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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

#431

Post by thinkloop »

littlestymaar wrote: post #413
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…

The difficulty is where the security comes from. Bitcoin's goal is to have the highest possible prices and difficulty so that nation-states and alien civilizations can't hack it. It's very easy to have a cheap low-difficulty coin. Equally worthless too. You need to understand that proof-of-work is actually proof-of-waste - the waste, the difficulty, the cost, is the security.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#432

Post by lottin »

keymone wrote: post #391
lottin wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain? No they don’t.

Of course, they have a choice. If didn't, miners would serve no purpose. We would just have one block and that would be the block that would be appended. The consensus would be achieved automatically, without any need of guessing secret numbers.

> And if it was an election, wouldn’t the result always be the same with largest miner always winning because they have most votes?

No, because the miner is elected at random. The crucial point to understand is that their chances of getting elected are proportional to the money they spent. That doesn't mean the largest miner will get elected 100% of the time.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#433

Post by throwaway6734 »

xwolfi wrote: post #337
snet0 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't take a discussion of climate change seriously unless it specifically addresses a single-percentage problem?

He probably speculates, like the degenerate speculators, that it won't end up there. Why push around everyone to consume differently while distributing vast amount of tax money that immediately go into more wasteful crypto ? It will not stay at 1% and I agree with the OP that it's going to be difficulty to reduce electricity wastage on one end while ignore the elephant baby in the crib taking over the room. I'm a ran…

>I'm going to eventually be forced into using their tokens at whatever cost when it becomes legal tender,

I'm assuming the large nation states would attack these tokens before allowing this to happen and I don't think any token ecosystem could withstand a strong nation state attack

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#434

Post by seoaeu »

suikadayo wrote: post #67
sp332 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, how many times has it been delayed? Clearly it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

What’s delayed? Beacon chain has been running on mainnet since last December-ish. http://beaconcha.in

They’ve been saying Etherium will switch to proof of stake “soon” since like 2017!

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#435

Post by xorcist »

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…

This explanation does not make sense to me, which is probably due to my lack of understanding, but perhaps you can expand on this:

> about 30-45 accounts _which had stake at that time

The this is stated makes it sound difficult. But if this is false history presented by a malicious node, surely they could make up anything, as it the data does not need to line up with any official history at any point. (Without a trusted party, no history line is really offical anyway, is't it?). Constructing a history with 30 accounts with stake at any given point in time isn't any harder or easier than constructing 3 or 3000.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#436

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

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…

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…”

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#437

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

amelius wrote: post #386
mission_failed wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smelting metals actually produces something, proof of work just burns electricity for the random chance of winning a lottery

Perhaps we should insert humans in the loop, to verify whether useful work was performed. Or some AI because humans are prone to bribery to some extent. Or we could make it democratic. "Jeff Bezos asserts that he provided useful work for society and that he therefore deserves $1B this year. Please cast your votes".

PoB: Proof of Bullshit

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#438

Post by dan-robertson »

righttoolforjob wrote: post #426
dan-robertson wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it was cheaper there would be no need for bitcoin as a driver (and then also to completely waste it, in the broken window fallacy sense).

I feel like we’re talking past each other. I’m not saying we should want bitcoin wasting a bunch of power. I’m saying there could be positive outcomes to that power suddenly becoming available.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#439

Post by xg15 »

mlyle wrote: post #186
neuroma wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why fork at low difficulty?

You need to fork at low difficulty if you want to significantly lengthen the chain from that point, because creating a high difficulty, long chain that is valid is hard. But-- there's nothing to preclude you making big steps up in difficulty at the end of the chain. It means that one evaluating the length of the chain for authenticity really needs to integrate the difficulty over the entire chain and not just look at…

I was wondering about that bit actually.

Suppose I'm a new node and want to verify the blockchain. How do I verify that each block was mined with the correct difficulty?

I'd need some record about the actual real-world timestamps for each block. Then I could say something like "duration between block x and block x+1 was > 10 min, so the down-adjustment in block x+5 is justified".

But if those timestamps were stored on-chain, an attacker could simply lie about them and keep difficulty artificially low on its alternative chain.

On the other hand, if we had some un-forgeable record of block timestamps, wouldn't this solve the double-spend problem all on its own? Would we even need PoW at this point?

Edit:

Ok, sibling comment seems to suggest bitcoin has solved this problem differently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29368166

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#440

Post by lottin »

seoaeu wrote: post #389
lottin wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS. Maybe I'm missing something... if miners are required to send the tokens to an invalid address, are these tokens not lost irrevocably?

What stops miners from sending their tokens somewhere, then hard forking from a previous block where they didn’t send them? This has a clear answer in PoW, but not in your scheme

Easy, you put the transaction in the previous block. So the miner can only mine a block if they have already made the expenditure.
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