I'm not saying this is you, but many people on HN will cry out "Use Boring Tech!" while also not understanding why Bitcoin is king.

Bitcoin is old, secure, proven, and most importantly _simple_.

Of course what you sacrifice with Proof of Stake is sovereignty. A random person cannot participate in the network unless they have X amount of existing resources. So that's the trade-off as I understand it. Depends on where your values align. No doubt that existing financial institutions would prefer to be core partners with a performant PoS chain.

Your point could be truth in theory, and/or in the future.

However, in practice, it seems that it almost works the other way around.

To mine on BTC, you cannot enter the game with 10$ to your name. You can't buy a mining rig, it is way too wasteful to mine on your existing CPU, etc.

However if we look for example at staking in Ethereum, there are decentralized (no trust required) pools that allow you to stake however little amount of ETH. The chain itself will require at least 32ETH to run a single meaningful staking contract, but through pooling this is directly practically accessible to anyone with even small amount of ETH.

There's a difference between merely making money and being your own sovereign node in the network that is not reliant on anyone else (other than your source of electricity :P).

Just making money, yes you can pool together. And that's a great feature of smart contract networks. But we are also seeing smart contracts being brought into Bitcoin that allows the same things. I just think sovereignty and making money shouldn't be conflated.

Doesn't the same hold for PoW systems, except the X amount is in the form of mining resources? This is why people argue PoS blockchains are (besides being more eco-friendly) actually more decentralized.

>Doesn't the same hold for PoW systems, except the X amount is in the form of mining resources?

That's not as true as I would have thought. Surprisingly, a single person can have a profitable mining setup on Bitcoin today. It might only be $10 USD per day profit, but it's something. To me, that is an achievement.

> Why are we still talking about bitcoin and first gen blockchain tech.

Because it doesn't seem to be going away faster than the newer generations. There is a real chance that if cryptocurrency ends up being a thing forever that BTC is the winner. And that is an environmental disaster until we get to 100% clean energy worldwide.

Even then. This stuff produces heat.

The way the scaling operates, as it goes along, even if you had FREE energy piped from a hyperspatial link in the heart of the Sun… eventually the ASIC farms themselves will begin to cook the planet.

It doesn't stay alive and profitable unless it keeps burning energy MORE. The fact that the energy's going to come from the dirtiest and most dangerous (cheapest) possible fuels, is certainly a problem and will continue to be one for as long as such fuels exist, but in the literal absence of fuel and cost of fuel, the exponential-growth thing just switches to the computers turning (now free and infinite) energy into calculation.

There is always a bigger server farm, because such a thing costs money, and those with money are the ones who can and will make more of it. With cryptocurrency, that's just literal, and their profitability is always a perfect and direct match with how hard they can cheat or abuse any possible rule there to constrain them. The end result, perfectly untraceable and fungible, as long as the system is allowed to continue.

Disaster will always be more profitable, in cryptocurrency-land. I mean, I suppose you could play nice and barely make any money…

The energy usage of Bitcoin is proportional to the price, it doesn't grow without bound as you seem to be saying here. Miners compete for a fixed reward, it doesn't make sense for new miners to enter the system if the rewards already are distributed to the point that they just cover the costs.

> PoS solves the problem of mining and wasted energy.

For a value of "solves" that doesn't actually include anyone solving anything YET. Maybe in 18 months!

pretty weird seeing this recent trend of hn going from crypto-resistant, to cardano pumping. out of all the blockchains cardano? thats where you see the future? really?

bizarre.

Pretend that someone is really reading and trying to understand for a moment ;).

What do you see in Cardano that makes it a poor candidate for a future blockchain? Governance? Functionality? Algorithms? Investment?

well #1 would be Charles Hoskinson and his history...

but more meaningful opposition would be in why use a DPoS network now that we can have PoS networks without the delegation? if you value decentralisation and think it has a future why would you go for a DPoS network that can so far just send tokens, there are better dpos networks like cosmos or polkadot, and ethereum is moving to pos. What is cardano actually (still attempting) to solve that hasnt already been solved by polkadot/cosmos?

Why use haskell as the contract language? do you think in the limited pool of blockchain developers there are many people are wanting to write haskell? and that they are going to port all the existing tokens/defi/contracts made over the past few years to a haskell+utxo model? who is expected to build on this. in 15 years of dev work ive met a handful of haskell devs, they are all in academia and dont make production software.

And alongside that, and why i refer to it being pumped, is that it is getting so much publicity but barely being used. i just looked at the block explorer and in the past ten blocks three are empty and the rest have a top of 10 transactions being processed. Where are the supposed network effects driving it? shouldnt the blockspace be in demand? especially with the recent price surge, if the price is going up but it has empty blocks surely that is a bad sign?

I wonder the same thing about people that still talk about cars. Electric cars solve all the problems with cars. Why do we even bother to talk about cars?