I thought I understood what author says.
After reading comments, I am lost again. I will continue my journey clueless, without ever touching this burning pile of trash with scammers on top.
Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
241–250 of 822 posts
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#242He 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…
What do you mean by "allowed to"? In a PoW system, the PoW is a distributed timekeeping device. That's the actual operation the PoW does, and the distributed timekeeping is then what you can build a blockchain on. PoS doesn't not do distributed timekeeping. If you sign a block now, then go back later and sign a different block with the same key, there's no distributed clock that can be used to prove which was actually signed first.
The obvious argument here is "the one that was signed first will then have other blocks built on top of it". But since there's no PoW, building a parallel blockchain is trivial to compute, the only restriction is being able to produce something that's actually convincing enough. That and having people say "well, I was there at the time and I saw a different block than this", but that's just relying on authority rather than something that can be proven within the system.
Basically, PoS requires something external to the system to prove that history hasn't been changed. PoW technically does too, but what it relies on is "physics" and "provable historical fact" (i.e. approximate computing power available in the past).
You certainly can build a system that depends on something external to itself to ensure its consistency, but this challenges its claim to being "decentralized" and limits the amount of trust you can place in the system (and consequently the power of what it can do).
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#243Earlier 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.
> hashing algo You mean Proof of Work algorithm. Which is not quite the same as hashing function [1]. [1] https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-min...
hi tromp! good to see you are on here too.
...just re-using the terms for continuity and simplicity sake.
yes, a PoW algo is probably better generic term, although I am not confident complex algos would be accepted as first-line replacements by the wider community.
am I wrong in that assessment?
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s already fixed to some extent. On Reddit, you make a new subreddit of your own. On GitHub, you fork. The problem is that some projects are too big to effectively fork (or forking would over leverage the community) or people are lazy and don’t want to do the forking themselves despite accurately identifying the presence of a problem.
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…
The first amendment of the US constitution does apply to private enterprise.
This is why Congress cannot make a law that limits private enterprises' editing of third party content on the platforms they own.
What you are arguing for requires either an amendment to the constitution or nationalization of those private enterprises.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
If you go by the usual, energy-wasting meaning of "proof of work" that is also the one relevant to the discussion (i.e., Bitcoin-style PoW which is described in the article), then no.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#246Earlier 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…
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...
PoW at least provides a decent and somewhat fair coin distribution mechanism.
With PoS, the coin creators can assign themselves an arbitrary fraction of the coins, concentrating the wealth. Even if there is a public record of all the funds raised in a public sale and all expenditures made (which is rarely the case), it's possible for the creators to participate in the public sale and recover large parts of funds used to buy their own token by generous expenditures on software development and such.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You make it sound like I need a new hobby - which I might haha.
> Do you consider nuclear energy sustainable?
Low-carbon, yes. Sustainable, yes. Renewable, not until we productionize extraction of uranium from seawater. [1]
> ... but do you believe nuclear, either fission or fusion, will play a large role in the future?
Fusion if we can crack it, totally. Seems like a clear winner. Fission probably will if there's some political will behind it, but not unless there's a change in sentiment.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/24/is-nuclea...
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
But...if you no longer have value on the network, doesn't that mean you no longer have enough stake to control the network?
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…
You can look up how Ethereum's beacon chain implements slashing
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#249He 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.
Those two examples were demonstrating what happens when you don't have provable consensus. They weren't issues with the validity of the blockchain, but debates over changing the software itself. They're good examples of why centralized development of a decentralized protocol still opens up the software to attacks (though with the option of continuing the blockchain without the software change, as Ethereum Classic did for a while), and demonstrates why having a provable consensus mechanism is important.
Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
#250My opinion on PoS is that because no other community that I know of outside of bitcoin has a culture of running nodes normal people will just stake through exchanges. Now you have these exchanges acting not only as the in and out ramps but also as the biggest network validators meaning that they can direct transactions. Congratulations. You’ve just went full circle and invented central banks.
Am I wrong? Would gladly read counter arguments.