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Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

yanmaani.github.io

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Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#121

Post by rich_sasha »

vages wrote: post #116

> If a node can present a lottery ticket of rarity one-in-a-million, the network can conclude the node did about a million lottery tickets’ worth of work, on average. This is not true. You will have scratched far fewer tickets on average than one million. If you have one million tickets, one of them guaranteed to be a winner, you will on average scratch exactly half of them (500 000) before finding the winning ticket…

If there’s a million tickets and you know one of them is a winner, then yes.

If you have an effectively infinite stream of tickets and each have a 1 in X probability of winning, you will indeed go through X on average.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#122

Post by yanmaani »

hanniabu wrote: post #77
_2d30 wrote: post #21

I'm blown away by how quickly this rose on HN and how unconvincing it is.

It's a fud piece by a bitcoin maxi and HN is anti-crypto so it resonates with them and gives the echo chamber some good confirmation bias kool aid.

Am I a Bitcoin maximalist?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#124

Post by c0742e9366 »

As far as I am aware, these long-range forks can be hindered by using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) [1, p. 6]. Essentially, VDFs take a certain amount of steps to compute and cannot be parallelized. However, the correctness of their output can be verified efficiently.

Now if a proof of stake includes a VDF that needs to be computed for every block, then a long-range attack needs to recompute the VDF outputs as well. This is infeasible as it will take a long time given the correct choice of VDF parameters.

Notably, the Chia blockchain mentioned in the article would succumb to long-range attacks as well were it not for their usage of VDFs [2, p. 17].

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/601.pdf [2] https://www.chia.net/assets/ChiaGreenPaper.pdf

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#125

Post by plokiju »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #100
thesausageking wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?

>Christmas lights Well, let's see >Bright lights strung on American trees, rooftops and lawns account for 6.63 billion kilowatt hours of electricity consumption every year [1] >Bitcoin mining consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. [2] Huh. That's at least the same order of magnitude, at any rate. [1] https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countr... [2] https://www.businessinsider.co…

And that’s only looking at US Christmas lights, not world-wide

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#126

Post by seniorsassycat »

pshc wrote: post #78
ricardolopes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The block 200 will be adding validation to the previous blocks, and will be validated by the future ones. Without other types of checks, nothing stops you from rewriting the previous 199 blocks and using block 200 to validate them. This is not FUD, it's the most obvious PoS flaw, called long range attack, and the reason PoS chains often need more checks to be more trustworthy (e.g. keeping hardcoded checkpoints, choo…

Here’s a recent ETH2 block: https://beaconcha.in/block/2604970#votes It was voted for by 8000+ validators. Many of them have been validating since beacon chain genesis a year ago. There are like 260k validators active right now. I find it highly unlikely some entity is going to come along and try to pretend their alternate history, with a whole new set of hundreds of thousands of validators (which wouldn’t be support…

Are those 8k/260k individuals, or could they all be Syble?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#127

Post by omarfarooq »

lukebitts wrote: post #61
omarfarooq wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way of conquering FOMO is to totally write the thing off, and to stubbornly stick to that thesis.

Questioning people's motives is always a boring endeavor. You don't actually know that's the reason, why not respond to the arguments that were made?

Let me qualify my initial comment.

I have conquered [and seen others close to me] FOMO by stubbornly writing things off, and I suspect others have done the same thing: it's calorically inexpensive and cognitively frictionless. No one can reasonably assess everything that comes their way.

I am not saying that that's the reason with the writer, but it's surely the reason in some people, precisely because it's easy. And easier still to click upvote on a take that reinforces that stubbornness. It's this latter group whose motives are being questioned, as per the GP who asked why these takes get upvoted. I wasn't actually questioning the motive of the writer of the article, hence why I didn't engage in the arguments in the first place.

And of course you have the corollary of true believers who will support anything positive of X-thing-they-have-adopted.

It's seems to be only these two dichotomies we see, rarely balanced takes. And that's the real problem.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#128

Post by TheDong »

thesausageking wrote: post #25
CraftingLinks wrote: post #19

Can't wait for the day all PoW mining activities are declared illegal. To be honest, I don't understand why it hasn't been banned already. Sweden has recently called for a EU wide ban because it identified PoW mining as a threat to transition their economy to renewable energy. https://www.fi.se/en/published/presentations/2021/crypto-ass...

Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?

There is a difference between each of those uses of electricity and PoW.

PoW is throwing away electricity for the sake of it, and resists getting more efficient. If the goal is for the bitcoin network to cost $1M to do a single double spend, then PoW has to use $1M worth of electricity every 10 minutes.

Let's say we live in a future where we suddenly have 10x as much electricity. Due to supply and demand, electricity now costs 10% of what it did before.

Dryers etc all keep using the same amount of electricity with no issue, but bitcoin has a problem: it's now really cheap to double spend unless bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity. So of course, it does.

There's a similar proper with making things more efficient. If we make a christmas light more efficient (make it use an LED instead of an incandescent bulb or whatever), christmas lights will use less electricity.

If we make ASICs or GPUs more efficient, then people will just have to run more of them, or else bitcoin will be less secure.

I think this is a real and notable difference, and I think that's enough of a justification to consider a ban.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#129

Post by colordrops »

ricardolopes wrote: post #119
comex wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you know any other way to bootstrap a peer to peer network without centralised authorities? I’m not the parent, but – no, I don’t. But that’s exactly the point. The need to bootstrap from centralized authorities is what’s supposedly so bad about weak subjectivity in proof-of-stake. Yet in practice, it’s needed with proof-of-work as well.

Maybe I didn't word it right, but I wasn't calling bitcoin's method reliant on centralised authorities, just asking if there were more methods out there that weren't as well. Bitcoin is an open source permissionless protocol, so you have multiple clients to chose from, each with their own list of bootstrapping nodes, many open source where you can submit a PR to add your node too. You can even build your own client a…

It seems that PoW is like recursion. You don't get it at all until you completely get it. It's a leap to understand it and somehow many very technical people don't understand a seemingly simple protocol even a decade after it became mainstream and is threatening national banks due to the very characteristics these people claim it doesn't have.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#130

Post by seniorsassycat »

darcys22 wrote: post #103

He lost me at the part where he thinks you can sign messages after withdrawing your stake. The whole point of proof of stake is that you can only sign blocks or messages while you have something staked. When you withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything. He also didnt need to spend 1000 words going on about the history of bitcoin and proof of work. This is literally just a filler piece with a provocative cl…

I think the argument was that you could withdraw at 201 then sign new 200b messages.
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