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

Post by KirinDave » Thu, May 24, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #20

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…

These days you can just auction the coins in an ICO.

Post by brian_cloutier » Thu, May 24, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #49

brian_cloutier wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.