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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

#571

Post by tromp »

aqme28 wrote: post #360
tromp wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW at least provides a decent and somewhat fair coin distribution mechanism. With PoS, the coin creators can assign themselves an arbitrary fraction of the coins, concentrating the wealth. Even if there is a public record of all the funds raised in a public sale and all expenditures made (which is rarely the case), it's possible for the creators to participate in the public sale and recover large parts of funds used…

I think this is organizational more than technological. There are plenty of PoW coins with unfair or absurd distributions, and plenty of PoS coins with somewhat equitable distributions.

Yes, PoW coin emission curves often leave something to be desired, tending to emit too much in the first few years, which leads to some wealth concentration as well.

In my opinion a fixed block subsidy would be most equitable, but that's a very slow emission, taking 100 years to reach a yearly supply inflation under 1%.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#573

Post by lgvld »

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #531
oblio wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how is that better than a government?

It’s not. There is a huge gulf between Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto space. Bitcoin is certifiably decentralized hard money with an ossified monetary policy. I believe it is reasonable to conclude that something like Bitcoin can only happen once. The rest of crypto space isn’t really trying to be money, or is only pretending to be.

& what about Monero?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#574

Post by cloakandswagger »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #357
keymone wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The leader who wins has the privilege of proposing the next block. No, the hash that you win with, deterministically points to the only possible block that you can “propose”. Your understanding is completely backwards. You seriously don’t know how bitcoin works.

Whether leader election happens at the same time as the block is proposed or not is completely irrelevant to the nature of the problem from a distributed systems perspective. The point is that in each round, the leader both wins the election, and proposes the next block. There are other variants of proof of work in which the leader is allowed to continue generating new blocks for a period of time and (AFAIK) these in…

You're confusing the discussion by trying to force the "leader" terminology. That term does not appear in the BTC whitepaper and the protocol's approach to consensus is different than a traditional leader elected system.

There is no "voting" and no "leader" except in the most abstract sense and I'm not sure why you're so determined to use those terms.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#575

Post by wmf »

cinquemb wrote: post #183
inter_netuser wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't fork gigawatt powerplants and silicon foundries by clicking a button on Github. You can't even fork a stablecoin. in case of a split in a PoS chain, the correct fork will be decided for you by USDC and Coinbase.

You can fork decentralized over (crypto) collateralized stablecoins even if you can't force a fork of a centralized stablecoin operated by incorporated entity to be recognized by them. Unless we're going to pretend that there is only one way on and off networks and only in one currency denomination…

You can fork decentralized over (crypto) collateralized stablecoins

In practice the value of the forked collateral is likely to be low, leaving the stablecoins insolvent.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#576

Post by lukifer »

inter_netuser wrote: post #304
keymone wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a system with feedback loops, it’ll eventually level out at some equilibrium. You didn’t provide an actual argument for why it should definitely collapse.

Seems like he’s insinuating a global ban will occur.

Interestingly enough, as the ledgers are all public by nature, there would be nothing stopping states from forking blockchains into centralized solutions, outcompeting miners by reducing transaction costs to zero. Crypto-anarchists would lose their minds, but most consumers would probably pick whatever's cheapest and which "just works".

Don't get me wrong, I love the politics of decentralization. But it's worth remembering that decentralization tends to be a cost-center, not a profit-center, from the standpoint of efficiency and performance; and decentralized tech is no guarantee of decentralized results (see Amazon/Facebook/Google, who have quasi-monopolies in their niches, despite being delivered over open and federated web protocols).

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#577

Post by perlgeek »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #406
perlgeek wrote: post #279

I'm trying to understand the central technical argument being made here. Please tell me if I got this right. --- Somebody has a stake in a PoS crypto currency. They can now do two things: 1) sell their stake 2) sign something fraudulent (like a double spend). Since there is no decentralized timestamp service, a node validating those two actions doesn't know how to order them, so different validating nodes come to dif…

> have a strictly monotonic sequence number Then you lose decentralized property.

Note that I meant a strictly monotonic sequence number PER PRIVATE KEY.

This only means that each holder of a private key must have some sort of synchronization mechanism (if they use several agents/clients), but it doesn't centralize the whole network.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#579

Post by seoaeu »

lottin wrote: post #511
seoaeu wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops me from doing a hard fork to roll back both blocks?

If you spend more tokens than the tokens that were spent mining the last two blocks you can erase the transactions in those blocks, but isn't that also the case with PoW?

You aren’t following. The hard fork lets me double spend the tokens from those blocks.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#580

Post by lukifer »

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 focus on fixed money supply seems a little absurd to me anyway, given the triviality of creating new crypto-currencies, and the relatively low transaction costs of trading between them.

Imagine making a case for returning to the gold standard, when thousands of other choices for new precious metals, all with the same performance characteristics, were literally just lying around, and a network of drones would let you swap perfectly and instantly between those metals for pennies!

In that light, one can certainly understand the fervent contempt that Bitcoin maximalists hold for "shitcoins"; but a free-banking market cuts both ways. Barring a state blessing one chain and outlawing the rest, creating new cryptos and swapping between them won't go away. The proper way to measure the emergent "monetary policy" of crypto-currency is of the sum of all chains, not of Bitcoin itself.

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