I've heard of proof of time, proof of space, proof of authority... What other oddball mechanisms are out there?
eg. Anything like "proof of latency"?
Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
191–200 of 822 posts
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#192This is a silly article. Only working in a weaker security model does not, a priori, mean that proof of stake is a scam; it just means you need to convince yourself that the weaker security model holds. You can read the post linked ( https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov... ) and decide for yourself. Personally, I think this kind of "quiescent" knowledge, letting you differentiate the real chai…
> 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?
Indeed, you can probably fix plutocracy with some PoW.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Billion kilo is already the same magnitude as tera (it’s kilo-> mega-> giga -> tera: 1000^3).
Did I miss something or is your comment factually incorrect?
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#194He 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 biggest problem with his whole argument is when he wants to give some examples of community consensus being a problem, and gave examples from the PoW world (Bitcoin small block size decision, Ethereum bhard fork) - that to me complety destroyed his own argument that PoS is more community-dependent than PoW.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
you didn't read the article to the end, did you? about 40% in: "Because of all the arguments above, we can safely conclude that this threat of an attacker building up a fork from arbitrarily long range is unfortunately fundamental, and in all non-degenerate implementations the issue is fatal to a proof of stake algorithm’s success in the proof of work security model. However, we can get around this fundamental barrie…
> you didn't read the article to the end, did you? I skimmed it. It made no serious arguments. If it had a serious argument, it would have exploited one of the many existing proof of stake systems. > Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having masters, whatever floats your boat. You mean...exactly like PoW mining?
No, exactly the opposite of PoW mining.
Miners do not set the rules, they are merely a service that provides immutability to a ledger, with a nuclear option that will bankrupt all the billions they have invested, should they misbehave.
Large stakers can rent-seek and extract your wealth, PoS is the same system we have now, plus some code.
You are quite literally being exploited right this minute, by the same methods outlined in the article.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#196Can'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
If electricity was an unlimited non-polluting resource, sure. But when my neighborhood mining rig coal power plant gives me cancer, it's not just a simple marketplace thing.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#197Not really, its unfair but not a scam. Can we talk about the actual scam known as layer 2 rollup chains? Optimism is completely centralized and even Vatalik is shilling it like a good thing. At least the PoS shill makes sense, it artificially benefits early adopters.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#198Can'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
Bitcoin is not predominantly mined by a ton of individuals running an ASIC or 2. It is mined in huge warehouses, which have to go through state/federal bureaucracy for business licenses, etc etc. It would be hard to enforce a complete ban on anyone mining any Bitcoin, but the vast, vast majority of mining could be easily shut down in the US, as it was in China.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#199He 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…
The argument he's making is, you could stake for blocks 10000-10005 and get your money back.
And then produce a big fake chain from 10,002 (in the middle of the time you were staking) -> 10,000,000 later, with an alternate history in which you didn't stop staking.
I don't think this attack is particularly realistic for a lot of reasons, but PoW does have some small amounts of additional strength against these scenarios.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can fork decentralized over (crypto) collateralized stablecoins even if you can't force a fork of a centralized stablecoin operated by incorporated entity to be recognized by them. Unless we're going to pretend that there is only one way on and off networks and only in one currency denomination…
how do I send a wire to DAI?