whole purpose of proof-of-work is to protect the attribute of scarcity in a distributed way where one actor can't control (or change) the rules.
[+] [-] capnorange|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_woozy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hmrtn|5 years ago|reply
It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.
[+] [-] chrisco255|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DennisP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stevebmark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] capnorange|5 years ago|reply
Inaccurate analogy. Miners are more limited by cheap electricity/cooling than CPU which is more generally available.
[+] [-] Jasper_|5 years ago|reply