Satoshi spent real resources to mine, yes they were negligible at the time, but it was real resources. I recall genesis block took 6 days of hashing at difficulty 1. Vitalik just hit print.
BitAxe is a toy, yes. But my point was that people are mining sats. You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity. That’s the disconnect. PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity. Bitcoin… offers an alternative. ETH PoS is more of the same. I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.
> I recall genesis block took 6 days of hashing at difficulty 1.
The genesis block (0) was hard-coded. Block 1 was mined 6 days later, but Satoshi wasn't hashing that whole time, he was just waiting.
Every block after the genesis block itself was subject to the difficulty adjustment process, including Block 1. So technically we know that Bitcoin is actually pre-mined by at least one block, since if anybody else knew about Bitcoin back then, it's certain they wouldn't have waited 6 days to mine Block 1 like Satoshi did.
> You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity.
To equal 10% of the current Bitcoin network hashrate (a good ballpark figure for having "enough to matter" when it comes to defending PoW consensus), you would need 2.5 million of these units, plus 2.5 million people willing to pay $145 and $52/yr in electricity to run them 24/7 next to their wifi routers, to earn $0.02 per day. Plus, of course, fiddle with the units every few months/years when they stop mining for whatever reason, like your partner changed the wifi password or a fan goes out.
How many people do you know who would want to take up that deal? It's not just me - nobody sees that value. Nobody wants to donate $200 to create an insignificant, marginal contribution to Bitcoin's theoretical security properties and earn $0.02 per day.
It's a lot more alluring to earn a real return on whatever ETH you're already holding by doing the exact same thing on Ethereum without needing to buy specialized mining hardware.
> PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity.
Can you be more specific? Ethereum doesn't rely on humans for integrity any more than Bitcoin does. Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't rely on humans any less. Both protocols are nothing more than a set of rules that everyone agrees on, and everyone can collectively agree to change at any time.
> I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.
You trust the CEOs of large mining farms that grow more and more concentrated year after year through economies of scale. You also trust that governments won't execute a single warrant to take over their country's largest centralized mining operation whenever it's convenient for them.
I trust a large set of of geographically distributed stakers. They can't grow any larger than they currently are, because staking has no economy of scale, and they can't be seized by governments, because it would require them to execute tens of thousands of warrants on tens of thousands of physical locations.
proxynoproxy|9 months ago
BitAxe is a toy, yes. But my point was that people are mining sats. You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity. That’s the disconnect. PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity. Bitcoin… offers an alternative. ETH PoS is more of the same. I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.
everfree|9 months ago
The genesis block (0) was hard-coded. Block 1 was mined 6 days later, but Satoshi wasn't hashing that whole time, he was just waiting.
Every block after the genesis block itself was subject to the difficulty adjustment process, including Block 1. So technically we know that Bitcoin is actually pre-mined by at least one block, since if anybody else knew about Bitcoin back then, it's certain they wouldn't have waited 6 days to mine Block 1 like Satoshi did.
> You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity.
To equal 10% of the current Bitcoin network hashrate (a good ballpark figure for having "enough to matter" when it comes to defending PoW consensus), you would need 2.5 million of these units, plus 2.5 million people willing to pay $145 and $52/yr in electricity to run them 24/7 next to their wifi routers, to earn $0.02 per day. Plus, of course, fiddle with the units every few months/years when they stop mining for whatever reason, like your partner changed the wifi password or a fan goes out.
How many people do you know who would want to take up that deal? It's not just me - nobody sees that value. Nobody wants to donate $200 to create an insignificant, marginal contribution to Bitcoin's theoretical security properties and earn $0.02 per day.
It's a lot more alluring to earn a real return on whatever ETH you're already holding by doing the exact same thing on Ethereum without needing to buy specialized mining hardware.
> PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity.
Can you be more specific? Ethereum doesn't rely on humans for integrity any more than Bitcoin does. Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't rely on humans any less. Both protocols are nothing more than a set of rules that everyone agrees on, and everyone can collectively agree to change at any time.
> I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.
You trust the CEOs of large mining farms that grow more and more concentrated year after year through economies of scale. You also trust that governments won't execute a single warrant to take over their country's largest centralized mining operation whenever it's convenient for them.
I trust a large set of of geographically distributed stakers. They can't grow any larger than they currently are, because staking has no economy of scale, and they can't be seized by governments, because it would require them to execute tens of thousands of warrants on tens of thousands of physical locations.