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

251–260 of 822 posts

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#251

Post by [deleted] »

pshc wrote: post #102
anonporridge wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attestations don't have a real world economic cost that can be validated trustlessly within the system. If you compromise or coerce enough validators, you can rewrite the history for no cost. That's what PoW provides that PoS just doesn't. Immutability. In fact, I would argue that one of the most important products of bitcoin, is providing the hardest, most immutable database human civilization has ever created. We c…

I have to say I appreciate your transparency in directly Bitcoin shilling. > If you compromise or coerce enough validators, you can rewrite the history for no cost. If you can. You would need to compromise thousands of randomly selected validators just to forge one block. That impossible task nonwithstanding, the validators are selected with maybe five minutes’ warning. PoW doesn’t even offer absolute immutability, i…

[deleted]

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#252

Post by 127 »

TTPrograms wrote: post #22

Why 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…

They might not upvote the article, just the discussion in this thread; which in my humble opinion is quite good.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#253

Post by denton-scratch »

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…

> standing armies that are "doing nothing"

Armies have to practice. Smart generals don't let their armies do nothing; to be any good at warfighting, they have to fight wars. Effective standing armies have to constantly be finding new wars to fight.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#254

Post by Kbelicius »

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…

> The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+)

Do you have an source for this? I remember the same number being flaunted before but it turned out not to be true. What was true was that 70%+ of miners use any amount of renewables in their energy mix.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#255

Post by a-dub »

a-dub wrote: post #15

regarding the private mining attack: proof of work proves that not just one miner had sufficient hash power, but that the entire network had a certain aggregate hash power that was required to mine the block. can't this be emulated by requiring all major stakers to sign the block? (so rather than one miner staking being enough, all the aggregate staked was required to mine the block)

in any event i think the op is wrong in terms of the hard part of proof of stake, private mining attacks are solvable.

the stickier issues are around maintaining the decentralized nature of pow mining and the random and decentralized election of who mines the next block. under pow, everybody does their own thing and when someone finds a block they are able to publish it without direct collaboration with other miners. the fact that the miner is chosen at random gives rise to all sorts of anti-censorship and anti-collusional properties.

proof of stake will have to emulate this, and possibly make a few targeted and carefully chosen compromises in order to emulate the decentralized nature of pow mining. it's not obvious how this will play out, but i don't think it's impossible and efforts to do so certainly aren't a "scam."

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#256

Post by csomar »

The author has good points, bad points and badly explained stuff. The article is a bit confusing at best and disorientating at worst.

But I'll try to explain here, why the author thinks that PoW is magical. It's still bound to the readers, or philosophers, to pull whatever they want from this.

Proof of Work creates time. In a decentralized system, you don't have time. If time was provable, the double-spending problem would not happen. You would sign a transaction and broadcast it; a second transaction that you would sign later, will have a higher timestamp. Obviously, you can sign a transaction later and have a lower timestamp, there is nothing that prevents you from that.

What Proof of Work does, is create an arrow of time. Using this arrow of time, the nodes create a ledger (the blockchain).

The OP is arguing that PoS cannot create an arrow of time; and as a result, the PoS is still liable to the double-spending problem.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#257

Post by Dylan16807 »

evil-olive wrote: post #233
c0742e9366 wrote: post #204

Earlier 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?

Only the chosen validators for a particular block do the calculation, and they only need one core to do it on.

The global CPU and power use for the VDF calculations doesn't need to exceed what you could fit into a single server rack.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#258

Post by 127 »

TheDong wrote: post #128
thesausageking wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

Why do people keep propagating this claim that PoW is burning electricity for nothing? It directly provides security for the blockchain. I don't disagree with your arguments general direction, just with this piece of incorrect misinformation.

LED was a technological innovation. Nothing says Bitcoin can't have those. If you want more light, you need more lamps and you need to spend more energy. I don't really see the difference here.

About every 4 years the reward for mining a block will be halved. I don't see LED lights getting two times more efficient every 4 years.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#259

Post by samarama »

This person doesn’t have any idea how PoS works and all of the people upvoting it don’t either.

It’s very astonishing that the HN crowd still doesn’t understand blockchain after 13 years.

The article is complete nonsense because:

1. The author thinks that PoS is about having computing power. If someone thinks that they seriously don’t know anything about PoS and haven’t done any research

2. Proof of Work is 100x more centralized because 2 companies control the majority of mining equipment production and 4 companies control the hashpower including all kinds of attack vectors, instead of the around 200 entities in PoS.

3. There are many attack vectors for the PoW model of which many only require malicious behaviour of 1 person, be it the CEO of one of these companies or a disgruntled worker that is bribed with a couple of million dollars.

3. The cost of taking over consensus for a PoS network, such as Solana or Ethereum 20 requires billions or trillions of dollars worth of coins that then all would rank heavily in value

That’s why PoS is around 1,000x -1,000,000x more secure than PoW depending on how big the market cap of the PoS network is.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#260

Post by inter_netuser »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #240
inter_netuser wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 susta…

I disagree that standing armies and nuclear weapons are a waste. They guarantee your security, which you seem to take for granted. Your views on this could change if you spend a few years in a warzone under artillery fire.

It is of course not 100% perfect analogy, nothing is, but I believe you understood the point I tried to get across: it's a security service, and that costs money. Blackwater stationary guard roles are 180-220k a year for someone with years of experience. I'd imagine monetary networks use a lot of physical security, some central banks are literally located in bunkers under mountains, with a backup site in a similar setup on a different geological plate.

I have not seen any PoS schemes so far that provide anything other than plutocracy as a service. There is a reason why ETH with a 100mil R&D budget is still on PoW, Vitalik is not a dummy.

as for the cheap sources of sustainable energy, those are usually stranded hydro and wind that's too remote to be economic, and stranded natgas (for natgas "green" might be a better term, i've used sustainable in the sense that CH4 is far more damaging that CO2. I've been told by regulators it is actually better to burn off CH4 from stranded wells)

Balancing of the grid also does happen, but I believe primarily with wind and hydro.

I, of course, agree that we should not pollute the Earth we live on. High energy usage in itself is not bad, only if it's a harmful polluter. I've only pointed out dishwashers and pools (don't have the stats handy, but they do indeed use a lot more, like a magnitude more), as a common hypocrisy.

We must rapidly scale up non-polluting energy sources, as it seems unlikely humanity can become a spacefaring species on a self-imposed tight energy budget, and this self-imposed handicap coupled with an unexpected asteroid impact can end us.

Post reply on HN