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

Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

yanmaani.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 822 posts

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#231

Post by bouncycastle »

inter_netuser wrote: post #146
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…

PoS is Plutocracy on Steroids. You've outlined only one, the most obvious and least probable, mode of failure. The more subtle and wildly prevalent failure mode is that the consensus will be set by the few whales, who will maximize their rent extraction at the expense of numerous small players, which will include most later adopters, aka the entire population of Earth. It's already visible on smaller scale in DAOs, e…

PoS in Ethereum is not a plutocracy...There is no voting with the token or any other governance. The stakers do not control the network, by design. The whole system works only if everybody (holders/users/stakere/devs) cooperate together.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#232

Post by Covzire »

Eelongate wrote: post #70
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions. Reminds me a bit of the "free speech zones". It's a poor facsimile of true freedom of speech. Seeing as the new public squares are, by and large, digital spaces controlled by megacorps, we need to expand the first amend…

> So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions. And if by some chance your subreddit manages to become popular, the admins and power mods will conspire to take it from you. Reddit sucks.

There's something akin to a law of nature at work on Reddit that goes something like this: Any sub-reddit (or it's topic-at-hand) that garners any national attention in the political sphere will become an echo chamber full of corporate shills unless there is constant and public vigilance to guard against it, and even then the sub's chances for surviving to fulfill its original mission is grim. I f'ing hate what Reddit has become.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#233

Post by evil-olive »

c0742e9366 wrote: post #204
evil-olive wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, a VDF just proves that, given a certain input, you spent a certain amount of time to compute the unique (!) VDF output. As said, this computation must be carried out sequentially. Of course, it can still be sped up by creating an ASIC (the same technology used for Bitcoin miners nowadays). However, there is not point in running multiple ASICs (like a Bitcoin mining farm) because the computation cannot be parallel…

> proves that, given a certain input, you spent a certain amount of time

so, proof of work?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#234

Post by inter_netuser »

marcus_cemes wrote: post #226
mission_failed wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 retur…

It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens.

The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper.

Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#235

Post by celeduc »

barbegal wrote: post #5

Proof of work has always had an economic flaw that you could theoretically temporarily rent enough mining power to perform double spends of more value than the cost of renting those devices. But this attack has never been performed because the reality of all these cryptocurrencies is that the security depends only relatively weakly on proof of work. Instead it relies on trust between the main stakeholders: miners, bi…

51% attacks have been performed on some smaller PoW chains, specifically Ethereum Classic. It's not that hard. https://www.crypto51.app/

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#236

Post by inter_netuser »

bouncycastle wrote: post #231
inter_netuser wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoS is Plutocracy on Steroids. You've outlined only one, the most obvious and least probable, mode of failure. The more subtle and wildly prevalent failure mode is that the consensus will be set by the few whales, who will maximize their rent extraction at the expense of numerous small players, which will include most later adopters, aka the entire population of Earth. It's already visible on smaller scale in DAOs, e…

PoS in Ethereum is not a plutocracy...There is no voting with the token or any other governance. The stakers do not control the network, by design. The whole system works only if everybody (holders/users/stakere/devs) cooperate together.

Only some, it seems, are more equal than others.

https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/760232885483806720

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#238

Post by bouncycastle »

inter_netuser wrote: post #236
bouncycastle wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoS in Ethereum is not a plutocracy...There is no voting with the token or any other governance. The stakers do not control the network, by design. The whole system works only if everybody (holders/users/stakere/devs) cooperate together.

Only some, it seems, are more equal than others. https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/760232885483806720

I'm not sure what you are linking to. This looks like a tweet from 2016.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#239

Post by inter_netuser »

arcticbull wrote: post #230
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you consider nuclear energy sustainable?

It's probably not renewable (well, neither is the Sun on large enough timescale), but do you believe nuclear, either fission or fusion, will play a large role in the future?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#240

Post by Dylan16807 »

inter_netuser wrote: post #234
marcus_cemes wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 retur…

It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens. The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper. Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them…

> It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens.

You don't think those get very wasteful in the real world? And there's no equivalent to a real war situation. You can set it up so you don't need to defend against the equivalent of enemy armies.

> The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper.

What kind of sustainable?

When miners locate next to hydro, and buy it up, that doesn't help anything. That hydro could have been sold as somewhat less cheap power elsewhere, after going over long wires, and then it would have reduced the load on coal plants.

Miners that eat up excess solar can theoretically do a lot to encourage the installation of solar, but they need to be happy letting their machines be turned off a large fraction of the time. If it's still profitable to run 20 hours a day, then they're still encouraging fossil power plants.

> Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them.

Dishwashers are better than hand-washing, aren't they? Having plates is a lot more important than running cryptocurrencies in a particular way.

If heated swimming pools use that much, then sure let's go after that and use some kind of billing or taxes so they pay extra and encourage sustainable power sources.

Post reply on HN