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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

#401

Post by [deleted] »

keymone wrote: post #353
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, exactly, do you think the purpose of computing a SHA prefix is? It's to perform distributed, decentralized leader election. The leader who wins has the privilege of proposing the next block. "If somebody does it faster" is the voting aspect--nodes vote on who they think did it faster, and it is quite possible that they disagree (which can only be resolved by another round of leader election, since the next lead…

> The leader who wins has the privilege of proposing the next block. No, the hash that you win with, deterministically points to the only possible block that you can “propose”. Your understanding is completely backwards. You seriously don’t know how bitcoin works.

[deleted]

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#402

Post by DennisP »

inter_netuser wrote: post #176
eftychis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Proof of Work is better because the haves buy equipment the have-nots can't buy to vote? Unless you have a citizenship based voting of some short where a single person gets a single vote and they actually vote (automatically I guess and assuming without delegating to the big whale because "I am bored") what do you think agreement via resource scarcity implies? P.S. Also lobbying...

This is a common misunderstanding. Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. PoW is a service to the network, to create an immutable ledger. It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change. It's just a boring industrial business, like smelting aluminum or iron.

And stakers in PoS do exactly the same thing. They don't have any more "votes" than miners do.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#403

Post by dan-robertson »

righttoolforjob wrote: post #381
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.

> mining needs the cheapest energy and renewable energy is generally the cheapest The cheapest energy is the cheapest. It has nothing directly to do with it being renewable.

Right. The point is that you get renewable energy which is desirable rather than non-renewable energy. If the latter were cheaper the situation would be less appealing.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#404

Post by satyrnein »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #278
Eelongate wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

This is effectively saying we just shouldn't have copyright.

Person A buys a movie and agrees to not distribute it, but goes ahead and does it anyway to Person B. Person B hosts it for everyone, and Persons C through Z get it and also host it. You're suggesting Person A is liable, but the cat's out of the bag and Persons B through Z can continue redistributing it forever because they never agreed to anything.

If this is the desired goal, you don't need copyright at all, you can already get Person A on violating Terms of Service or whatever.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#405

Post by PretzelPirate »

inter_netuser wrote: post #176
eftychis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Proof of Work is better because the haves buy equipment the have-nots can't buy to vote? Unless you have a citizenship based voting of some short where a single person gets a single vote and they actually vote (automatically I guess and assuming without delegating to the big whale because "I am bored") what do you think agreement via resource scarcity implies? P.S. Also lobbying...

This is a common misunderstanding. Proof of Work does not get you any votes at all. PoW is a service to the network, to create an immutable ledger. It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change. It's just a boring industrial business, like smelting aluminum or iron.

> It comes with a very real nuclear option that will bankrupt miners if you misbehave and get fired by hashing algo change.

Changing the hashing algo isn’t a realistic punishment for targeting misbehaving miners.

You end up with two choices:

1. Change to an algorithm that uses gpu/cpu instead of ASICs (and is ASIC-resistant), but then your algo runs on general-purpose computing and you can’t fork miners off ever again.

2. Move to another algo that benefits from ASICs. This has the extra overhead that you need to spin up manufacturing and distribution of these ASCIs to honest miners, which takes quite a long time to do and while you’re waiting, your network is being attacked.

In either case, you aren’t just punishing a misbehaving miner, you’re punishing *all* miners who now all need to get funding to buy and rack new hardware. You’re making a big assumption that the misbehaving miner won’t be able to get financing or sufficient capital while the honest ones will. If the dishonest miner’s attack was profitable while waiting for the fork, they get to keep all of that money and can spend it on new hardware.

In PoS, the attacker will lose their stake, meaning they lose the money they had before, and earned as a result of, the attack. It may be much more difficult for that validator to get access to capital and lenders will be hesitant to lend to an entity that now has a history of burning capital.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#406

Post by ComodoHacker »

perlgeek wrote: post #279

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 dif…

> have a strictly monotonic sequence number

Then you lose decentralized property.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#407

Post by meribold »

perlgeek wrote: post #279

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 dif…

I think another top-level comment (by csomar) answers your question:

> you can sign a transaction later and have a lower timestamp, there is nothing that prevents you from that.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#408

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

anonporridge wrote: post #63
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…

You really don't need to trust a "friend" while bootstrapping into the network with PoW, because the proof of work is irrevocably embedded within the blockchain, and the real world cost of creating those blocks can be pretty easily estimated. So long as you have a general idea of how much hash power is being used currently for the network, or even just how efficient ASIC computing is in general at your point in histo…

If Bitcoin cash had more mining power than Bitcoin would it be called Bitcoin instead?

What if Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash had the exact same amount of hashing? Which is the true Bitcoin and why?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#409

Post by floatboth »

c0742e9366 wrote: post #245
evil-olive wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> proves that, given a certain input, you spent a certain amount of time so, proof of work?

If you go by the usual, energy-wasting meaning of "proof of work" that is also the one relevant to the discussion (i.e., Bitcoin-style PoW which is described in the article), then no.

so, it is proof of work, it's just not "a proof-of-work lottery"

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#410

Post by MarkPNeyer »

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…

All of this makes sense if you assume people won’t build new power plants for bitcoin. But they already are. They are renewable plants because these are now much cheaper. Bitcoin acts as a subsidy for the construction of new green power plants.
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