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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

#631

Post by ertian »

evergrande wrote: post #620
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…

What if Buffett just wants to see the world burn and doesn't care about getting the money back out? Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.

It's a temporary state, until the PoS coin market cap gets too large to be attackable. Bitcoin's market cap is in the 1T range now, Ethereum is close to half that. Buffet couldn't do a thing against a PoS coin that large, and it would be a serious commitment and risk even for a nation state. Buffet could take down some random smaller coin, maybe, at the cost of most of his personal fortune, but if he did so the world would not burn.

It's _possible_ that a government might choose to attack a random small coin just to discredit the notion of PoS cryptocurrencies, but it's hard to picture a government gaining consensus to do it, and it would be obvious to knowledgeable onlookers that larger coins are immune (or anyway, much better protected), so the resulting disruption would probably be temporary.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#632

Post by toss1 »

politician wrote: post #564
toss1 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite Even if BTC and every other POW cryptocurrency converted this afternoon to 100% renewable energy use (and we ignore the carbon cost of manufacturing the hardware), it is STILL a huge climate problem. Why? 1) Because that ~1% of total energy consumption is being squandered on maintaining the cryptocurrency instead of any other use. Thus, it prevents those clean energy sources from displacing CO2-generating s…

A while ago, I asked folks if PoW happened entirely off-Earth using the Sun. Predictably, that was still a problem to some people which, to me, says everything.

"folks" is not me, that is certainly not the point I was making, and your "predictability" indicates that your comment is no less based on fact-free as those you criticize.

Obviously, if the mining is done off-earth anywhere, it will not contribute to the CO2 problem, =ASSUMING= that it does not require on-earth energy resources to put the power generation there.

Crypto mining also stops being a problem when 100% of on-Earth power generation is de-carbonized — in that situation, it is no longer diverting energy generation that could be used to displace/reduce remaining CO2-spewing energy generation.

The problem is: While CO2 power generation is still active, and especially when it dominates, every kW of electricity used for crypto mining either directly generates CO2, or it uses clean generation that could otherwise (but now does NOT) displace a kW of CO2-based generation capacity.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#633

Post by EthanHeilman »

evergrande wrote: post #620
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…

What if Buffett just wants to see the world burn and doesn't care about getting the money back out? Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.

> Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.

While you are correct that burning $30 billion dollars to destroy trust in PoS blockchains isn't that much money, I disagree that such an action would actually destroy trust in PoS blockchains. We have seen serious attacks on a number of blockchains, Ethereum for instance had enormous amounts of money stolen or destroyed via weaknesses in the blockchain. Yet Ethereum is still going strong. Bitcoin suffered 51% attacks that were used to perform double spends and Bitcoin is more valuable than ever.

It might be cheap to burn $30B to destroy a blockchain, but what if you burn $30B and the blockchain recovers 12 hours later.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#634

Post by yanmaani »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #628
hedora wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the “nothing at stake problem” from the article. Warren Buffet buys up 70% of the network, induces a network partition, and then double spends it all, signing both transaction histories. By the time he’s caught, he’s converted 2x the value of the POS network to POW bitcoins. Replace “warren buffet” with “crypto exchanges selling bundled securities”, and the above is not just plausible, it’s inevitable. The sa…

A trust assumption of PoS (Proof of Stake) is that >66% of the stake is honest. If you violate this trust assumption then yes PoS breaks. This is a similar trust assumption to requiring that 51% of the mining power in PoW (Proof of Work) is not malicious. This risk can be mitigated: 1. The network should halt if a fork is detected. A fork with more than 66% of the stake behaving maliciously means a fundamental trust…

> This is a similar trust assumption to requiring that 51% of the mining power in PoW (Proof of Work) is not malicious.

Yeah, but you're glossing over an important detail: It's not 66% of the stake that has to be good, it's 66% of anyone who has ever staked. In PoW, I only need to trust the miners of today to tell me the truth about what happened today. In PoS, I need that, plus the miners of yesterday, plus the miners of a year ago, plus ..., in perpetuity.

> New parties who are syncing for the first time would be vulnerable, however clients could be programmed to have hardcoded 6th month checkpoints or clients could check block explorers and halt if a fork is detected.

