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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

#601

Post by ghughes »

inter_netuser wrote: post #264
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…

Do you believe PoW can be used as bootstrap mechanism, and then some combo of PoS/Pow in the maintenance mode? Who is the top researcher on this subject these days?

It could be interesting to bootstrap a PoS network using the wallet keys for all existing public blockchains, by allowing users to initialize their PoS wallet with the fiat value of their PoW keys held at some agreed moment in time. I toyed with this idea for a while, but I don't know how you could keep the network secure until a significant proportion of the total value has been claimed.

Anyway, I'd also be interested to know if there's existing or active research along these lines.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#602

Post by dathinab »

ricardolopes wrote: post #210
pshc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a recent ETH2 block: https://beaconcha.in/block/2604970#votes It was voted for by 8000+ validators. Many of them have been validating since beacon chain genesis a year ago. There are like 260k validators active right now. I find it highly unlikely some entity is going to come along and try to pretend their alternate history, with a whole new set of hundreds of thousands of validators (which wouldn’t be support…

ETH2 was years in the making, with multiple delays and not fully migrated yet precisely because of how unsafe standard PoS is. Vitalik and co spent years researching the best mitigations. Right now, it seems to be one of the best protected PoS chains. It's still fairly new, with novel mitigations, so it still doesn't stand the test of time against all possible attack vectors. In that sense, it still can't be consider…

> unsafe standard PoS

Not "unsafe standard" but

"dangers/unsafe to bootstrap".

But there are ways to mitigate the bootstrapping issue to some degree.

And PoW chains tend to have a low cost at the beginning making them similar not easy to bootstrap safely (through more easy then PoS).

In the end I don't think what theoretically is better matters, what only really matters is what practically matters for big crypto currencies (and smaller ones can during bootstrap (and potentially later one) interlink with the large chains).

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#603

Post by rictic »

xorcist wrote: post #435
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 trus…

With Ethereum at least, it's proof of work leading up to proof of stake, so you'd have to break proof of work to create a fake early history, so the initial stake has to be legal within the proof of work history of Ethereum.

Unsure how pure PoS chains work, maybe they hard code an early block's hash? Like, it's not a legit xorcist-chain unless block #10 has hash #deadbeef

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#604

Post by dathinab »

dcow wrote: post #593
otiose_tortoise wrote: post #588

This article completely misunderstands proof-of-stake and the distributed consensus space in general. Both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake are mechanisms for making distributed consensus sybil-resistant. Distributed consensus is the problem of getting a bunch of computers to agree on some state when some of the computers can behave maliciously. In the case of cryptocurrency, the state is a log of transactions, which…

The main point the author is making is that PoS doesn’t require spending of any scarce resource on a per block level so the accuracy of the distributed clock is not to be trusted. I don't think they misunderstand their argument. You’re just not replying to it.

You spend "safety of your stacked money while having stacked a lot of money" it's a scarce resource as if you over spend it you lose your money. And the more money you have stacked the less interest you have into braking the currency as it makes you lose that money.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#605

Post by rictic »

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…

PoS validation does not have to include any more power than a bitcoin miner has.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#606

Post by comex »

xorcist wrote: post #435
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 trus…

The history still needs to be signed by former stakers to be valid. The "nothing at stake" problem is that a staker might break the rules by signing two mutually incompatible histories. During the staking period, they are strongly disincentivized from doing this because anyone can present proof that they've done so, causing the network to punish them by taking away all the funds they staked. But once that period expires, they can send those funds to someone else, and now they can't be punished. Someone who's sent away their funds is longer a staker moving forward, but they can still sign an alternate history for the time when they were a staker, potentially fooling clients who haven't connected to the network for a long time.

In practice, among the people who once staked large amounts of a proof-of-stake currency, most of them will probably continue being invested in its ecosystem moving forward. Even if they can't be personally punished for lying about the past, a successful history split would likely reduce the community's confidence in the currency, and thus its market value. Most of those people are also emotionally invested in the ecosystem and would not want to dishonestly subvert it. There will be exceptions. But to create an alternate history you need to subvert not just one validator, but most validators (or rather, validators who together control most of the currency being staked).

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#607

Post by jude- »

everfree wrote: post #589
leishman wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes PoW is way better because miners need to constantly expend resources to maintain their right to participate. PoS validators keep their throne for life at virtually no cost.

But like PoS, PoW returns all spent resources and more back to the miner - both are designed to be profitable and self-sustaining. I don't see much difference between a PoW mining setup that does $1000/day gross, $990/day expense, $10/day profit and a PoS staking setup that does $12/day gross, $2/day expense, $10/day profit. Both earn $10/day, both require maintenance, and both are run not at a net cost but at a net…

You can't transmute Bitcoin back into electricity and ASICs. You have to generate more of both, which is extrinsic to the protocol and thus available to currently-non-participating actors. PoS does not have this property.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#609

Post by UncleEntity »

keymone wrote: post #512
lottin wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question that you asked was: > when the leader is elected every 10 minutes, do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain? and the answer is yes, the miner that gets elected chooses which transactions to append to the chain. Do they pick the transactions after getting elected? No, they pick them before getting elected. In fact, it doesn't matter whether they pick the transactions before or after get…

The answer is no and you’re clueless if you think otherwise. The “leader” has no choice in blocks or transactions after they “win” the “election”.

The "leader" has no choice after they win the current round but they do have a choice as to what to include in the winning block before they start hashing.

Maybe they act like all the other rational miners and optimize by mining fees.

Maybe they include no transactions and only take the miner reward.

Maybe they they don't like the Dutch so all their transactions are excluded.

It really doesn't matter as all y'all have been arguing over is what to call the person who won the current round.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#610

Post by SilasX »

dathinab wrote: post #604
dcow wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main point the author is making is that PoS doesn’t require spending of any scarce resource on a per block level so the accuracy of the distributed clock is not to be trusted. I don't think they misunderstand their argument. You’re just not replying to it.

You spend "safety of your stacked money while having stacked a lot of money" it's a scarce resource as if you over spend it you lose your money. And the more money you have stacked the less interest you have into braking the currency as it makes you lose that money.

But it’s not a scarce resource you spent. As the author says, you can sign multiple, contradictory stakings.
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