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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

#271

Post by mattdesl »

ulzeraj wrote: post #250

My 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…

In a chain like Tezos, the validator software is relatively easy to run if you have a Raspberry Pi and some terminal chops, and a lot of hobbyists do stake this way.

But it’s easier for most people to delegate to another party. This is where decentralized staking pools for ETH2[1] built around smart contract interactions could be a good alternative for many users, and may compete with centralized staking platforms.

The mere fact that these peer-to-peer and decentralized alternatives exist, and that some portion of users will prefer to use them, is what makes this technology distinct.

[1] - https://rocketpool.net/

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#272

Post by yunohn »

Findecanor wrote: post #42
CraftingLinks wrote: post #19

Can'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...

A couple Swedish public servants have called for a EU-wide ban. Sweden does not have an official stance on PoW mining.

> a couple Swedish public servants

- Director General at the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority

- Director General at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency

I’m not sure who you think is more qualified to have a stance that represents Sweden?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#273

Post by inter_netuser »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #261
inter_netuser wrote: post #192

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? Indeed, you can probably fix plutocracy with some PoW.

> Indeed, you can probably fix plutocracy with some PoW. Uh... great! Glad you agree that this is a solution? Let's switch to this new "some PoW" system as soon as possible, because it uses less than a megawatt to calculate proofs. Total, for the entire network.

The more complex is the math, the more opportunities to screw up, or should we say, optimizations.

VDFs are far too new, at best bleeding edge research, nobody is going to gamble serious money on the robustness of such new constructions.

You would need unanimous agreement from the entire cryptology field.

However, yes, there are some workshops on quantum and implications for mining, and some other fanciful stuff that are also just research at this point.

The current setup of PoW relies on rather well understood, battle hardened primitives, that have been in actual usage under adversarial conditions for decades.

Do you think any major central bank will hold any asset that's secured by a paper written last year?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#274

Post by yunohn »

adnzzzzZ wrote: post #80
CraftingLinks wrote: post #19

Can'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...

Doesn't seem like everyone in Sweden agrees with that opinion, especially not the people actually running energy companies: https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1457114531314995206

> not the people actually running energy companies

I’m not sure if the people making the most money from crypto-mining’s energy usage, are to be believed?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#275

Post by inter_netuser »

delaaxe wrote: post #248
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…

You can look up how Ethereum's beacon chain implements slashing

Yep, isn't it great to get slashed for being DDoSed?

Amazing breakthrough, realy. Now ddos blackmail can be actually measured in money.

At least you could point to avalanche or something else that's better constructed. Eth is a dinosaur at this point, albeit with the fattest treasury.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#276

Post by inter_netuser »

Avshalom wrote: post #262
arcticbull wrote: post #230

Earlier 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.

So literally one guy has control of Ethereum?

and every other PoS chain that relies on USDC and major exchanges.

So probably more than 1 guy. maybe 5-10.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#277

Post by sktrdie »

josnyder wrote: post #8

PoW 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…

Finally someone actually mentioning the code. In PoS "trust" must exist along several points in time before you can engage with the system - and the most notable point being trusting that the rules (written in the code) are of your desire.

With PoW you don't care about the software code. The rules are dominated by the PoW because it literally proves to you which is the chain where most people are interested in, because literally no single entity could burn that much electricity.

With PoS on the other hand you kind of need these checkpoints in the actual software and then you have to activate this entire new trust model where you have to trust the client code, and where it came from etc. I could literally come up with an entire fake chain on my computer and present it to you and without client-checkpoints there would be no way for you to not accept my chain compared to your current one.

With PoW I don't have to trust anything. If the majority next year decides to change the rules, so be it. The majority has spoken.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#278

Post by jokethrowaway »

Eelongate wrote: post #82
Godel_unicode wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't understand the fear generated by the youtube-dl storm in a teacup. It's a great example of the system working: someone thought they had a DMCA case so they filed a takedown, the takedown temporarily removed the content, then after a review the content was put back up. This is just evidence that this particular slope isn't as slippery as some thought.

> the content was put back up. The repo is back up, but the project is dead. I suspect the developers got nasty letters from lawyers behind the scenes. I believe yt-dlp is the future of this project, but it's presently lesser known than youtube-dl so the lawyers got what they wanted in the end.

That's a problem with our laws.

Copyright should just be a contract between seller and buyer. You promise not to redistribute this. If you didn't buy something, you have no contract with the seller and you can be free to download whatever you want or build whatever software or service you want.

The onus of finding who is the buyer breaking the contract and dragging them to court is on the seller.

We shouldn't have things like DMCA which allow you to censor anything tangentially related or being able to scare people off, but that's what you get when you have a corrupted government that does the bidding of Big Business.

Similarly, patents shouldn't be a thing.

You came up with something, you already have first mover advantage. If someone comes along and does the same thing better, too bad, they were better than you. If you have a manufacturing secret, protect it with contracts and sue for damage if they get broken.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#279

Post by perlgeek »

I'm trying to understand the central technical argument being made here. Please tell me if I got this right.

---

Somebody has a stake in a PoS crypto currency. They can now do two things: 1) sell their stake 2) sign something fraudulent (like a double spend).

Since there is no decentralized timestamp service, a node validating those two actions doesn't know how to order them, so different validating nodes come to different conclusions, and no global consensus is reached.

---

Is that what the article is trying to say?

And if yes, isn't the solution fairly easy? Within the same "chain link" of the block chain, require each action singed by the same private key to have a strictly monotonic sequence number, and if two actions appear with the same sequence number, discard both these two and all actions signed by that private key.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#280

Post by denton-scratch »

rich_sasha wrote: post #121
vages wrote: post #116

> If a node can present a lottery ticket of rarity one-in-a-million, the network can conclude the node did about a million lottery tickets’ worth of work, on average. This is not true. You will have scratched far fewer tickets on average than one million. If you have one million tickets, one of them guaranteed to be a winner, you will on average scratch exactly half of them (500 000) before finding the winning ticket…

If there’s a million tickets and you know one of them is a winner, then yes. If you have an effectively infinite stream of tickets and each have a 1 in X probability of winning, you will indeed go through X on average.

Yeah, I think that's right. The hypothesis was that on average, one in a million cards is a hit. That implies that if you scratch a million cards, you have a 50:50 chance of a hit.

That the author got this basic thing wrong doesn't inspire much confidence in the rest of his reasoning.

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