Right, maybe you can elaborate on this. Is checking block explorers a decentralized or trustless solution to, well, anything?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#635

Post by bitcurious »

ertian wrote: post #631
evergrande wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Buffett just wants to see the world burn and doesn't care about getting the money back out? Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.

It's a temporary state, until the PoS coin market cap gets too large to be attackable. Bitcoin's market cap is in the 1T range now, Ethereum is close to half that. Buffet couldn't do a thing against a PoS coin that large, and it would be a serious commitment and risk even for a nation state. Buffet could take down some random smaller coin, maybe, at the cost of most of his personal fortune, but if he did so the world…

PoS encourages centralized exchange-held staking, which means that there are only a handful of failure/pressure points. In other words, a government doesn’t have to buy 66% of the stake - merely compel the exchanges.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#636

Post by yanmaani »

comex wrote: post #611
bhaak wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is indeed a viable threat in certain conditions. It's called "Eclipse Attack". But it's a threat for single nodes not for the network as a whole.

> But it's a threat for single nodes not for the network as a whole. Indeed, but the same is true for attacks on "weak subjectivity" proof-of-stake. They're only a threat for nodes that have been disconnected for a long time (months) before they try to reconnect.

Except for the part where eclipse attacks can be resolved by simply feeding my node more data (it's not a problem if some of it is lies), while "weak subjectivity" requires recourse to an external authority.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#637

Post by PretzelPirate »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #633
evergrande wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Buffett just wants to see the world burn and doesn't care about getting the money back out? Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.

> Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them. While you are correct that burning $30 billion dollars to destroy trust in PoS blockchains isn't that much money, I disagree that such an action would actually destroy trust in PoS…

> Ethereum for instance had enormous amounts of money stolen or destroyed via weaknesses in the blockchain.

These weaknesses weren’t due to consensus failures or protocol failures, but bugs in applications running on Ethereum. If Ethereum’s protocol allowed arbitrary funds to be stolen, that could certainly cause a loss of trust.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#638

Post by simonw »

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…

> in DAOs, every vote resembles a banana republic: "90% voted, 90% in favour"

I've been wondering about that recently - for all of the excitement about DAOs and Governance Tokens, are there any good examples of interesting decisions being made via their voting mechanisms?

What are some places I can go to see recent votes and their outcomes?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#639

Post by yanmaani »

comex wrote: post #619
ricardolopes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I didn't word it right, but I wasn't calling bitcoin's method reliant on centralised authorities, just asking if there were more methods out there that weren't as well. Bitcoin is an open source permissionless protocol, so you have multiple clients to chose from, each with their own list of bootstrapping nodes, many open source where you can submit a PR to add your node too. You can even build your own client a…

> Bitcoin is an open source permissionless protocol, so you have multiple clients to chose from, each with their own list of bootstrapping nodes, many open source where you can submit a PR to add your node too. You can even build your own client and point to whatever you want. You can also just ignore them and just point directly to nodes in a list from a public forum, a private chat, whatever. I characterized this a…

I want to take a moment to note what you're doing here. You're making a negative argument, in want of a better word. It goes something like this:

1. X is a problem?

2. But Y is also a problem, in my opinion.

3. X and Y are both the same, I think.

4. Therefore X is not a problem.

We can - theoretically - verify the correctness of PoW software by downloading the source code, reading it over, etc. We can also refuse to update, reducing ourselves to SPV security. We can internally verify the checkpoints using 100% objective standards. There are other things as well. This is not the case for PoS, where our "signature A existed at time B" has to be taken as faith, or evidence of things unseen. There is no internal way to verify the veracity of such a statement.

The fact that users aren't personally doing this, is not the same as saying it makes no difference whether they are able to or not. I'm not personally going to withdraw all the money in my bank account - that would be ridiculous - but if the bank informed me I was no longer able to withdraw the money in my account, that would not be suitable at all. The assurance that I can do it makes it so that I don't have to.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#640

Post by Bjartr »

mgraczyk wrote: post #617

> If you have a file on a computer, despite what NFT promoters believe, it is not possible to prevent people from copying it. Not sure if these quips are meant to be jokes or serious, but nonsense like this detracts from the credibility of the argument. Nobody believes the data corresponding to an NFT cannot be copied.

Part of the problem of the NFT hype is that some people DO believe this to sure degree and believe that those redistributing the NFT content are somehow attacking the NFT itself.
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