301–310 of 414 posts
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It's a guessing game. Referring to a guessing game as a complex mathematical problem is misleading.
False. The problem is so complex we have to resort to guessing / brute force to solve it; if it's so easy, give me a closed-form solution so I can become rich.
Guessing a number isn't a complex mathematical number, it's just guessing a number.
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Care to objectively articulate the arguments against switching to proof-of-stake? Why is it controversial?
It definitely takes a bit of power away from miners, and it adds a bit of complication to the overall consensus mechanism of the chain.
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False. The problem is so complex we have to resort to guessing / brute force to solve it; if it's so easy, give me a closed-form solution so I can become rich.
While that is true, I think the point that other users are trying to make is that wording it as "a complex mathematical problem being solved" makes it look like that work is doing something useful when it really is not.
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It is order of magnitude easier for them to make changes after launch since the code and developers are here on earth and not floating in space.
Especially given Ethereum's decision power being entirely centralized in the hands of the developers (unlike bitcoin for instance) who has shown willingness to hard-fork when they consider it necessary. In fact, the move from PoW to PoS illustrate this concentration of power: the miners lose a lot but they had no say in the decision.
Ethereum uses hard forks often an liberally. This new change is a hard fork. In a hard fork those that want to stick with the old rules of the game are not coerced to follow the new ones, they can just follow their way.
In fact, there has been talk of creating an ETHPoW which would continue the PoW chain. We will see how that pans out but is likely to be a mayor flop because support for it is negligible.
Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in…
A direct way to do that is to vote NO for such blocks. Does PoS protocol of yours require the NO vote to have reasons for that decision? It can be analyzed and having wrong NO reasons may be a reason to punish validator.
An indirect way to do that attack is to timeout on unwanted blocks. E.g., if a malicious validator sees a block it does not want, it will stop sending any messages at all until it sees next block or has an opportunity to be a proposer. How PoS protocol of yours handle such attack?
> Should a malicious actor try to tamper with the underlying protocol by using a large number of validators to revert a finalized block (the equivalent of a "51% attack" in PoW) their funds are slashed — meaning they lose a portion of their staked ETH Where does it go? Is it destroyed?
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Modulo summation is a good hash function to teach non-CS people what hash functions are in principle. But, judging by my experience in learning about how Bitcoin works, is not sufficient to see why it's a secure currency (and PoW explanations are only invoked in that context). I knew about hash functions long before I knew why bitcoin works. I think the first thing people need to get over to understand de-centralized…
Nice write up. I noticed a couple things you may want to consider. >>> Money doesn't actually have to be a scarce thing, it just needs to be a trusty record of transactions Physical cash or coin, exchanged between parties, is trusted by both parties yet leaves no transaction record. >>> Money is simply any promise backed by trust Credit is backed by trust. A finalized and appended bitcoin block needs no further trust…
The cash/coins are the record in this case: that was the point the GP was trying to make. But, they are not required for the transaction to take place: a trusted ledger also works.
> A finalized and appended bitcoin block needs no further trust. It is settled.
Of course it needs trust: you have to trust that Bitcoin is doing what it promises. Every time you sell something in exchange for bitcoin, you have to trust that:
- the network is working as advertised
- your client is working as advertised, it's not infected with some Malware to report the wrong info to you
- there is possibility of a 51% attack
Also, the latest finalized and appended block often changes. You actually have to wait until there are several other blocks appended after the one that contains your transaction until you can be sure the transaction won't be reverted.
OK, so you stake 32ETH, buy a dedicated server for a validator, and you'd get up to 5% reward per year. How is that going to pay off your dedicated server? Moreover, you are risking losing those 32ETH in case your validator goes down. Your payment would be proportional to the number of attestations, so if only a few people use ETH for transactions, your reward will be low. Did anyone think about making staking actual…
Attestations occur for every validator once every epoch, i.e. once every 6.4 minutes. It is not related to network activity in any way.
Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in…
It's actually closer to 99.95% [1] which is significantly less than a 99% reduction.
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> Heck, I understand well how POW works, and even I think of it as solving a "complex mathematical problem"... the inherently difficult problem of prime factorization. ??? Factoring is not a common problem for proof of work. In fact im not sure how you could even make that work in a way that ensures participants arent cheating.
All cryptography exploits the inherent difficulty of factoring integers. POW requires brute force precisely because the underlying hashing algorithms are built around large primes. This is, actually, how I layperson-explain cryptography: there’s no fast or easy way to take any huge number and know what two numbers mutiplied to make it, and this mathematical property is what makes (good) passwords hard to crack.
Note that even being able to quickly reverse the hash function for Bitcoin wouldn't do anything to the PoW security.
The only thing that matters for PoW as implemented in Bitcoin is that there is no way to predict the value of the hash of a block + nonce faster than computing the hash. This doesn't rely on integer factorization difficulty in any way, it simply relies on a construction that uses many one-way functions.