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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

#141

Post by ivalm »

brianolson wrote: post #133

(my day job is developer on Proof-of-Stake Algorand block chain, I'm a developer, this may not be polished official PR) Article's theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up. Let's say I start a new node and verify history since the beginning. Somewhere along the line I'm connected to a malicious node which hands me a fictionalized block. It would need to have been signed by not just one but about 30-45 account…

> but that would destroy the network and destroy his value that he sunk into the network

Isn’t the whole point that by that time he would have withdrawn from the network so he would sink it without losing anything himself.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#142

Post by hopevillian »

TheDong wrote: post #128
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?

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…

bitcoin incentivizes the search for cheaper energy, and allows for the instant monetization of once wasted energy. That's a LOT. this whole argument of energy use... i bet most of these people would have fallen for the same energy propaganda when the internet was just getting started... "what's email?? why would you waste electricity to send an electronic mail??"

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#143

Post by suikadayo »

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…

Even if they tried, it’d take weeks, months to get all of their validators accepted by the chain because of the limit each day.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#144

Post by neuroma »

supermatt wrote: post #94
xg15 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is which kind of hash you needed. For PoW, you'd have to know the hash of the start of the chain (the "genesis block") in advance to verify you downloaded the correct chain. That's true, but this hash doesn't change during operation. You could get that hash from a history book if you will. For PoS, the hash is from the end of the chain and therefore constantly changing. This means the challenge…

> For PoW, you'd have to know the hash of the start of the chain (the "genesis block") in advance to verify you downloaded the correct chain. Nope. You could fork the chain at a period of low difficulty and it would still stem from the genesis block. It would either be a short chain, or have clearly low difficulty though, so it wouldnt fool anyone knowledgeable. Im not sure how you would leverage that chain for fraud…

Why fork at low difficulty?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#145

Post by trompetenaccoun »

luckydata wrote: post #117
anonporridge wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed? Numbers I've seen suggest that global PC gaming alone (excluding consoles) currently uses about as much electricity as bitcoin. Should we ban that too since playing cards are readily available and use almost no energy? Maybe we can make a concession…

"who gets to decide" it's called "we the people" or democracy if you will. We as a society decide that cryptocurrency aren't worth destroying the world over, and that's about it.

It's funny "we the people" always decide this when it's about something that would actually empower us. Meanwhile, "we" didn't only not ban cars, "we" destroyed public transport in the US and lobbied the government to massively subsidize roads and cars. Just as an example.

It's curious how much agitation there is concerning the energy consumption of PoW. I don't see nearly as many articles calling for restricting AWS & co. Coincidentally Bitcoin is the base layer of a decentralized finance world completely out of the control of traditional elites and banks.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#146

Post by inter_netuser »

brianolson wrote: post #133

(my day job is developer on Proof-of-Stake Algorand block chain, I'm a developer, this may not be polished official PR) Article's theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up. Let's say I start a new node and verify history since the beginning. Somewhere along the line I'm connected to a malicious node which hands me a fictionalized block. It would need to have been signed by not just one but about 30-45 account…

PoS is Plutocracy on Steroids.

You've outlined only one, the most obvious and least probable, mode of failure.

The more subtle and wildly prevalent failure mode is that the consensus will be set by the few whales, who will maximize their rent extraction at the expense of numerous small players, which will include most later adopters, aka the entire population of Earth.

It's already visible on smaller scale in DAOs, every vote resembles a banana republic: "90% voted, 90% in favour". No matter what smaller stakeholders do/say, the early big investors and dev team always win. Why would they structure it otherwise? The same dynamics exist in PoS, just not as grotesque.

Perhaps that's OK for a private company governance, but for a global currency?

You want the multibillionaires to dictate the properties of the medium of exchange that serves the entire globe? Seems rather strange that so many have such a burning desire to be governed by someone much richer than them.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#147

Post by justusw »

luckydata wrote: post #117
anonporridge wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed? Numbers I've seen suggest that global PC gaming alone (excluding consoles) currently uses about as much electricity as bitcoin. Should we ban that too since playing cards are readily available and use almost no energy? Maybe we can make a concession…

"who gets to decide" it's called "we the people" or democracy if you will. We as a society decide that cryptocurrency aren't worth destroying the world over, and that's about it.

But we the people is usually restricted to one country. How do you get multiple countries to cooperate and ban cryptocurrency mining?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#148

Post by vkou »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #13
jimbob45 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s already fixed to some extent. On Reddit, you make a new subreddit of your own. On GitHub, you fork. The problem is that some projects are too big to effectively fork (or forking would over leverage the community) or people are lazy and don’t want to do the forking themselves despite accurately identifying the presence of a problem.

So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions. Reminds me a bit of the "free speech zones". It's a poor facsimile of true freedom of speech. Seeing as the new public squares are, by and large, digital spaces controlled by megacorps, we need to expand the first amend…

Freedom of speech is exactly how you get r/politics, private propaganda syndicates, and qanonsense screaming loud enough that it drowns out everything else.

"More" of it isn't going to make any of those things go away.

"Freedom of speech" isn't a guarantee that your prefered brand of rational discourse is going to have an audience of millions. If anything, it's a guarantee that it won't, because someone with a self-serving profit motive is far more incentivized to shout over you.

Freedom of speech does not entitle you to broadcast to anyone else's audience.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#149

Post by yrral »

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...

You never mentioned why you think mining should be illegal. Probably because of the outrage published by the media based on intuitive assumptions that end up not being true. That bitcoin mining long term is bad for the environment. However, this is not true even though it intuitively seems that way. (Similar to how making highways wider actually ends up making traffic worse, not better).

We can actually start with 1 question: If electricity demand from PoW mining spurs new renewable plants to be built, is that bad for the environment?

I (and many electricity companies) actually think PoW mining is good for the grid/renewable adoption in the long term. Let me explain why:

Some indisputable facts to get us started:

1. Most renewable electricity has unpredictable supply

2. Introducing marginal capacity of the same type gives diminishing returns. Eg: you're producing more during high supply times where electricity rate is low. During lower production periods all of the same type of renewable will be producing less so you can't even take advantage of the higher rates.

3. Rational bitcoin miners will turn off their machines when cost of power is greater than marginal return.

As a result, PoW mining will help the economics of building new wind/solar plants. Eg, currently it may not be profitable to build a new wind plant because base load is too low that the excess power generated would need to be sold off at 0 or even negative prices. However if bitcoin mining could be turned on during these times and off during periods of high demand, there will need to be fewer peaker plants in operation and it would positively affect the economics of opening a new wind plant.

Bitcoin mining only cares about the cost of electricity at a given time, it is not like most other electricity demands that are very time based. With the large variance of electricity generation by renewables, I think bitcoin can in the future help smooth demand according to the real supply/demand curve.

It's kind of like a different implementation of the Tesla utility grid batteries. Instead of deploying batteries, you force the grid to build more renewable capacity (that the miners are paying for) that miners use except in peak periods, where you turn off and effectively provide the grid with more power.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#150

Post by tsimionescu »

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?

Fortunately, we have a consensus system called 'voting' that can be used to decide such things in a way that hurts the least amount of people.
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