Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus • Hacker News Board

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#391

Post by keymone » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

lottin wrote: post #364

keymone wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have zero clue how bitcoin works. No, there is no voting and there is no leader election. Miners construct blocks with transactions and if they manage to find a signature - that block is appended to the chain. If somebody does it faster - they append their block. Please at least get the basics before you start arguing with people.

> No, there is no voting and there is no leader election. Every 10 minutes a miner wins the right to append a block to the chain, by guessing a secret number. The chances of winning are proportional to the amount of money each miner has expended in the process of guessing the secret number. This is equivalent to holding a vote every 10 minutes in order to choose who gets to append the transaction block. Therefore, yo…

Obviously I can’t change your decision to use this terminology, but ponder this: when the leader is elected every 10 minutes, do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain? No they don’t. So was it election of the leader or election of the block? And if it was an election, wouldn’t the result always be the same with largest miner always winning because they have most votes?

As I said in a sibling thread, it’s like arguing the earth is flat by proposing a very special metric of space. Feel free of course, I just don’t accept it.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#392

Post by floatboth » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

inter_netuser wrote: post #273

Dylan16807 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> nobody is going to gamble serious money on the robustness of such new constructions

Thounsands of buttcoiners would gamble their entire life savings on shitcoin, pisscoin, asscoin, PonziCoin, whatever. When there's enough of them, it gets big enough so institutional investors start gambling on that too. It really doesn't seem like "serious money" is spending anything on actual technological research, the management of big money is also often done by idiots who follow any kind of hype.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#393

Post by DonHopkins » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #368

tommek4077 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you would take a job paying a cent per day, because your time is free?

We are talking about computer time here. It's cheap to spin up 1000 tiny aws instances.

As long as they're somebody else's instances, and you're a criminal who broke into their account.

And that still destroys the environment and enriches Jeff Bezos.

Forget stealing data — these hackers hijacked Amazon cloud accounts to mine bitcoin:

https://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-broke-into-amazon-cl...

>A report from the security intelligence group RedLock found at least two companies which had their AWS cloud services compromised by hackers who wanted nothing more than to use the computer power to mine the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The hackers ultimately got access to Amazon's cloud servers after discovering that their administration consoles weren't password protected.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#394

Post by dan-robertson » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #385

dan-robertson wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A positive side effect of your (1.) scenario is that it results in a surplus of renewable energy (mining needs the cheapest energy and renewable energy is generally the cheapest). Having a surplus of cheap green energy is probably good for the economy, though a lot more than 1% would probably be needed to see significant benefits.

A positive side effect of hitting your hand with a hammer is a surplus of morphine your doctor prescribes to make you stop feeling it, and a surplus of lithium your psychiatrist prescribes to make you stop doing it. And no, renewable energy isn't generally the cheapest, coal is. (Until you factor in the health care and funeral service costs.) Bitcoin is just China's way of exporting coal through the atmosphere.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

It may be the case that coal is cheaper if you ignore the capital cost of the plant (e.g. running an old plant beyond its design life) but including capital costs amortised over the lifetime of the plant coal is not even cheaper than natural gas.

My understanding is that a major source of electricity used for bitcoin mining in China was hydro power during the wet season (when there is a natural power surplus because the level in the dam must be reduced)

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#395

Post by dan-robertson » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #384

dan-robertson wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A positive side effect of your (1.) scenario is that it results in a surplus of renewable energy (mining needs the cheapest energy and renewable energy is generally the cheapest). Having a surplus of cheap green energy is probably good for the economy, though a lot more than 1% would probably be needed to see significant benefits.

How does adding demand for something create a surplus of it? I think you have that backwards.

Scenario 1 involves a crash where mining is no longer being done. So there is a drop in demand.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#396

Post by zionic » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

inter_netuser wrote: post #146

brianolson wrote: post #133

(my day job is developer on Proof-of-Stake Algorand block chain, I'm a developer, this may not be polished official PR) Article's theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up. Let's say I start a new node and verify history since the beginning. Somewhere along the line I'm connected to a malicious node which hands me a fictionalized block. It would need to have been signed by not just one but about 30-45 account…

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…

> You want the multibillionaires to dictate the properties of the medium of exchange that serves the entire globe?

Somebody tell him about the r-family.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#397

Post by lottin » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

inter_netuser wrote: post #365

lottin wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nodes have zero decision power, as far as I understand. They just go with the chain that is the most expensive to produce.

That’s incorrect. The proposed block must comply with the rules your node enforced, or it will not be accepted. It’s not just work, but also the entire consensus-set they must abide by. Miners cannot force new rules, if there is no consensus.

No, you're misunderstanding everything. The consensus mechanism is about agreeing about the contents of the blockchain, not about the rules that make up the bitcoin protocol.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#398

Post by DennisP » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #366

drclau wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is already approaching 1% of global electricity consumption, if it hasn't passed that point already And this is the reason why I cannot take any climate change conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of cryptocurrencies. Whatever the promises of cryptocurrencies were, now most (all?) degenerated into a mechanism for speculation, and effectively into a self-sustaining and self-promoting mechanism…

> And this is the reason why I cannot take any climate change conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin's electricity use (or the electricity use of any other single application) is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to addressing climate change. Proof: • Too much of what we does depends on electricity and has no even remotely feasible substitutes for it to be plausible to giv…

That would be a fine argument if we weren't in a race to switch to new sources of electricity before triggering catastrophic damage, and losing.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#399

Post by michaelsbradley » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

yanmaani wrote: post #118

darcys22 wrote: post #103

He 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…

> When you withdraw you are no longer allowed to sign anything. Allowed to by whom? Who's to punish me if I disobey them?

https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/phase...

After withdrawal is completed, your node would no longer be in the set of active validators and from that time could not validly propose a block or submit an attestation (or, more accurately, be selected as a block proposer, etc.)

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#400

Post by pabl0rg » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

tommek4077 wrote: post #287

wcoenen wrote: post #268

Whether PoS will work, I don't know. But the author didn't realize that PoW is certainly doomed. PoW miners tend to spend more and more resources on finding blocks, until the cost approaches the rewards. But the rewards go up as the cryptocurrency becomes more popular, because the price and transaction fees go up. Therefore, a PoW cryptocurrency tends to "eat the world" as it becomes bigger. That's why Bitcoin is alr…

It is not about spent electricity bills, it is about spent time. This is the problem that needs to be solved, how can you make the work more time consuming without beeing able to go around this with computing here: electric power.

That’s the idea in Proof of time and space used by chia.net

You probably haven’t heard of this coin/network (invented by the inventor of bittorrent) b/c it doesn’t aim to be a speculative asset, but it does have a very sane programming model (in lisp)