I'm blown away by how quickly this rose on HN and how unconvincing it is.
Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
21–30 of 822 posts
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#22Why do unsophisticated, redundant, vitriolic takes like this get upvoted on HN so much? Is there some common ax to grind here?
The strongest point here is the strawman presentation of the altered security model that PoS can be proven to form consensus under. Reading the source he cites is far more informative: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...
The majority of the article frames distributed consensus mechanisms in an extremely sophomoric understanding of asset value and the PoW security model. All of these topics (including valid ETH criticisms) are discussed in much better ways in many other places.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#23Why do unsophisticated, redundant, vitriolic takes like this get upvoted on HN so much? Is there some common ax to grind here? The strongest point here is the strawman presentation of the altered security model that PoS can be proven to form consensus under. Reading the source he cites is far more informative: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov... The majority of the article frames distribut…
Occam's razor points to sour grapes
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#24PoW systems rely on the "phone a friend method" as well. When you download a Bitcoin client from a "friend", you are trusting them to honestly introduce you to the network. If you fall asleep for a period of years, you have to trust your friends to honestly inform you of all of the PoW forks and policy changes that have occurred over that interval. The only difference is that PoS blockchain clients must be bundled wi…
'Policy changes' and hard forks have about as much to do with PoW as whether the Federal authorities should ban cryptocurrencies or not - they're outside the realm of consensus algorithms. In PoW there are no friends. If your blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your transactions on it are invalid and will be rejected by the rest of the network.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#25Can'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...
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?
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#26If POS is really as bad as claimed, then why is Ethereum 2.0 going to be using POS?
Well, how many times has it been delayed? Clearly it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#27PoW systems rely on the "phone a friend method" as well. When you download a Bitcoin client from a "friend", you are trusting them to honestly introduce you to the network. If you fall asleep for a period of years, you have to trust your friends to honestly inform you of all of the PoW forks and policy changes that have occurred over that interval. The only difference is that PoS blockchain clients must be bundled wi…
Indeed. And even if you posit a PoW currency which never has policy changes, unlike Bitcoin or any other major cryptocurrency…
And you assume that attackers will never have enough computing resources to execute a 51% attack – which could happen because the currency’s value falls enough that people stop mining it, because an extraordinarily well-funded entity decides to attack it, or because someone manages to hack the miners…
Then you do gain the security guarantee that if you see multiple competing branches of the blockchain, you’ll know which branch is the correct one (namely, whichever is longest). However, you’re still relying on phoning your “friends” (nodes you’re aware of) to tell you what blocks exist! If they all keep the true longest branch a secret from you (or, say, someone blocks your Internet connection to the nodes that aren’t willing to do so), then you will think the next longest branch is the correct one.
To be fair, that isn’t the most practical attack. But none of the risks being discussed here are remotely practical. In practice, nobody wants to connect an outdated client to a blockchain network because it risks (a) getting yourself exploited through known vulnerabilities in the client, (b) not working due to backwards incompatible protocol changes or bugs, or (c) missing a hard fork that might have happened over disagreements in policy changes (because there are always policy changes). So you update your client, and that means you have to rely on a “friend” to tell you which software you should be running.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#28Do people deploy PoS chain clients that are ok with blocks that totally ignore the historical leader schedule or use a leader schedule that could not have resulted from the distribution of stake in the network at the time? If not, how will the attacker who wants to swap out a single block a year later get all the other validators to sign a year worth of new blocks?
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#29Why do unsophisticated, redundant, vitriolic takes like this get upvoted on HN so much? Is there some common ax to grind here? The strongest point here is the strawman presentation of the altered security model that PoS can be proven to form consensus under. Reading the source he cites is far more informative: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov... The majority of the article frames distribut…
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Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#30If POS is really as bad as claimed, then why is Ethereum 2.0 going to be using POS?
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