461–465 of 465 posts
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There are also big risks to fiat money, such having the entire economic output of your civilization be grossly distorted by central banks.
Until the cryptocurrency community sorts out their Tether problem, they should probably lay off the "but central banks print money" talking point...
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All block chains in practice require trusting central authorities (trust the code, trust the protocol, trust the math behind it, trust the hardware, trust people to honor their off-chain transactions, trust authorities to help when they don't etc.) so this whole fantasy about 'trustless systems' is meaningless anyway. You can't create trustless electronic systems for humans. There is simply too much complexity in eve…
This is blatantly false. Bitcoin doesn't require anything at all besides the idea of a most work chain humanity produced. You just pick it and that's it. You cant pick wrong, there is no chain bigger. All other cryptos are a fantasy and cannot provide any comparable guarantees.
It happened multiple times that a longer change was discoed shortly after. So in reality you have to wait some blocks to reduce the risk of a longer chain to almost zero.
Also the trust you missed is that you have to TRUST that at least 50% of the work is produces and controlled (pool owner) by honest humans, because if not they could collude and re-org/double-spend. which essentially means you will pick the wrong chain because they make you think its the longest while secretly mining a longer chain that will eventually repalce the once you picked. There is absolutely no way you would know before its to late so you blindly trust that from an unknown number of people the majority is honest.
If you take mining pools into account you trust a hand full of people who control them.
>All other cryptos are a fantasy and cannot provide any comparable guarantees.
Obvious nonsense, other tech has defined finality. Not pick the longest and if a longer shows up later you switch. These systems provide MORE guarantees.
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>One way to sidestep this: every few minutes, post the longest hash to some distributed medium that can't be edited, like Twitter. Then the threat model moves to "do we trust the person with the keys to this twitter account?" The XRPL does this by broadcasting. Every node tells everyone what they think is right, therefore everyone can see who lies and more importantly no one can see who you listen too. Its hard to tr…
> All decentral systems trust that the majority of something does "the right thing". There's a difference between assuming a majority of relevant nodes are honest and relying on your ability to identify that majority.
Identifying the majority is however optional. BTC for example does not. You pick the longest chain you can find at a given time. You assume the majority saw the same as the longest. If a longer shows up you switch and again you assume the majority saw that too and switched swell.
Other systems like the XRPL dont assume, every node defines from whom they want a majority. If 99% of them made a Tx final then there is no way that at a later point in time this final state can be changed because 1% can not ever reach a majority. The only thing that could happen is that the network forks and different parts of the network reach majority on different states. This problem is solved by raising the majority needed to 80% rather than >50% and on top of that is is further reduced by intentionally overlapping the nodes who are defined by each node. Essentially you need many nodes who listen to each other both ways. So I choose your node to be part of my nodes that must reach majority and you list my node. If you have 10 nodes all listen to the other 9 and require that form the other 9 80% agree then there is no way the network can ever fork. No 2 different states could ever reach 80%, its just not possible.
Now these 10 nodes are publicly known so if you operate a node you have to pick from these nodes the one you want but you must make sure that your node can not reach a majority without them. So you could pick all 10 and then add for example 5 others. Your node can hen also not fork because the 5 alone can never reach an 80% majority. and so on and on. every new node must have ~80% overlap to prevent forking. And all of that is super simple because the nodes are public and use public key encryption to identify themself.
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You mean like hacking a few mining pools like 4 and then performer 51% attack at near zero cost. Sounds silly but you get the point. The hacking argument is just not realistic. And it gets less and less relisting to more nodes there are. (and more realistic the fewer mining pools are needed for a 51% attack) BTW if you would have full control over any 4 XRPL validator nodes at your choice you could do absolutely noth…
The solution I posted isn’t based on consensus, like Bitcoin even 1 node with a stronger history should win. Validator nodes aren’t the weak points. It’s as you say the mining pools themselves, internally they need to be coordinated and have access to the Bitcoin network so they can’t be air gapped. So while all major pools have solid network security as they’re major targets, it’s still an actual risk.
The perfect exist scam if you want. If china for example would actually put an ultimatum on chines miners to shut down. It could potentially make perfect financial sense to leave with a big boom and make as much money as possible before closing.
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> All decentral systems trust that the majority of something does "the right thing". There's a difference between assuming a majority of relevant nodes are honest and relying on your ability to identify that majority.
Yes, one thing is unavoidable, you have to assume that the majority is honest else the system simply can not work. Identifying the majority is however optional. BTC for example does not. You pick the longest chain you can find at a given time. You assume the majority saw the same as the longest. If a longer shows up you switch and again you assume the majority saw that too and switched swell. Other systems like the X…
That's the main thing that Bitcoin solved, how to resolve this exact situation. You can't just ignore this problem and claim to have a similarly resilient design.
> This problem is solved by raising the majority needed to 80% rather than >50% and on top of that is is further reduced by intentionally overlapping the nodes who are defined by each node.
The first part just makes it slightly more expensive to do a sybil attack. The second part relies on someone deciding what the overlapping nodes are, now you have to trust them.
> If you have 10 nodes all listen to the other 9 and require that form the other 9 80% agree then there is no way the network can ever fork.
And now you have a network that can't grow beyond 10 nodes, and if more than 10 show up you need to somehow choose the ones that are honest. Or someone needs to decide which nodes get to be the "special 10".
> Now these 10 nodes are publicly known
And chosen by whom? Can you trust the entity that chooses them? Can you trust them not to be hacked and share malicious nodes instead?