I asked Andreas about DPOS
I’ve been dabbling in the crypto world for about a year now and tonight I finally met people in the real world who are also into crypto. I also made my first Bitcoin joke.
The event was Andreas Antonopoulos speaking in Melbourne.
Arriving at the venue there was a crowd of people all standing out front waiting to get in. It was a big crowd of people milling about with no discernible line. So I turned to the guy next to me and said, “Looks like they’ve got scaling issues.” He looked at me blankly like he knew I’d made a joke but he didn’t know how to react.
After a small wait and being given some free beer, the room settled to listen to Andreas speak. He was a really good speaker, super clear, passionate and he’d obviously done this a lot. But there was nothing really new for me in terms of info, as it was more geared towards people getting into Bitcoin for the first time. So at the end they opened it up for questions and I shot my hand up.
“Proof of Work is a very robust consensus system, but it uses a lot of energy and has had difficulty scaling. Have you looked at other consensus systems such as DPOS and what are your thoughts on them? And is there a point where we don’t need more security in a consensus system?”
He answered that he has looked at other consensus models and started talking about how Ethereum was about to try Casper which is a Proof of Stake consensus. He said they're interesting but we don't know how effective they will be until they scale. The only real test of a how a system scales is when it actually does. He went on to say he thinks the world will need at least one consensus system based on thermodynamics and that that will be Bitcoin, perhaps as the settlement layer for other consensus systems.
So I guess he avoided saying anything about DPOS. And I am unsure why he thought one consensus system had to be based on thermodynamics.
As an interesting adjunct when I went home I listened to this old interview from 2014 of Dan Larimer being interviewed on Let’s Talk Bitcoin with Andreas.
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-129-dogeparty-and-delegated-proof-of-stake
They kind of go head to head there for a few minutes.
Lol. Andreas has been hosed by Dan on a few occasions. There was a bit of a split between bitshares community and the lets talk bitcoin people whem we realized thry were wrong and we could build something better. Annnnnd congrats we did.
Andreas will not say anything to u because he fears u might realize his lies and call them out in real time. So again (as he always does when confronted by dpos) he tucks tail and runs.
Ha. I had no idea I was asking a loaded question. That's classic me.
When he saying thermodynamics means that there is some metric in the physical would that is consensus mechanism is dependent on. Something that ties to nature or something that can't be created without real world work.
Yeah that makes sense. It just seems a shame to expend all that energy just because it's so valuable to us. And the logic that you have to use up something valuable to prove that what you are using it on is valuable seems wasteful. Although it does make sense in terms of value.
It would be cool if someone creates a system in which the energy a solar panel generates is tokenized. Say 1KW of energy generated released 1000 solarcoins on a blockchain. Each Panel has an address and be independently monitored.
Cue people setting up sun lamps over their solar panels to boost their output...
You could establish thermodynamic proof by lowering the block reward as difficulty increases. Same energy-per-token, but less energy wasted overall.
Thanks
I started writing a reply to this post, but it mushroomed into a full post The limits of knowledge - why we don't know enough about blockchain. Sorry about that!