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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

#51

Post by duped »

rank0 wrote: post #46
pmorici wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Decentralization” has been the argument ideologues have fallen back on time and again in crypto. It’s never well defined and typically used to oppose policies that would promote low transaction fees or increased transaction throughput. It’s why things like Solana which is focused on massive scale and low fees have found a foothold. Ethereum is repeating the mistakes of Bitcoin

It’s because if you’re not decentralized, then you don’t need a blockchain.

The gold standard was decentralized. Over a century of monetary policy has shown that decentralization isn't aligned with political or economic goals.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#52

Post by sudosysgen »

thesausageking wrote: post #25
CraftingLinks wrote: post #19

Can't wait for the day all PoW mining activities are declared illegal. To be honest, I don't understand why it hasn't been banned already. Sweden has recently called for a EU wide ban because it identified PoW mining as a threat to transition their economy to renewable energy. https://www.fi.se/en/published/presentations/2021/crypto-ass...

Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?

What is your source according to which Christmas lights and porn use more energy than bitcoin? I fear you may seriously underestimate the energy usage of bitcoin.

Even clothes dryer seem to be using less energy than Bitcoin. If you run the dryer for an hour each week, you're at 12-15kWh per month, which is 1-2% of your average household energy usage in the US, Canada or the EU. Now households at most around a third of the electricity in cold countries with a decent amount of electric heating for which dryers are much less, but let's run with it. That still sets the upper bound to 0.6%, which incidentally is the same as bitcoin.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#53

Post by everfree »

crazypython wrote: post #12
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…

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. As most developers are not pseudonymous, this poses a threat to the honesty of the system. You mention “POW forks”, but Bitcoin’s POW has never been hard forked: you’d need to trust a Bitcoin expert to tell you if it was a good idea.

> 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.

In Proof of Work, a lawsuit could force the distributor of the software to hard-code a transaction that reverses the coin theft. But in both the PoS case and the PoW case, anyone using that client would be partitioned off from the honest network majority.

> You mention “POW forks”, but Bitcoin’s POW has never been hard forked: you’d need to trust a Bitcoin expert to tell you if it was a good idea.

Bitcoin's PoW forked in 2013, when a database upgrade to the software made it incompatible between two recent versions. The Bitcoin developers had to jump in and tell people which PoW fork to follow and which one to abandon.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#54

Post by [deleted] »

TTPrograms wrote: post #22

Why do unsophisticated, redundant, vitriolic takes like this get upvoted on HN so much? Is there some common ax to grind here? The strongest point here is the strawman presentation of the altered security model that PoS can be proven to form consensus under. Reading the source he cites is far more informative: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov... The majority of the article frames distribut…

[deleted]

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#56

Post by comex »

crazypython wrote: post #12
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…

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. As most developers are not pseudonymous, this poses a threat to the honesty of the system. You mention “POW forks”, but Bitcoin’s POW has never been hard forked: you’d need to trust a Bitcoin expert to tell you if it was a good idea.

> 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’s been soft forked, which turns the consensus rules into a popularity contest. If a soft fork produces two competing branches of the blockchain, old clients will go with whichever branch has more mining power. Which means you open yourself up to interesting attacks like convincing 51% to literally steal the funds of the other 49% (which is much worse than a mere double spend). Or, more realistically, in the case of a contentious soft fork that ends up roughly fifty-fifty, you could ‘just’ end up on a different side of the fork from the people you want to transact with. Either way, soft forks don’t make the downsides of policy changes go away.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#57

Post by ricardolopes »

pshc wrote: post #34

Is this FUD from Bitcoin maximalists? > That key is valid to sign any number of versions of, let’s say, block #200, and there is no objective, system-internal standard for which version is legitimate, other than “the one that was published first”. The real block #200 will have hundreds of attestations courtesy of randomly-selected validators, each of those signatures attesting to its validity and finality.

The block 200 will be adding validation to the previous blocks, and will be validated by the future ones. Without other types of checks, nothing stops you from rewriting the previous 199 blocks and using block 200 to validate them.

This is not FUD, it's the most obvious PoS flaw, called long range attack, and the reason PoS chains often need more checks to be more trustworthy (e.g. keeping hardcoded checkpoints, choosing the first received block as valid, introducing penalties and so on).

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#59

Post by thruway516 »

derefr wrote: post #40
thruway516 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Policy changes' and hard forks have about as much to do with PoW as whether the Federal authorities should ban cryptocurrencies or not - they're outside the realm of consensus algorithms. In PoW there are no friends. If your blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your transactions on it are invalid and will be rejected by the rest of the network.

> If your blockchain is incorrect (i.e not the longest) your transactions on it are invalid If your chain tip is on the dead side of a hard fork (i.e. if the majority of the network will predictably soon finish switching away from software which considers your chain tip valid, to software which considers your chain tip invalid), then nobody cares if your chain tip is the longest in the interrim, or how long you still…

Um, yes. I should have phrased that as 'your transactions based on it are invalid in the network'. You just described consensus working correctly, but like I said hard-forks and policy changes are outside the scope of PoW, so saying PoW does not handle hard-forks is not really a valid criticism of PoW.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#60

Post by comex »

ricardolopes wrote: post #49
Laforet wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the threat of long range attacks in PoS any worse than PoW in practice? Bitcoin for example still relies on a list of hardcoded nodes for bootstrapping clients. Not to mention very few people actually bother to verify the full chain (360GB and counting) from genesis. As for auditing the the integrity of the code or binary, it is signed by GPG keys hosted on public key servers accessed using X509 certificates pinne…

The Bitcoin Core client includes a hardcoded list of DNS servers that point to thousands of nodes. These lists get updated frequently by different people. Other clients may use other lists. What is the threat model you're suggesting here, exactly? Do you know any other way to bootstrap a peer to peer network without centralised authorities? All network participants are forced to verify the full chain from genesis. So…

> Do you know any other way to bootstrap a peer to peer network without centralised authorities?

I’m not the parent, but – no, I don’t. But that’s exactly the point. The need to bootstrap from centralized authorities is what’s supposedly so bad about weak subjectivity in proof-of-stake. Yet in practice, it’s needed with proof-of-work as well.

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