Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

ipfs.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 53 posts

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#21

Post by paulsutter »

api wrote: post #16
paulsutter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chia is bitcoin but with farming (storage) instead of mining (compute), plus a whole host of cleanups to do it right. So no DAG or any such thing. One could read "Beyond Hellman's Time-Memory Trade-Offs with Applications to Proofs of Space" https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf

Is proof of space actually "greener" than proof of work? Memory and hard drives consume power, and querying them consumes power. Seems like it could be just another kind of work. It would be more ASIC resistant though.

yes. vastly.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#22

Post by leijurv »

This sounds an awful lot like each transaction can consume exactly one UTXO, but can have multiple UTXO outputs. This would cause progressive "shattering" of the UTXO set into millions of low-value "dust" UTXOs, a problem that Bitcoin is struggling with (specifically, how best to incentivize "cleaning up" the UTXO set by making transactions with multiple inputs, even though that increases the overall transaction size).

"We adopt what is commonly known as Bitcoin’s unspent transaction output (UTXO) model. In this model, clients are authenticated and issue cryptographically signed transactions that fully consume an existing UTXO and issue new UTXOs."

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#23

Post by leijurv »

leijurv wrote: post #22

This sounds an awful lot like each transaction can consume exactly one UTXO, but can have multiple UTXO outputs. This would cause progressive "shattering" of the UTXO set into millions of low-value "dust" UTXOs, a problem that Bitcoin is struggling with (specifically, how best to incentivize "cleaning up" the UTXO set by making transactions with multiple inputs, even though that increases the overall transaction size…

It seems like in this protocol, such a cleanup wouldn't even be possible... if transactions can have only one input

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#24

Post by wyas »

leijurv wrote: post #22

This sounds an awful lot like each transaction can consume exactly one UTXO, but can have multiple UTXO outputs. This would cause progressive "shattering" of the UTXO set into millions of low-value "dust" UTXOs, a problem that Bitcoin is struggling with (specifically, how best to incentivize "cleaning up" the UTXO set by making transactions with multiple inputs, even though that increases the overall transaction size…

Seems like ambiguous wording on that part. However, they do not seem to require single-UTXO-inputs, but can consume multiple.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#25

Post by wyas »

chrispeel wrote: post #14

It would be good if the authors would have extended figures 20, 21, and 22 out to networks of size 20,000 or more nodes. Or at least described what they expect to happen. I.e. if you have many more nodes, does the throughput remain above 1k tps? I also always like authors who are willing to acknowledge the limitations of their work. If this work described the limitations I didn't see it; maybe they think there are no…

Cursory reading, they do seem to discuss limitations. They say that the system is not guaranteed to provide liveness for double-spends.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#26

Post by gtrubetskoy »

apo wrote: post #12

Initial reactions: 1. Sybil-resistance (faking strong consensus by deploying cheap replica nodes you control) in a protocol like this is crucial. All I could find is this: To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts. 2. Every non-proof-of-work protocol I've seen, including Ripple Consensus Process an…

Add to that - I do not see any mention of the source of timing or "timestamp server" as the Nakamoto paper refers to it. The details of why it is important are in my blog post here https://grisha.org/blog/2018/01/23/explaining-proof-of-work/ (which was once at the top of HN).

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#27

Post by Shoue »

shepardrtc wrote: post #15
apo wrote: post #12

Initial reactions: 1. Sybil-resistance (faking strong consensus by deploying cheap replica nodes you control) in a protocol like this is crucial. All I could find is this: To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts. 2. Every non-proof-of-work protocol I've seen, including Ripple Consensus Process an…

> PoW systems have a clean distribution mechanism based on external resource consumption. Unless the creators are the only ones mining for a time.

Even without that it's still not fair because of ASICs not being widely available to consumers. It's not as fair as simply selling tokens/coins which grows linearly with how much money you have, which is what you'd be spending on electricity and hardware anyway, you're just taking the shortcut of not using them and is one of the more popular arguments for PoS.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#29

Post by woah »

apo wrote: post #12

Initial reactions: 1. Sybil-resistance (faking strong consensus by deploying cheap replica nodes you control) in a protocol like this is crucial. All I could find is this: To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts. 2. Every non-proof-of-work protocol I've seen, including Ripple Consensus Process an…

Is PoW really a “clean distribution mechanism”? Economically, it’s like proof of stake, but all stake is divided up among the small set of people who have the electrical connections and equipment to mine profitably.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#30

Post by simias »

mkirklions wrote: post #8

At this point, are these papers simply to reduce the cost of verification? It seems thats the only problem in the crypto world, but I dont know if verification will ever be scalable.

What do you mean about "cost of verification"? Verification is not too difficult, it's reaching a consensus among trust-less nodes that is.

PoW solves the problem by making it so that any node which receives two valid but conflicting versions of blockchain has an objective metric to decide which one is the "right" one. The answer being whichever has the most work put into it. Since you can't fake work you can't arbitrarily create a new chain that would take over the others (unless you manage to work harder than all the rest of the network combined, hence the 51% attacks).

Without PoW if you receive two valid but conflicting chains you need an other metric to decide which one you select. This paper describes such an approach.

Post reply on HN