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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

#741

Post by reyqn »

inter_netuser wrote: post #195
darawk wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you didn't read the article to the end, did you? I skimmed it. It made no serious arguments. If it had a serious argument, it would have exploited one of the many existing proof of stake systems. > Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having masters, whatever floats your boat. You mean...exactly like PoW mining?

No, exactly the opposite of PoW mining. Miners do not set the rules, they are merely a service that provides immutability to a ledger, with a nuclear option that will bankrupt all the billions they have invested, should they misbehave. Large stakers can rent-seek and extract your wealth, PoS is the same system we have now, plus some code. You are quite literally being exploited right this minute, by the same methods…

I'm not really knowledgeable about all this, but mining of PoW currencies right now seems to rely a lot on mining pools. Isn't there a risk that they are "the rich" and people trust them? What's the difference with PoS there?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#742

Post by itsoktocry »

Siira wrote: post #739
cs702 wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add that the silly argument that a super-wealthy individual or a government could in theory degrade or destroy a transaction platform is applicable, not just to Algorand and other block chains, but also, more generally, to ANY transaction platform . I mean, if Doctor Evil suddenly decided to spend tens of billions of dollars to destroy the three main credit card networks, he could probably do it. In fact, it…

Provided a shorting mechanism for X, destroying X will be incentivized.

Everything already has a shorting mechanism. Can you cite a single instance where short-selling has destroyed a legitimate business, ever?

This irrational fear of short selling is such a modern midwit view. There is way more value to fraud on the upside then there is on the downside, and we see that everyday.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#743

Post by ogogmad »

lottin wrote: post #735
ogogmad wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the hell do you know? You've just admitted that you don't actually know how PoS and PoW work. You've repeatedly refused to "do your homework" by researching what's known about these things. And yet you have repeatedly been rude to other people who have done their homework, and have informed opinions, unlike you. Just shut up and stop talking about blockchains. You're an entitled internet nobody. For other people:…

I will talk about whatever I want to talk. If you don't like it, too bad.

I have regrets about calling you a "nobody". I was annoyed, but that's going too far, and I apologise for saying that. Almost no one deserves that level of vitriol, especially if at worst they're just being annoying. And I think I get annoyed too quickly.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#744

Post by denton-scratch »

keymone wrote: post #306
denton-scratch wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> standing armies that are "doing nothing" Armies have to practice. Smart generals don't let their armies do nothing; to be any good at warfighting, they have to fight wars. Effective standing armies have to constantly be finding new wars to fight.

Nice to see you rationalizing expenditure that goes towards murdering people. Are you the people talking down to bitcoiners about being wasteful and not caring about future of humanity? Give me a break.

I was presenting a case against large standing armies!

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#745

Post by dahak27 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #742
Siira wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provided a shorting mechanism for X, destroying X will be incentivized.

Everything already has a shorting mechanism. Can you cite a single instance where short-selling has destroyed a legitimate business, ever? This irrational fear of short selling is such a modern midwit view. There is way more value to fraud on the upside then there is on the downside, and we see that everyday.

The analogy to companies doesn't work because there isn't a legal mechanism by which you can make your short predictions come true. It's illegal to manipulate markets and most ways by which you could destroy a company (without spending more than you hope to gain) are also probably illegal. If you can think of any legal ones I'd be curious to hear

If it were legal to take a short position in a company and then take actions which blew the company up AND there existed cost-effective ways to do so, then you would definitely have seen more legitimate companies taken down by short-attacks. In contrast, here you have an entity where (a) there isn't the same legal safeguards and (b) there exists a claimed cost-effective way to tank the entity after taking a short position

If you disagree with (a) or (b) empirically then cool but it's clearly a totally different scenario to regular companies

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#746

Post by keymone »

newswasboring wrote: post #525
keymone wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right. The correct number is somewhere around 50%, probably over the line already, which is significantly better than any other big industry.

> The correct number is somewhere around 50% Do you have some source for this? I see random numbers being thrown around a lot, would be nice to have a citation for yours.

https://bitcoinminingcouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/...

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#747

Post by EthanHeilman »

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.

