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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

#171

Post by eftychis »

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…

And Proof of Work is better because the haves buy equipment the have-nots can't buy to vote?

Unless you have a citizenship based voting of some short where a single person gets a single vote and they actually vote (automatically I guess and assuming without delegating to the big whale because "I am bored") what do you think agreement via resource scarcity implies?

P.S. Also lobbying...

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#172

Post by nawitus »

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…

It's better to tax the harm created from electricity generation, which I suppose is mainly CO2 emissions. Then the market will decide how much PoW mining should be done compared to Christmas lights etc.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#173

Post by inter_netuser »

roenxi wrote: post #164
inter_netuser wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't fork gigawatt powerplants and silicon foundries by clicking a button on Github.

You can't even fork a stablecoin. in case of a split in a PoS chain, the correct fork will be decided for you by USDC and Coinbase.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#174

Post by evil-olive »

c0742e9366 wrote: post #124

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 we…

> Essentially, VDFs take a certain amount of steps to compute and cannot be parallelized. However, the correctness of their output can be verified efficiently.

this...sounds exactly like proof of work?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#175

Post by make_it_sure »

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.

It's the same for the other side.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#176

Post by inter_netuser »

eftychis wrote: post #171
inter_netuser wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And Proof of Work is better because the haves buy equipment the have-nots can't buy to vote? Unless you have a citizenship based voting of some short where a single person gets a single vote and they actually vote (automatically I guess and assuming without delegating to the big whale because "I am bored") what do you think agreement via resource scarcity implies? P.S. Also lobbying...

This is a common misunderstanding.

Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all.

PoW is a service to the network, to create an immutable ledger. It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change.

It's just a boring industrial business, like smelting aluminum or iron.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#178

Post by chrischattin »

dagmx wrote: post #38
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?

But won't each of those take up significantly more energy once they use Bitcoin than today? I.e the costs will be additive , and crypto aims to replace fiat. So crypto would need to be more efficient at the same scale as fiat to make sense. Also aren't each of those used by significantly more people than Bitcoin? So the per capita use is less and they scale better? Also how are you estimating cost of porn? Viewing co…

No. Bitcoin network power usage isn’t related to the number of transactions.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#179

Post by inter_netuser »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #167
inter_netuser wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

miners go bankrupt in PoW for misbehaving. Large stakers can be rewarded for misbehaving, at your expense.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#180

Post by Zpalmtree »

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...

Such an idiotic proposal. How should we enforce this, do we need a government backdoor on every single turing complete hardware to verify they are not running """bad"" code (hashing data)? Or are just ASICs the problem, mining with CPUs is OK?

Or maybe you could just let people do what they like with the electricity they paid for

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