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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

#161

Post by inter_netuser »

dawnbreez wrote: post #155
ivalm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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the network and destroy his value that he sunk into the network Isn’t the whole point that by that time he would have withdrawn from the network so he would sink it without losing anything himself.

But...if you no longer have value on the network, doesn't that mean you no longer have enough stake to control the network?

a coalition of wealthy interests can trivially dictate the consensus rules with very little to no recourse on your part. Even if the chain splits, they can maintain their share on both chains, and even suppress the minority chain.

In PoW miners risk going bankrupt overnight for egregious behaviour like that.

I'd like to see how one defines "slashing" programmatically that is impartial, works algorithmically, and does not have edge cases that can lead to catastrophic failures without handwavy assumptions that every single PoS network has today.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#162

Post by knorker »

plokiju wrote: post #125
LordDragonfang wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Even extremely generously scaling it up by population that still means Bitcoin uses three orders of magnitude more.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#163

Post by hopevillian »

duped wrote: post #51
rank0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because if you’re not decentralized, then you don’t need a blockchain.

The gold standard was decentralized. Over a century of monetary policy has shown that decentralization isn't aligned with political or economic goals.

it's "decentralized" in the sense that most anyone can confirm that the bar of gold they are holding is real. Gold being taken out of the ground is literally Proof of the work that was put into it. Exactly why bitcoin takes work

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#164

Post by roenxi »

inter_netuser wrote: post #146
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, e…

> Why would they structure it otherwise?

It gets a lot more complicated than that because setting up competing systems is cheap. It is like saying "nobody would write this piece of software for free". What we learned with open source is if the cost of distribution gets low enough then there needs to be just one person somewhere on earth willing to maintain it and it can work.

If the cost of creating trustworthy local (or international) monetary systems is basically 0 then it isn't obvious that plutocrats have an advantage beyond the one they already have by virtue of being powerful. If they can force you to use their system they already control the government so didn't need any technical help.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#165

Post by Nevermark »

hopevillian wrote: post #142
TheDong wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??"

Other merit's aside, Bitcoin's incentivizing cheaper energy provides nothing new of value.

All uses of energy incentivize the search for cheaper energy.

Not all energy uses are optimized to increase usage over time, to cancel efficiencies. Proof of work, whatever it's merits, is anti-efficiency with respect to itself.

This is a significant difference.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#166

Post by darawk »

hopevillian wrote: post #159
darawk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, go steal all the money in curve. I'll wait.

yeah, save all that money in a monetary system that is controlled and literally changed on the whim of it's creators... sounds vary familiar to another monetary system we currently are on... oh, well here are some interesting links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8LXLoTUJ5g https://twitter.com/CryptoLanroc/status/1458144922867957761 https://betterprogramming.pub/the-encyclopedia-of-smart-cont... https://twitter.com/…

So by "broken" you mean you can't actually break anything. Got it. MEV is well known, and the system operates just fine in its presence.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#167

Post by turbinerneiter »

inter_netuser wrote: post #146
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, e…

How is that different from PoW or our current political system?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#168

Post by hopevillian »

Nevermark wrote: post #165
hopevillian wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??"

Other merit's aside, Bitcoin's incentivizing cheaper energy provides nothing new of value. All uses of energy incentivize the search for cheaper energy. Not all energy uses are optimized to increase usage over time, to cancel efficiencies. Proof of work, whatever it's merits, is anti-efficiency with respect to itself. This is a significant difference.

nothing new of value? I know this sounds cliche but maybe consider you dont know enough about it?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#169

Post by tsimionescu »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #145
luckydata wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Bitcoin is the base layer of a decentralized finance world completely out of the control of the traditional elites and banks, yes.

It's also a new finance world completely under the control of an even smaller elite of devs and mining pool owners (see the hard fork of Ethereum that happened a long time ago, and the upcoming fork of Ethereum that will move it to PoS; sure, Ethereum isn't Bitcoin, but there is nothing fundamentally different to prevent Bitcoin taking a similar step whenever the devs and miners decide).

What Bitcoin definitely is not is a new currency where the people have any kind of control. It is actively opposed to that goal, and takes away even the slight chance of a benevolent leader that exists with central bank controlled currencies.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#170

Post by CryptoPunk »

EGreg wrote: post #97
betwixthewires wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LMAO I don't get your criticism. Why does requiring gossip to every node cause centralization? Why does everyone having the current state of everything cause centralization?

To make progress, every few seconds or minutes, all transactions in the world must be gathered in ONE place, and placed in ONE block, as the network and adoption grows this becomes more and more expensive for everyone. There are various aspects of centralization. This is one major aspect: a bottleneck . Just like when all Web 2.0 conversations in the world would have to go through a centralized server. Even if it was…

>>Even if it was a different server each time, it’s still an extremely centralized topology for that state transition.

That doesn't make the network centralized, since the server that acts as the centralized state transitioner will be randomly selected from a very large pool of servers with equal authority.

Innovations that Rollups and Sharding further extend the scalability that is achievable with Ethereum's Proof of Stake consensus protocol, mostly by debundling tasks to create modular components, so that the consensus layer has to handle far less load per transaction.

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