Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus • Hacker News Board

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#781

Post by akrymski » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

dorgo wrote: post #771

akrymski wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if the majority of validators are actually run by the project owners it's effectively centralised. And it's easy to maintain this control if you have the majority of coins to stake. It's not Sybil resistant for this reason - all validators could be owned by one person and you would have no way of knowing.

>all validators could be owned by one person and you would have no way of knowing. all bitcoin miners could be owned by one person and you would have no way of knowing.... >it's effectively centralised so your argument is not that it is not possible to have security AND decentralisation with POS, but that it currently is not the case, right?

> all bitcoin miners could be owned by one person and you would have no way of knowing....

Sure, it's entirely possible that BTC is also centralised and controlled by wales. I was merely suggesting that the reason PoS systems haven't been hacked (much) yet is because the validators are controlled by project owners, so they are really centralised payment systems in disguise.

There's a difference though: buying initial stake in PoS may be similar to buying an ASIC in PoW, but mining a chain has a real cost (electricity) in PoW. In PoS there's no cost to mining, so validators have an incentive to stake all possible forks. There's no way to have consensus on the correct chain, because real resources haven't gone into building one up.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#782

Post by keymone » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #461

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.

> It’s a system with feedback loops, it’ll eventually level out at some equilibrium. An equilibrium doesn't entail that it's a sustainable point, or that it's actually providing value when you properly account for all externalities.

Good question. Some function of how much PoW each person can deploy in order to attack the chain and how much value is secured by the chain. It’s like a relation between price of a bike and price of a lock to secure the bike.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#783

Post by PretzelPirate » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 11:13 PM UTC

EthanHeilman wrote: post #747

PretzelPirate wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

You’re now moving the goal post.

You said there were “enormous amounts of money stolen or destroyed” as a result of “ weaknesses in the [Ethereum] blockchain.”

The consensus issue where one client forked off isn’t evidence of that at all. Even the article you link to says it seems that the network was stable and the impact was minimal. Even in this particular attack, doing a double spend would be rather difficult.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#784

Post by nybble41 » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 11:16 PM UTC

meribold wrote: post #723

javert wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The natural scenario is that as the mining reward goes down, hash rate will dwindle until mining is profitable again. The only real problem with that is that with a small hash rate, bitcoin can be attacked more easily. If bitcoin is the monetary backbone for many nations, they will subsidize miners to maintain the balance of power. That is the actual scenario that I'm optimistically predicting. If bitcoin isn't the m…

I don't see why many nations would jump at the opportunity to make Bitcoin their monetary backbone. For example because an immutable monetary policy won't be seen as a feature.

> For example because an immutable monetary policy won't be seen as a feature.

Each nation would love to be able to manipulate the supply itself—why not, if people will let you get away with it?—but the fact that other nations can't do the same could be seen as a feature.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#785

Post by LordDragonfang » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 1:05 AM UTC

plokiju wrote: post #125

LordDragonfang wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Christmas lights Well, let's see >Bright lights strung on American trees, rooftops and lawns account for 6.63 billion kilowatt hours of electricity consumption every year [1] >Bitcoin mining consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. [2] Huh. That's at least the same order of magnitude, at any rate. [1] https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countr... [2] https://www.businessinsider.co…

And that’s only looking at US Christmas lights, not world-wide

It's also only looking at bitcoin, which is less than half of total crypto mining by energy usage. Adding ETH alone already doubles it.

Meanwhile, I'd reckon that the US accounts for the majority of Christmas lights.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#786

Post by clolege » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

yanmaani wrote: post #759

clolege wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is where you get the problem - if you just have two sets of signatures, how do you tell which is legitimate and which one isn't? How do you conclude in which set the cabal was lying? I feel like you should be able to deduce it from the distribution of participation after the fork, right? The “fake” chain would lose all honest verifiers (and all transactions from honest wallets?) which seems like it wou…

> The “fake” chain would lose all honest verifiers (and all transactions from honest wallets?) which seems like it would be pretty detectable with simple statistical analysis. Staked nodes not participating (and active wallets not transacting) becomes less and less likely the longer the post-fork chain is. But you don't know who's honest - you may as well be saying the real chain lost all the dishonest verifiers.