"Blockchains get knocked down but they get up again." - Chumbawamba, ...probably

So two of the Bitcoin examples I gave was a consensus failure which already establishes the point, but lets do a very recent example from Ethereum:

A few months ago in August 2021 when Ethereum had a serious consensus failure and about three quarters of the clients in the network and some miners [0] forked off from the miners. How many people even noticed? [1]

> "Ethereum has weathered a bug that split the world’s most-used blockchain and opened up the risk of counterfeit Ether tokens." [2]

The issue at play is that the ability to cripple the consensus of a blockchain for the most part only impacts its availability not its security or the trust placed in that blockchain. Social consensus can just reset the bad transactions. If the theft or doublespend is big enough. We've seen that happen time and time again. They are somewhat robust but highly resilient.

Now it is possible that perhaps someone could perform an action that can not be so easily reset. For instance a huge doublespend where both parties receiving the funds are honest and have traded an object of extreme value for the doublespent funds. That is very hard to pull off. For instance how do you non-reversibly send something of that much value before the fork/doublespend/consensus bug is discovered? If you are moving something worth say 1 billion dollars in a single transaction you should probably be using an escrow service. Perhaps someone will invent a better technique for turning consensus failures into blockchain killers but so far I'm not aware of such a technique.

[0]: https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1431278258222338056

[1]: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/115822/bug-impacting-ove...

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-30/ethereum-...

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#748

Post by keymone »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #732
keymone wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no leader election. You trying to insist on this terminology is like trying to explain that the earth is really flat by proposing some very special space metric. All miners “vote” by hashing and one of them wins. They don’t win because somebody voted for them, they win because they happened to find a satisfactory hash. The chance to win that hash faster than other miners is proportional to hashrate. The hash…

> Just read, please. You're coming off worse in this argument because you seem to realize on some level they're just using different (possibly wrong) terms in their accurate description of the mechanisms, but then you keep making snide remarks that imply they don't understand the mechanisms.

i in fact do insist on them not understanding the mechanism. trying to force incoherent terminology is just the largest red flag signifying that lack of understanding. snide remarks is my bad, i definitely lost my patience, it's hard to argue with somebody saying that sky is pink because they've changed what pink means.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#749

Post by davidmanheim »

inter_netuser wrote: post #699
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…

Why destroy it, when you can co-opt and control? Spend $X billion, then just bleed everyone without power. Sort of like what we do now.

Because nothing-at-stake attacks only allow double spending, not arbitrary forged transactions.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#750

Post by cs702 »

zocoi wrote: post #727
cs702 wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I said. Please don't attack a straw man. My main point was, and is, that the same attack-logic applies to ANY transaction network. The example with Doctor Evil was about other transaction networks. Why would Doctor Evil attack a block chain network when he could attack global/national/regional credit card/wire transfer/ACH networks, many of which are built upon ancient pre-Internet technology, are ful…

You didn’t answer the parent post. Your point was, in game theory, there’s no benefit in attacking the network or the loss is huge that it doesn’t worth the the attack. The parent post gave the counter point that there could be a benefit which we haven’t thought. If Dr Evil is heavily invested in 2 network, he might destroy one to focus on the remaining. The chance of the attack is low but it is not zero

I addressed it in the first paragraph of my comment above. Let me quote from it here: The theoretical attack argument is indeed "applicable, not just to Algorand and other block chains, but also, more generally, to ANY transaction platform" -- VISA, Mastercard, Amex, ACH, Fedwire, etc. No one disagrees that it is applicable, i.e., a theoretical threat, to all transaction platforms.

Now, if you think such an attack is an important problem for block chains, then you must also think it is an important problem for all legacy transaction networks. Yet we're all comfortable using our credit cards and bank accounts every day, and for virtually all practical purposes, we don't worry about a "Doctor Evil scenario." Why should we think and behave differently for block chain networks?

Moreover, as I wrote before, in practice, legacy transaction networks (like, say, regional VISA networks run by 100-year-old banks) are easier and cheaper to attack. If the Doctor Evil scenario were a real threat, it would be more profitable for him to target one of the legacy networks!

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