181–190 of 205 posts
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How is it more centralized than PoW? I see multiple factors that hamper decentralization: - Fixed costs that act as barrier of entry - Economies of scale that lead to centralization - Geographic factors (operation costs being different in different parts of the world, regulation/taxation, supply chain...) This is how I see each factor playing out in both scenarios: - Fixed costs: PoS runs on consumer-grade hardware,…
Can't you just stake more coins in PoS and receive more income? I though this was how PoS coins worked. How else would you even have a notion of people requried to satisfy the condition "all people get the same amount"? Surely not photo ID?
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I think the idea is that if piles of money grow proportionally to their size, the biggest pile of money will grow the fastest, effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated. With proof of work, the same effect exists, thought it involves a loop where hashrate is exchanged for money, which is converted into more efficient hashrate at a TSMC fab. An actor that openly attacks the network will quickl…
>…effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated. More ETH/= more power. In my understanding, an attacker would need to control half of all staked ETH to stage a 51% attack, which would require many billions of dollars. But actually exercising this control by attacking the network would undermine the network’s security/utility, potentially sending ETH to zero and obliterating the wealth of the att…
In such a situation, the price effect of the negative news from the attack would be partially canceled out by the jarring reduction in ETH supply.
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>…effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated. More ETH/= more power. In my understanding, an attacker would need to control half of all staked ETH to stage a 51% attack, which would require many billions of dollars. But actually exercising this control by attacking the network would undermine the network’s security/utility, potentially sending ETH to zero and obliterating the wealth of the att…
They wouldn’t necessarily attack the system to destroy it. Can they modify it to make it more favourable to incumbents. Consolidate power?
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>Another aspect of this is 51% attacks are recoverable for PoW, but are a permanent takeover condition for PoS networks. If a single entity ever accumulates more than half the tokens on a PoS network, they are unassailable. This is not true. PoS has many design flavours and the one Ethereum is planning on implementing includes random selection of validators and the amount staked has no influence on the inclusion or t…
Not to mention that Ethereum has shown willingness to hard fork to punish/reward specific actors. If an actor pulled off a 51% attack on Ethereum I'd be surprised if there wasn't an effort to just hard fork them out of their resources.
Without losing their stake to slashing penalties, though, the worst kind of attack 66% (not 51% iirc) can do anyways is a censorship or denial of service attack. Which is bad, but at least they can't revert transactions or double-spend like in a PoW model.
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The key distinction is that PoW is permissionless, whereas PoS is permissioned. Bitcoin is secured by hashpower, which is produced by physical capital outside the network. Nobody needs to ask for permission to start hashing and trade kilowatts for sats. PoS networks are secured by on-chain assets. This means you can't "mine" it without first buying tokens from someone who already owns them. You need permission from a…
Ya I wonder if we’ll start seeing attempts to corner the market in PoS.
If they can acquire a majority of only the active, staking ETH, then other big ETH holders can start chipping in stake to tip the scales back.
What are the current best estimates for the timeline of the proof-of-stake transition?
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Decentralized pools like Rocketpool do lead to more decentralization and are almost not affected by the economies of scale issue mentioned above (there is a small commission to pay to the operator). While pooling hashpower doesn't solve the economies of scale mentioned above. If your hashrate per kW is bad you will get a very poor yield on your investment. There is also a commission to pay to the pool operator. Pooli…
Pooling in PoW still means the pool operators are the ones to vote on proposals through the block mining. That is the whole point of decentralization...if one or two large pools (Ethermine and Sparkpool) get too big then they can sway proposals almost single handedly (they have 45% of ETH hash rate now).
If the pool operators don't actually own the mining hardware then their power is limited to what the participants in the pool, who do own the hardware, allow them to do. If as an individual miner you don't like what your pool operator is doing you can always switch to another pool and take your delegated influence with you. Most proposals require supporting votes in many blocks before they take effect, so you have time to choose a more representative operator.