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Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

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Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#201

Post by WJW »

olalonde wrote: post #139
WJW wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sanctions go a little bit further than that though. Financial institutions are not merely blocked from accepting transactions from the IP region of North Korea, but actually from doing business with a whole list of companies and individuals with ties to NK. To comply with the sanctions regulation you would need to have a lookup service listing the owner of every wallet and for every transaction you validate, chec…

It was actually ruled in 2014 that virtual currency miners are not money transmitters[0]. [0] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/2014...

From the link you posted:

> The first ruling states that, to the extent a user creates or “mines” a > convertible virtual currency solely for a user’s own purposes, the user > is not a money transmitter under the BSA.

That seems to leave rather a lot of open space IMO. For example, does a POS validator create convertible virtual currency? Clearly. But is it solely for their own purposes? Do they become a money transmitter as soon as they sell their crypto? Also, only part of miner income is the block reward; there are transaction fees as well. Is a miner allowed to accept fees from sanctioned individuals for providing payment validation services?

2014 was forever ago in crypto terms of course, so I can imagine that the viewpoints of regulators have evolved together with the technology.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#202

Post by rgrmrts »

bhaak wrote: post #22
rgrmrts wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 major…

> Incorrect state is rejected by the majority, and the minority is punished (slashing their stake). That's wrong. Also the state of those validators that are separated from the larger network is not wrong it's just not the same as what the majority considers the state. They will be on a forked chain of the network. But for being on a fork, no validator is slashed. They will only lose out on the rewards they would hav…

Ah, thanks. How does the forked chain reconcile with the rest of the network once the networks sync back up?

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#203

Post by mavhc »

mavhc wrote: post #152
totetsu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a peer to peer way to stop nuclear proliferation?

Be nice to people and don't drop so many bombs on their country they'll live in poverty for decades?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea

"During the campaign, conventional weapons such as explosives, incendiary bombs, and napalm destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85 percent of its buildings"

No idea why they have bad infrastructure and hate the west

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#204

Post by somebodythere »

cowtools wrote: post #186
redox99 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the social consensus, or "L0 consensus". It's a fork, so on only on this fork the attackers would lose the ETH. The social consensus means that actual humans, in front of these 2 forks of ETH , the original chain being attacked, and the one where all the attackers stake has been deleted so it's safe (and also non-attackers "richer"), humans would call the latter "Ethereum" and use that. And the former would fa…

Why not just ditch the whole Proof-of-Stake system and use a classical consensus system then?

Because social consensus can be achieved on which Ethereum fork to use but not on every transaction that fork processes.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#205

Post by naveen99 »

0xfoobar wrote: post #165
Barrera wrote: post #64

The article does not even mention long range attacks in which large portions of the block chain are rewritten. This is made extremely hard in Bitcoin through proof-of-work. To rewrite history you must re-do all of the work, which means you burn enough real-world energy to work faster than the entire rest of the network (aka majority hash rate attack). It's allowed, but expensive. In PoS, there was never any work, so…

Article author here. Supermajority attestations and block finalization, as well as withdrawal queues, prevent long-range attacks. To attempt to reorg a finalized block (blocks are generally finalized after 6 minutes) you have to commit to losing 1/3 of total staked ether, currently several billion dollars. The only participants who can equivocate (vote for two blocks at the same height) are active validators so there…

Wasn’t there a recent attack on solana/ solend, where the attacker was willing to lose more than 30% for the chance to cash out and crash solend at the same time ?

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#206

Post by webinvest »

olalonde wrote: post #116
SilverBirch wrote: post #54

>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…

> Then the US government smash down your door and throw you in federal prison because you're actively working to help North Korea. Not a real issue because transactions are not associated with IPs. There's basically no way to know the country of a sender or recipient. Also, it was ruled that virtual currency miners are not subject to AML regulations[0]. [0] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/2014…

Not related to miners but to the best of my knowledge, every transaction is broadcasted to the network from an IP address. Therefore the IP can be traced back or hidden with TOR or proxies.

Receiving cryptocurrency is by default anonymous because it requires no public action on the part of the receiver.

Except, checking a transaction tx or wallet balance on blockchain.info could flag the IP checking that balance.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#207

Post by kobieyc »

Something that always trips me up about PoS is how a system that determines the transactional chronology (i.e. sequence of valid blocks) that uses, as a weighted input, the current transactional chronology (valid blocks determine your stake) isn't a logically a circular definition.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#208

Post by 0xfoobar »

naveen99 wrote: post #205
0xfoobar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article author here. Supermajority attestations and block finalization, as well as withdrawal queues, prevent long-range attacks. To attempt to reorg a finalized block (blocks are generally finalized after 6 minutes) you have to commit to losing 1/3 of total staked ether, currently several billion dollars. The only participants who can equivocate (vote for two blocks at the same height) are active validators so there…

Wasn’t there a recent attack on solana/ solend, where the attacker was willing to lose more than 30% for the chance to cash out and crash solend at the same time ?

The Solend drama was at the app-layer rather than the protocol-layer. Solana also runs PoS but its variant is a bit more handwavy and weaker imo, slashing rules are applied in a post-hoc human decision-making process rather than clear rules enshrined within the protocol.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#209

Post by cwkoss »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #79
gregwebs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ If Bitcoin moved to PoS it would be fundamentally different. It might work for other coins since they aren't as decentralized. > Instead, proof-of-stake mainly seems less suitable for a decentralized and censorship-resistant global monetary asset, especiall…

> Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ That author doesn't seem to actually understand the scale of financial transactions in the world. Right now, there are about 300,000 Bitcoin transactions per day. The author defines Bitcoin being "wildly successful" as a 20x increase. Right now there are…

Energy usage is only loosely correlated with transaction volume, most of the energy goes towards securing the network.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#210

Post by pa7x1 »

0xfoobar wrote: post #169
SilverBirch wrote: post #54

>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…

Article author here. The tradeoffs between centralized control and permissionless primitives are better explored elsewhere, but the dangerously high costs of depending on a fickle intermediary for all transactions should be clear to any informed observer. Consider a Russian citizen unable to flee Putin's wartorn regime because all personal life savings and assets have been frozen. Just as private communications make…

This is very well put. If you believe the trade-offs of permissionless and private communications (as granted by cryptography) are worth-it and you don't think similar trade-offs to value transfer are worth-it (as granted by cryptocurrencies) you have to be able to explain how you are tracing the risk-reward in both cases to arrive at different conclusions. I'm not claiming it's not possible but certainly some very fine-tuning of the weights involved is necessary to reach different conclusions.

The average opinion (as in, the most oft-repeated or most popularly represented through upvotes) in HN maintains opposite conclusions. Which is an interesting observation.

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