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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

#31

Post by fallingknife »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #14
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…

Freedom of speech is not the same thing as requirement that others listen. If someone has no audience, with all the platforms that are available, it's not because they're being censored. It's because nobody cares what they have to say.

This is not what is happening on these platforms. r/thedonald had millions of subscribers and not a single one was forced to listen. Then it was banned by reddit for thoughtcrime.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#34

Post by pshc »

Is this FUD from Bitcoin maximalists?

> That key is valid to sign any number of versions of, let’s say, block #200, and there is no objective, system-internal standard for which version is legitimate, other than “the one that was published first”.

The real block #200 will have hundreds of attestations courtesy of randomly-selected validators, each of those signatures attesting to its validity and finality.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#35

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#36

Post by xiphias2 »

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…

Renting out equipment for miners is dangerous, as an attack on the network can wipe out all their sunk costs. Bitcoin miner farms are very strongly incentivized to be aligned with the long term health of the system, so they try to play nice close to the ethos of Bitcoin (they learned enough from the blocksize wars that they can get burned if they go against Bitcoin)

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#37

Post by cube00 »

josephcsible wrote: post #6
jimbob45 wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

What about when it's the Reddit or GitHub admins who judge you to be guilty of thoughtcrime?

...or the Reddit CEO who goes into the backend to invisibly edit your posts.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170720143148/https://www.reddi...

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#38

Post by dagmx »

thesausageking wrote: post #25
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...

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?

But won't each of those take up significantly more energy once they use Bitcoin than today? I.e the costs will be additive , and crypto aims to replace fiat. So crypto would need to be more efficient at the same scale as fiat to make sense.

Also aren't each of those used by significantly more people than Bitcoin? So the per capita use is less and they scale better?

Also how are you estimating cost of porn? Viewing cost? Generation cost?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#40

Post by derefr »

thruway516 wrote: post #24
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…

'Policy changes' and hard forks have about as much to do with PoW as whether the Federal authorities should ban cryptocurrencies or not - they're outside the realm of consensus algorithms. In PoW there are no friends. If your blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your transactions on it are invalid and will be rejected by the rest of the network.

> If your blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your transactions on it are invalid

If your chain tip is on the dead side of a hard fork (i.e. if the majority of the network will predictably soon finish switching away from software which considers your chain tip valid, to software which considers your chain tip invalid), then nobody cares if your chain tip is the longest in the interrim, or how long you still hold out running the software that considers your chain tip valid. Your side of the fork no longer holds any economic value as a platform for transactions, so nobody will participate in it. You'll just be out there mining blocks all alone, blocks that say you earn all the virtual tokens, but where those tokens are worthless on your side of the fork.

It's a bit like how, in old pre *serv IRC networks, in cases of netsplits, you could end up on a partition of the network where you were the only one in a previously-moderated channel; and so you could effectively do whatever you wanted in that channel. But it didn't really matter, because nobody could hear you.

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