371–380 of 414 posts
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If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value. It is your greed that is guiding you, not your benevolence.
Google short selling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value. It is your greed that is guiding you, not your benevolence.
Google short selling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proof of work is the only way to get acceptable security properties for a monetary system. Proof of stake suffers from the "nothing at stake" problem, leading to grinding attacks etc.
Slashing fixes the "nothing at stake" problem, and the RANDAO fixes the stake grinding attack. Both of those were open questions in 2015, but they are solved problems now.
Once again, this seems to be the case. I can see at least one trivial attack against RANDAO, as is often the case with many-party interactive RNG: you just have to be willing to lose your pledge.
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This problem is overstated IMO. Choosing the one with the most validators is closely analogous to choosing the chain with the most work i.e. the one with the most hash power. And with algorithmic difficulty adjustment in PoW, you don't pick the chain with the headers with the most 0s preceding, you pick the longest chain. A longer chain with a sudden difficulty adjustment is an obvious invalid chain, but I digress Th…
I’m not sure about Ethereum PoW, but in Bitcoin you absolutely pick the chain with the most work not the longest chain that’s a consensus rule. This is how bitcoin/PoW avoids weak subjectivity, the problem described by the parent comment.
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This is what I was trying to get to with "inherently." The information ITSELF that is yielded by the process is 100% arbitrary and not valuable, i.e. relays no additional useful information about the world (e.g. the boiling point of some new liquid or something), like many would think of when we think of people doing math to solve things.
I totally understood that you tried to define valuable in such a way to exclude cryptocurrency mining, as you can see below however it's not easy to create a definition like that. It also begs the question why that arbitrary definition of valuable is more correct than another arbitrary definition that excludes something else instead... > valuable, i.e. relays no additional useful information about the world (e.g. the…
The theoretical mathematician definition isn't very good either because I think enough people get that the novelty has some kind of inherent value that doing something repetitive like the above does not?
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Slashing fixes the "nothing at stake" problem, and the RANDAO fixes the stake grinding attack. Both of those were open questions in 2015, but they are solved problems now.
PoS people always add more epicycles and claim it solves the problem. On closer inspection, it never has. At this point, I'm tired of wasting my time by humoring them. Once again, this seems to be the case. I can see at least one trivial attack against RANDAO, as is often the case with many-party interactive RNG: you just have to be willing to lose your pledge.
What is the trivial attack, and why does it involve losing your pledge? To the best of my knowledge none of Ethereum's slashing conditions involve the RANDAO, so you've piqued my interest.
Unless by "losing pledge", you mean extra-protocol slashing by social consensus?
You would be doing me a big favor by explaining the vulnerability in this system that I generally consider to be secure.
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You really believe that the USD, as the world's reserve currency, doesn't require its military to keep it that way.
Yes, I do, actually. The US economy is the world's largest economy in gross value, is the largest or one of the largest trade partners of much of the world, and has very limited policies on capital control or other monetary restrictions. This means that there is going to be more depth on trading pairs via USD and even small currencies than you would likely have with other countries, you would have very little counter…
Because it's the final backstop that compels people to pay taxes, and taxes are essential to that role.
If you refuse to pay taxes, they send a policeman to arrest you. If you evade the policeman's arrest, they send more policemen. If you somehow evade all the policemen, they send the military.
If the US had no armed federal agents, then people wouldn't pay taxes and the government would shrivel up and die, because governments can't survive on zero revenue.
In this way, the US dollar's value is reliant on the threat of physical force - or in a broad sense, a military.
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I still don't understand how consensus works off the chain. If 51% of the stackers just decide to run their own software and do their own thing. How does something off chain change that? How does something off chain penalize a majority of staked ETH?
If the 51% is a single staker or small group of colluding stakers attacking the chain, the rest of the users will probably not want to continue using that chain. The users can activate a soft fork, just by changing the rules of the code to burn the attacker’s funds, and running the updated client software. The remaining honest stakers can then continue to follow the head of the non-attacked chain, and the attacker wo…
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It's worse than that, they're aren't solving anything at all. They're taking part in a lottery, in which participants have to guess a number, and the winner gets to update the ledger. Nobody is solving complex mathematical problems.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value. It is your greed that is guiding you, not your benevolence.
Google short selling.
If you own a security you are long, not short.