Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

yanmaani.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 822 posts

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#641

Post by wizzwizz4 »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #637
EthanHeilman wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You overestimate the amount that people “investing” in crypto actually care about what it is. If my friends are anything to go by, anyway.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#642

Post by SilasX »

dathinab wrote: post #625
SilasX wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which can (likely will) make you lose all the stacked money.

The article addresses that in the section starting:

>>Therefore, once they have withdrawn their deposits, they are untouchable. This is the “nothing at stake” problem. There will inevitably come a point when a node is free to liquidate their entire stake and cash out.

And later concludes that, In order to know which is the valid staking, you have to already have a decentralized mechanism for ordering transactions, which was the problem to begin with.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#643

Post by gruez »

mschuster91 wrote: post #626
gruez wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>[...] and the amount that the small oil wells produce is too low to justify the cost. >If it were for me I'd force oil well operators to [....] Maybe it's too costly for a reason? Building power lines or pipelines to the middle of nowhere has economic and environmental costs as well, so top down legislation forcing every single well to do it might result in worse overall outcomes. For instance, the resources it take…

> For instance, the resources it takes to construct a pipeline/power line to the nearest town might be more than the electricity/methane that can be generated from the well. Well, there already is a pipeline for the oil product (so the additional overhead for a small gas pipe isn't that huge) and an electric grid hookup for the pump. That can be used even for a small-scale electrical generator.

>Well, there already is a pipeline for the oil product

not every oil well is hooked up to a pipeline. Some (many? most? not sure) are only serviced by trucks, presumably because they're too remote to profitably operate a pipeline for.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#644

Post by keymone »

thinkmassive wrote: post #560
keymone wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously I can’t change your decision to use this terminology, but ponder this: when the leader is elected every 10 minutes, do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain? No they don’t. So was it election of the leader or election of the block? And if it was an election, wouldn’t the result always be the same with largest miner always winning because they have most votes? As I said in a sibling thread…

> when the leader is elected every 10 minutes, do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain? No they don’t. Yes, they do get to choose the block. Transactions to include in the block are (usually) chosen from the mempool, which is unique per node (it’s similar but never exactly the same between any two nodes). Miners can also choose to include transactions that were never publicly broadcasted, and ther…

You’re not paying attention. Does miner have a choice what transactions to include after they win the “election”? Don’t rush, take your time.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#645

Post by mgraczyk »

Bjartr wrote: post #640
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.

Show me a single example of anybody claiming this in earnest (using a real identity, not a troll or stooge) and I'll delete my comment

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#646

Post by keymone »

UncleEntity wrote: post #609
keymone wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Everybody has that choice before they win the election, so are they all leaders?

You really don’t see how this terminology is completely incoherent for this scenario?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#647

Post by injidup »

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.

If you have 30 billion, and the motivation, then there are more entertaining ways of making the world burn than hacking somebody else's Ponzi scheme.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#648

Post by danlugo92 »

lgvld wrote: post #573
rufusroflpunch wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Regardless of Monero's technicals, new upcoming updates to BTC will infuse with privacy, therefore making Monero et al redundant.

BTC is also getting smart contracts soon, which makes ETH redudant as well, but it will take a while before it catches up in terms of possible complexity of the contracts.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#649

Post by joshuajbouw »

Developing PoS systems for 8 years, the research is completely dated on both old Bitcoin-like PoS and modern PoS.

That, and the author has a wrong understanding of the Nothing at Stake problem. At the time, the argument was there was nothing stopping someone from staking on multiple forks to hedge their bet on the dominate chain, giving them nothing at stake on the forked branches since the get equal ownership on each chain.

Mind you, Nakamoto consensus is pretty awful and completely ignored these days. Why do you believe that nodes flagged for support of protocols and miners with dominate hashrate LOST the big block debate? Because of the nodes, and community consensus.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#650

Post by lukifer »

amelius wrote: post #630
lukifer wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW should actually stand for Proof of Waste. It's not even unprecedented in nature: many species will intentionally waste energy or resources to demonstrate mating fitness, as with a peacock's tail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

... or people going to the gym. The problems start, of course, when you take a concept to its logical extreme.

I'm less concerned with wasting resources (which is highly subjective), than with ecological and systemic harms. I don't care whether a terawatt is "wasted" on pointless SHA256 hashes, or calculating triangles for Yet Another Marvel Movie, so long as the externality is being paid for [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

Post reply on HN