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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

#221

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

Do you work on HEX for Richard Heart?

As a POS developer, what do you think of HEX and Richard Heart (whose real name is Richard J Schueler)?

If you don't work on HEX, how is your POS get rich quick pyramid scheme any better or more trustworthy than HEX?

If you do work on HEX, then please ask Richard to drop by, join the discussion, and answer the questions below (to which he replied "Dodge Dodge"), and any other questions the HN community wants to ask him:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367412

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#222

Post by arcticbull »

inter_netuser wrote: post #176
eftychis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the limit, proof of work and proof of stake converge - they are the same thing, except for the Kazakh coal that is burned in the former along the way.

PoS staking is simply committing a portion of your capital to the task of validating transactions. You benefit by receiving a reward in the form of additional tokens.

In a PoW system, the same exact thing can be accomplished by using your tokens to purchase a stake in a mining pool. You will similarly be unable to access your capital, be rewarded with additional tokens, and at the end of a period of your choice, you can liquidate your position in the mining pool to reclaim your tokens.

[edit] PoW in this context is a bit worse because PoW miners can rent out their hash power maliciously without being slashed.

In this world, the "nothing at stake" problem also manifests in proof of work, where I believe ownership in the mining pool makes you agnostic to the outcome of any chain splits - although I'm still working this bit through in my head. Opinions welcome!

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#223

Post by neuroma »

mathnmusic wrote: post #115
anonporridge wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed? Numbers I've seen suggest that global PC gaming alone (excluding consoles) currently uses about as much electricity as bitcoin. Should we ban that too since playing cards are readily available and use almost no energy? Maybe we can make a concession…

> If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed? We already legislate different pricing for different applications. Household electricity has a different price than industrial usage. A 1000x price of electricity for certain applications is just a small extension of what we currently have.

In the UK electricity costs are essentially the same for all users with discounts applied for volume and time/ demand. Is this not the case elsewhere?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#225

Post by newaccount74 »

dawnbreez wrote: post #207
inter_netuser wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a coalition of wealthy interests can trivially dictate the consensus rules with very little to no recourse on your part. Even if the chain splits, they can maintain their share on both chains, and even suppress the minority chain. In PoW miners risk going bankrupt overnight for egregious behaviour like that. I'd like to see how one defines "slashing" programmatically that is impartial, works algorithmically, and does…

No, no, back up a second. The argument being made in the parent comment is that once there is one entity with enough stake in the network to dictate where it goes, they can just pull out before tanking the network. But my understanding was that you can only have enough stake in the network to make decisions...by having that stake in the network . If you un-stake your crypto and cash out, by definition, you no longer…

If you had a controlling stake in the past, couldn't you just rewrite history to make it seem like you still have stake?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#226

Post by marcus_cemes »

mission_failed wrote: post #206
inter_netuser wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of work just burns electricity for the random chance of winning a lottery

It's burning electricity (that could in an ideal world be renewable, maybe one day) to provide a service to the network, therefore making it more secure by providing additional processing capacity that is controlled by a good actor, making it harder for a bad actor to get 51% of the pie. It is a waste, but there are also a lot of other sources of wasted resources/energy that we could tackle first and get larger returns from.

You get compensated for your service, it may seem like a lottery, but if you do it for a long enough time, you'll get fairly steady returns as in theory it should be random and proportional to your hashrate.

I don't mine, and I think it's definitely overhyped at the moment, but maybe it will settle in the future and actually provide a useful service to us folk. It doesn't seem to be going away for now, and it is really easy to send money to friends and family, whether they're nextdoor or in another country.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#227

Post by tylerhou »

nawitus wrote: post #172
TheDong wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nit: when you say better you mean "more economically efficient in terms of $s produced." That's not necessarily equivalent to a policy that would be the best for society.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#228

Post by jack_pp »

inter_netuser wrote: post #179
turbinerneiter wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They only go bankrupt if they don't hold the majority of the mining power, if they do they take over. How is this different from PoS?

Actually in PoS if you try to attack and you don't have a majority you will lose all your coins. in PoW if you try to attack and somehow you miscalculated you will lose a couple of hours worth of electricity after which you can go back to mining normally so much lower stakes for an attack.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#229

Post by tromp »

inter_netuser wrote: post #153
Laforet wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the threat of long range attacks in PoS any worse than PoW in practice? Bitcoin for example still relies on a list of hardcoded nodes for bootstrapping clients. Not to mention very few people actually bother to verify the full chain (360GB and counting) from genesis. As for auditing the the integrity of the code or binary, it is signed by GPG keys hosted on public key servers accessed using X509 certificates pinne…

> As for auditing the the integrity of the code or binary, it is signed by GPG keys > hosted on public key servers accessed using X509 certificates pinned by a a > couple of trust anchors preloaded in your OS. So much for distributed consensus... You can literally validate the entire chain with a simple python script. Millions of those on github. >Not to mention very few people actually bother to verify the full chai…

> You can literally validate the entire chain with a simple python script.

I challenge you to present a "simple python script" that implements the exact bitcoin consensus rules (as codified in bitcoin core). Bitcoin is not all that simple and there's a nontrivial amount of complexity in bitcoin script alone [1].

> The chain is validated in its entirety upon first sync. 100% from genesis to tip.

The default behavior is to skip signature verification for all signatures before some relatively recent block [2].

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/script/in...

[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/9484

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#230

Post by arcticbull »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #212
inter_netuser wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all Within protocol, no. But when weighing a fork, those with the gold choose the rules.

The fork-wars of old will never happen again, IMO, on any chain of significance. These days, fork winners will be decided by the stablecoin operations they host. If ETH forks, for instance, hash power will follow whichever chain Jeremy Allaire deems the winner.
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