Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
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Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
1–10 of 338 posts
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#2I have seen description like this so many times, but no guide seems to describe exactly how everything is done in decentralised way.
"The validators for each slot are assigned to committees". By whom? Also what if there is network partition for these 12 seconds. It's not very unlikely that some country could be completely cutoff from the internet for some time due to anything from natural or political reasons. Could there be recovery after this? At least in PoW, it is clear on what could be the possible scenarios.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#3I have seen description like this so many times, but no guide seems to describe exactly how everything is done in decentralised way. "The validators for each slot are assigned to committees". By whom? Also what if there is network partition for these 12 seconds. It's not very unlikely that some country could be completely cutoff from the internet for some time due to anything from natural or political reasons. Could…
Generally we've described this sort of research as "review resistant", rather than being secure in some classical sense. How Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies actually work is often eagerly explained but completely unfathomable on closer inspection. Concerns raised are fixed with additional complexity repeatedly until the reviewer grows weary of attempting to piece it together. Consequently there's sufficient conflicting descriptions that I don't think anybody has any hope of successfully understanding the system as a whole, much less being able to come to conclusions about its security.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#4I have seen description like this so many times, but no guide seems to describe exactly how everything is done in decentralised way. "The validators for each slot are assigned to committees". By whom? Also what if there is network partition for these 12 seconds. It's not very unlikely that some country could be completely cutoff from the internet for some time due to anything from natural or political reasons. Could…
As for the source of randomness, they mention it briefly in the appendix:
> RANDAO: the random number generation scheme used to select block proposers, sort validators into committees, etc
Spec and implementation: https://github.com/randao/randao
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#5I have seen description like this so many times, but no guide seems to describe exactly how everything is done in decentralised way. "The validators for each slot are assigned to committees". By whom? Also what if there is network partition for these 12 seconds. It's not very unlikely that some country could be completely cutoff from the internet for some time due to anything from natural or political reasons. Could…
Heres my understanding of it: committee assignment is random, as in baked into the protocol, similar to how a validator is selected for a block (i.e. randomly).
While only one validator creates the block, others create attestations which I understand as duplicate work done to check the chosen validators produced block.
If an entire country goes down, those validators fall out of the active set and assuming some majority is still active they'll produce and verify blocks.
Incorrect state is rejected by the majority, and the minority is punished (slashing their stake).
Full disclosure, I'm not an expert - just an enthusiast interested in these protocols. Would love for someone more knowledgeable to correct my mistakes. I'm also not arguing for or against anything here.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#6I can't see governments allowing PoW to continue to exist in our current climate (in all senses). How would Bitcoin ever move over to PoS like this? Would it just be a Bitcoin hard fork?
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#7I have seen description like this so many times, but no guide seems to describe exactly how everything is done in decentralised way. "The validators for each slot are assigned to committees". By whom? Also what if there is network partition for these 12 seconds. It's not very unlikely that some country could be completely cutoff from the internet for some time due to anything from natural or political reasons. Could…
According to Eth docs:
> One validator is randomly selected to be a block proposer in every slot. This validator is responsible for creating a new block and sending it out to other nodes on the network. Also in every slot, a committee of validators is randomly chosen, whose votes are used to determine the validity of the block being proposed.
The annotated code for this can be found in [2].
[1] https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/phase...
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#8I have seen description like this so many times, but no guide seems to describe exactly how everything is done in decentralised way. "The validators for each slot are assigned to committees". By whom? Also what if there is network partition for these 12 seconds. It's not very unlikely that some country could be completely cutoff from the internet for some time due to anything from natural or political reasons. Could…
Generally we've described this sort of research as "review resistant", rather than being secure in some classical sense. How Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies actually work is often eagerly explained but completely unfathomable on closer inspection. Concerns raised are fixed with additional complexity repeatedly until the reviewer grows weary of attempting to piece it together. Consequently there's sufficient confl…
The spec is open and documented pretty clearly.[1]
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#9> There are two key equivocation rules a validator must follow, taken from the Gasper paper:
>
> Double vote - no validator makes two distinct attestations for the same target block
>
> Surround vote - no validator makes an attestation that surrounds or is surrounded by a previous attestation
Which are both punished by having the saked ETHs being "slashed" (32 ETHs staked, you end up losing 16 of the 32).
I never understood that: it opens a door for a huge attack in that it's now impossible to safely "stake". Ethereum devs says you can safely stake in that staked ETHs aren't at risk of being stolen (the key to stake and to move the ETHs aren't the same, so it's impossible for an attacker to steal the 32 ETHs) but...
An attacker accessing a staking node can, on purpose, double vote or surround vote to get the ETH slashed. The difference between losing 32 ETHs or 16 ETHs is not that big (sure, in the case of slashing at least the attacker doesn't get them, but for the person losing the ETHs, it doesn't make a huge difference).
So it's impossible to stake without risking your ETHs getting slashed, even if the staker is honest.
Here's my prediction: we'll see exactly that attack on slashing nodes, people are going to lose ETHs and we'll see excuses to the tune of "you didn't securize your node well enough".
I do think it should be possible to stake without that risk (just as it is possible to hold the private keys to cryptocurrencies on hardware wallets because, well, computers are all too often insecure).
Here's another prediction: some are going to come up with HSM to stake ETHs (maybe they already exist?). The risk of getting people's ETHs slashed is just too big.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#10I can't see governments allowing PoW to continue to exist in our current climate (in all senses). How would Bitcoin ever move over to PoS like this? Would it just be a Bitcoin hard fork?
Yes it would need a hard fork - but Bitcoin community is notoriously resistant to change, so it probably would not happen for some years or decades.