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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

#411

Post by DennisP »

inter_netuser wrote: post #275
delaaxe wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can look up how Ethereum's beacon chain implements slashing

Yep, isn't it great to get slashed for being DDoSed? Amazing breakthrough, realy. Now ddos blackmail can be actually measured in money. At least you could point to avalanche or something else that's better constructed. Eth is a dinosaur at this point, albeit with the fattest treasury.

If you go offline the penalties are very small. You can be offline a third of the time and break even. The real penalty happens if you send conflicting messages, and even that's not too severe unless a lot of other nodes do it at the same time.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#412

Post by prepend »

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…

> if Warren Buffet comes along and wants to spam our network, I guess he could, but that would destroy the network and destroy his value that he sunk into the network

Not if he’s undetected and does it for years while extracting value at key points in time.

There are numerous people who could put up $50B with the ability to get very high returns.

It’s not even worrying about Buffet. I worry about hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds that would definitely manipulate PoS if it earned enough for them.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#413

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

There's also an alternative:

3. cryptocurrencies stop the Austrian economics fetishism and index the coin reward to the mining difficulty. That means getting rid of the fixed coin supply.

That would stabilize the price of the token a lot (since price going up would increase the mining appeal, thus expanding the money supply, driving the price down) and also make it much more usable as a mean of payment (the number of token in circulation would grow in parallel with the growth in users).

Obviously it's not gonna happen, because those people have spent a decade convincing themselves that deflation is good and fixed money supply is the righteous way to manage a currency.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#414

Post by jaggirs »

rocqua wrote: post #291
dawnbreez wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But...if you no longer have value on the network, doesn't that mean you no longer have enough stake to control the network?

You can fork far in the past, before you cashed out. Any new entrants into the network will not be able to distinguish your fork from the real chain. You cannot be slashed for this in the real chain because you already cashed out your stake there. This 'long range attack' is different from a 50% attack because it doesn't affect nodes that were running before the attack happened. But a situation where new entrants int…

But why would a new entrant get the chain from a node that already exited, and why would this affect anyone other than the entrant itself? I assume the new entrant is itself liable if it copies the wrong chain, because other nodes will vote against it once it starts operating, so it will make an effort to get the correct chain (maybe by buying it from current nodes and ensuring they all provide the best chain). So maybe you would have some kind of cartel of running nodes that may or may not allow new nodes to enter, but I don't see a critical network-destroyig issue here.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#415

Post by DennisP »

xg15 wrote: post #93
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…

I think the difference is which kind of hash you needed. For PoW, you'd have to know the hash of the start of the chain (the "genesis block") in advance to verify you downloaded the correct chain. That's true, but this hash doesn't change during operation. You could get that hash from a history book if you will. For PoS, the hash is from the end of the chain and therefore constantly changing. This means the challenge…

Because of withdrawal delays, the PoS hash isn't from the end of the chain, but from a few months before. So it changes only about as often as client software updates.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#416

Post by drexlspivey »

akhosravian wrote: post #315
drexlspivey wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It’s actually the opposite since the block reward goes down over time

> It’s actually the opposite since the block reward goes down over time It is true that 10 years ago block rewards were almost 10x what they are today in terms of BTC, but by USD value new rewards are worth several orders of magnitude more today.

The block reward approaches zero so no matter what the price is in the future it will amount to zero at the end.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#417

Post by floatboth »

127 wrote: post #258
TheDong wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between each of those uses of electricity and PoW. PoW is throwing away electricity for the sake of it, and resists getting more efficient. If the goal is for the bitcoin network to cost $1M to do a single double spend, then PoW has to use $1M worth of electricity every 10 minutes. Let's say we live in a future where we suddenly have 10x as much electricity. Due to supply and demand, electricity…

Why do people keep propagating this claim that PoW is burning electricity for nothing? It directly provides security for the blockchain. I don't disagree with your arguments general direction, just with this piece of incorrect misinformation. LED was a technological innovation. Nothing says Bitcoin can't have those. If you want more light, you need more lamps and you need to spend more energy. I don't really see the…

Because "security of the blockchain" doesn't necessarily mean "good for society". Cryptocurrencies are most widely used for speculation, and then fraud, ransomware, all those very fun and pleasant things.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#418

Post by DennisP »

ricardolopes wrote: post #109
comex wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference in Proof of Stake is a lawsuit could force the distributor of the software to change the hash to one where coins weren’t stolen. And with proof of work a lawsuit could force the distributor to change the consensus rule so that a particular transaction is invalid - just as Ethereum did voluntarily with the original DAO. > You mention “POW forks”, but Bitcoin’s POW has never been hard forked Instead it…

Changing consensus rules requires coordinating a fork. This requires coordinating developers, miners and node operators. That may fly in pseudo decentralised chains where the community accepts whatever the leader says so, and even so, at high risk. In bitcoin, for instance, where there is no leader, this would never be a viable scenario. Soft forks don't force you to download and run new clients just to be able to us…

Changing a PoS checkpoint would also require coordinating a fork. Even if a dev team were forced to make the change, they couldn't make everyone go along with it.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#419

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

josephagoss wrote: post #319

Tezos is Proof of stake, decentralized and clearly has consensus, the three things the author argues cannot occur in a proof of stake system. I did not find this post convincing especially as many proof of stake systems have been running consistently for years now and with significant transaction and economic volume. As an example Tezos has decentralized apps such as liquidity pools, collateral based stablecoin syste…

> the three things the author argues cannot occur in a proof of stake system.

The author appears to be saying that "any decentralized consensus via proof of stake system is vulnerable to timing attacks"

The counter-argument that "This here proof of stake system has not been successfully attacked ... that we know of ... yet" does not seem to be watertight.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#420

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

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…

The assumption that a 10x increase in price results in a 10x increase in electricity usage is incorrect. There is some correlation but it is definitely not 1:1 as insinuated.
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