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Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

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Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#41

Post by api »

KirinDave wrote: post #37
woah wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is PoW really a “clean distribution mechanism”? Economically, it’s like proof of stake, but all stake is divided up among the small set of people who have the electrical connections and equipment to mine profitably.

This statement is not always true. May deployed PoW implementations are provably worse than most modern proposals for Proof of Stake. PoW mining opens selfish mining strategies, whereas Proof of Stake fixes the set of actors opens to scrutiny the mechanism for "who gets to mine the next block." This doesn't mean that proof-of-stake is magical, but it's certainly less prone to issues than Proof of Work. It's also less…

I have two issues with PoS that I've never seen addressed?

(1) Isn't it Plutocratic? PoW can be too in that capital and energy costs money, but PoS seems to directly reward the largest stakeholders with more stake.

(2) Removing money from circulation is not free. It reduces monetary velocity and has other detrimental effects on the currency's economic system.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#43

Post by j0hnM1st »

apo wrote: post #12

Initial reactions: 1. Sybil-resistance (faking strong consensus by deploying cheap replica nodes you control) in a protocol like this is crucial. All I could find is this: To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts. 2. Every non-proof-of-work protocol I've seen, including Ripple Consensus Process an…

>To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts.

Isn't this already implemented by STEEM ?

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#44

Post by api »

paulsutter wrote: post #21
api wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is proof of space actually "greener" than proof of work? Memory and hard drives consume power, and querying them consumes power. Seems like it could be just another kind of work. It would be more ASIC resistant though.

yes. vastly.

I'm curious about this. Are you saying that relying on storage latency and volume is energetically cheaper than relying on compute?

I see a few flaws in this. First of all: all fast storage media consume energy even when idle. Secondly I think this neglects the embodied energy (energy to manufacture) of storage media. Lastly if a proof of storage mining scheme became popular you'd probably see ASICs that incorporate onboard fast memory controllers with huge caches and other approaches that would improve performance to the point that this would just become another proof of work.

Comparing full life cycle energy of different approaches to securing a cryptocurrency is actually pretty tough. It's also pretty hard to compare it to the energy requirements of more conventional approaches to currency since the energy cost of those is so spread out across society.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#45

Post by DennisP »

apo wrote: post #12

Initial reactions: 1. Sybil-resistance (faking strong consensus by deploying cheap replica nodes you control) in a protocol like this is crucial. All I could find is this: To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts. 2. Every non-proof-of-work protocol I've seen, including Ripple Consensus Process an…

Why do you think that's an inadequate Sybil defense? It clearly prevents someone with x% percent of coins from getting more than x% of the selection by making more accounts.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#46

Post by DennisP »

api wrote: post #16
paulsutter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chia is bitcoin but with farming (storage) instead of mining (compute), plus a whole host of cleanups to do it right. So no DAG or any such thing. One could read "Beyond Hellman's Time-Memory Trade-Offs with Applications to Proofs of Space" https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf

Is proof of space actually "greener" than proof of work? Memory and hard drives consume power, and querying them consumes power. Seems like it could be just another kind of work. It would be more ASIC resistant though.

It can be greener if there's a higher ratio of hardware cost to energy consumption (including the energy consumed to produce the hardware).

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#47

Post by brian_cloutier »

KirinDave wrote: post #37
woah wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is PoW really a “clean distribution mechanism”? Economically, it’s like proof of stake, but all stake is divided up among the small set of people who have the electrical connections and equipment to mine profitably.

This statement is not always true. May deployed PoW implementations are provably worse than most modern proposals for Proof of Stake. PoW mining opens selfish mining strategies, whereas Proof of Stake fixes the set of actors opens to scrutiny the mechanism for "who gets to mine the next block." This doesn't mean that proof-of-stake is magical, but it's certainly less prone to issues than Proof of Work. It's also less…

> PoW mining opens selfish mining strategies

This isn't really true. It's true of Bitcoin but selfish mining is an artifact of Bitcoin's sloppy way of estimating how much work is being done, not an artifact of PoW. An enhancement like Bobtail [1] eliminates the incentive to selfishly mine by improving the network's ability to estimate the network hash strength.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.08750

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#48

Post by ancapalex »

j0hnM1st wrote: post #43
apo wrote: post #12

Initial reactions: 1. Sybil-resistance (faking strong consensus by deploying cheap replica nodes you control) in a protocol like this is crucial. All I could find is this: To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts. 2. Every non-proof-of-work protocol I've seen, including Ripple Consensus Process an…

>To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts. Isn't this already implemented by STEEM ?

That line in the paper is actually describing Algorand in the "related works" section. Full quote:

"Algorand [26] uses a verifiable random function to select a committee of nodes that participate in a novel Byzantine consensus protocol. It achieves over 360 tps with 50 second latency on an emulated network of 2000 committee nodes (500K users in total) distributed among 20 cities. To prevent Sybil attacks, it uses a mechanism like proof-of-stake that assigns weights to participants in committee selection based on the money in their accounts."

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#49

Post by KirinDave »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #47
KirinDave wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This statement is not always true. May deployed PoW implementations are provably worse than most modern proposals for Proof of Stake. PoW mining opens selfish mining strategies, whereas Proof of Stake fixes the set of actors opens to scrutiny the mechanism for "who gets to mine the next block." This doesn't mean that proof-of-stake is magical, but it's certainly less prone to issues than Proof of Work. It's also less…

> PoW mining opens selfish mining strategies This isn't really true. It's true of Bitcoin but selfish mining is an artifact of Bitcoin's sloppy way of estimating how much work is being done, not an artifact of PoW. An enhancement like Bobtail [1] eliminates the incentive to selfishly mine by improving the network's ability to estimate the network hash strength. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.08750

I've read it, but my concern with this approach is it actually slows bitcoin down substantally. Bitcoin already can't scale, and moving transactions off-chain to Lightning doesn't really address this concern. What's more, the slower the basis blockchain gets, the more prone Lightning networks are to malicious actors.

Re: Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Crypto

#50

Post by KirinDave »

api wrote: post #41
KirinDave wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This statement is not always true. May deployed PoW implementations are provably worse than most modern proposals for Proof of Stake. PoW mining opens selfish mining strategies, whereas Proof of Stake fixes the set of actors opens to scrutiny the mechanism for "who gets to mine the next block." This doesn't mean that proof-of-stake is magical, but it's certainly less prone to issues than Proof of Work. It's also less…

I have two issues with PoS that I've never seen addressed? (1) Isn't it Plutocratic? PoW can be too in that capital and energy costs money, but PoS seems to directly reward the largest stakeholders with more stake. (2) Removing money from circulation is not free. It reduces monetary velocity and has other detrimental effects on the currency's economic system.

1. That's a process question. It's quite possible to rotate stakeholders, audit stakeholders, and challenge stakeholders.

2. If a network can hold back some currency, but actually scale to meet global transactional demand, it'll be better in this regard anyways.

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