Exactly - that's where statistical analysis (like fakespot) comes in.

For each chain you'd be able to look at the age, stake & historical participation level of the post-fork participants and get a pretty good idea which (if either) of the chains is real. The absence of honest participants should look a lot different than the absence of dishonest ones.

Granted, this method is not nearly as simple as checking the number of 0s on a hash, but I would imagine it to be quite difficult to circumvent.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#787

Post by inter_netuser » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 2:06 AM UTC

lilyball wrote: post #680

light_cone wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The clock issue is an excellent point, but the ethereum PoS have a nano scale PoW mechanism for this exact problem. Look at VFD "Verifiable Delay Functions" [1]. In short: If you take the pbkdf2 key derivation function: its job is to slow down hashing a thousand fold or so, so that hashing an entire search space becomes impractical. You give your secret in input, and it gives you a hash, let's say, in 1 second. You'l…

The site isn’t particularly accessible for a quick discussion so I appreciate your explanation, thank you. However, I’m not sure I understand how this is supposed to help. Proving that a few seconds passed just slows down block generation a little, but this cannot be a significant barrier to block generation or else you just have a full PoW system again. And if it’s not a significant barrier then it’s not clear to me…

all VDF does is solves the problem of pseudorandomness being manipulated.

Said randomness is needed to elect the new quorum who will build the new block.

This does absolutely nothing with the fact that you need 66% honest stakers in the system for it to remain secure.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#788

Post by inter_netuser » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #185

yrral wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never mentioned why you think mining should be illegal. Probably because of the outrage published by the media based on intuitive assumptions that end up not being true. That bitcoin mining long term is bad for the environment. However, this is not true even though it intuitively seems that way. (Similar to how making highways wider actually ends up making traffic worse, not better). We can actually start with 1…

> If electricity demand from PoW mining spurs new renewable plants to be built, is that bad for the environment? Yes, obviously. Even if every single miner pool built its own solar/wind plant to power 100% of its energy needs, that would still be horrible for the environment: building the power plant itself produces harm to the environment; and the space and work and money used to create the Bitcoin miner's power pla…

1. do you agree that an industrial economy can run on windmills and solar?

2. do you agree that nuclear is a sustainable and necessary solution?

3. do you agree that mining provides massive incentives, on huge scale, to nuclear power developers?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#789

Post by simondotau » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

leishman wrote: post #514

simondotau wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single percentage problem today. In order to become a mainstream everyday currency, use of Bitcoin will have to increase by three, four, possibly five orders of magnitude.

Bitcoin’s energy consumption is completely unrelated to how many transactions it can process.

False. It's not linear, it's not directly related, but it's certainly not unrelated. As reliance on a blockchain increases, as it becomes normalised in our daily lives, the number of entities motivated to be part of the blockchain increases. As the number of entities increases, the number of compute cycles per transaction increases.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#790

Post by wahern » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 4:18 AM UTC

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.

> Can you cite a single instance where short-selling has destroyed a legitimate business, ever?

What kind of short-selling? For naked short selling I quickly found evidence: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=273488 That's the predecessor of a paper cited from 2003 SEC testimony of Robert J. Shapiro published at https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/rshapiro122403.htm..., which in turn may have been a related source for the Shapiro citation in a 2008 Time magazine article at https://web.archive.org/web/20080424032340/http://www.time.c..., which I found via the Wikipedia article on naked short selling at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling#Claimed_ef...

That first paper describes a scheme whereby investors bought convertible warrants, used naked short selling to drive the stock price down, then covered by exercising their warrants. And apparently in many cases, as documented by the paper, this resulted in a delisting or even bankruptcy of the targeted firms.