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

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#791

Post by meribold » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 8:08 AM UTC

javert wrote: post #621

meribold wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the idea of a hard fork of Bitcoin may become more popular as the supply limit is approached and transaction fees go up. The current transaction fee is only a few dollars but the cost is over a hundred. Eventually the fee will have to cover the full cost and a hard fork may start to look more interesting. If this happens I can technically stay on the original protocol, but that would be rather pointless if…

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…

> It's also very possible that transactions fees alone actually will be sufficient to support a high enough amount of hash power to secure the network.

I have to admit that I have no idea how much work is actually needed to secure the network. My point of view is that the current rate of energy expenditure outweighs whatever benefit Bitcoin does or could provide to society. But if this rate is a transient result of still-significant minting going on, things could definitely look different in the future.

Do you know of any analyses on how much work really has to be continuously expended in order for Bitcoin to remain reasonably secure at a given market capitalization?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#792

Post by tsimionescu » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 8:24 AM UTC

inter_netuser wrote: post #788

tsimionescu wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes (with some help from nuclear, hydro), yes, and no/irrelevant.

Power generation is a social concern, and states provide plenty of incentive to build power plants, especially nuclear - crypto mining is a profit chasing wasteful afterthought.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#793

Post by rocqua » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 10:48 AM UTC

somebodythere wrote: post #330

rocqua wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while ago bitcoin clients changed from facoring the 'longest' chain to favoring the chain with the most work done on it. (To prevent long chains with low difficulty)

So... the consensus rules of the network changed, you need to make sure you have the correct client, and bitcoin is weakly subjective after all?

In practice this was essentially a soft-fork. But yes the consensus rules of bitcoin software changed.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#794

Post by csomar » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 12:50 PM UTC

dorgo wrote: post #769

csomar wrote: post #256

The author has good points, bad points and badly explained stuff. The article is a bit confusing at best and disorientating at worst. But I'll try to explain here, why the author thinks that PoW is magical. It's still bound to the readers, or philosophers, to pull whatever they want from this. Proof of Work creates time. In a decentralized system, you don't have time. If time was provable, the double-spending problem…

>If time was provable, the double-spending problem would not happen. Can't you sign two transactions at the same time? If yes then you could double-spend even without faking timestamps.

Not sure I understand you. When you are signing a transaction, you are the one who fills in the timestamp.

The timestamp of a transaction in the bitcoin blockchain is the block height. The actual timestamp is merely informative.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#795

Post by ulzeraj » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #587

ulzeraj wrote: post #250

My opinion on PoS is that because no other community that I know of outside of bitcoin has a culture of running nodes normal people will just stake through exchanges. Now you have these exchanges acting not only as the in and out ramps but also as the biggest network validators meaning that they can direct transactions. Congratulations. You’ve just went full circle and invented central banks. Am I wrong? Would gladly…

In practice PoS chains have hundreds of nodes or more. In Bitcoin, nodes can't stop a 51% attack and I don't know if the software would even alert you when a 51% attack is likely going on.

> In practice PoS chains have hundreds of nodes or more.

Is that supposed to be a lot? I look at the node requirements for these new chains and they mention monstrous amounts of cpu and storage power.

> In Bitcoin, nodes can't stop a 51% attack and I don't know if the software would even alert you when a 51% attack is likely going on.

My question was about regulated exchanges dominating huge percentage of PoS validators. What are you going to do when, due to regulatory pressure, Coinbase and Binance start to implement blackists and OFAC based validators into those PoS chains?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#796

Post by ulzeraj » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

mattdesl wrote: post #271

ulzeraj wrote: post #250

My opinion on PoS is that because no other community that I know of outside of bitcoin has a culture of running nodes normal people will just stake through exchanges. Now you have these exchanges acting not only as the in and out ramps but also as the biggest network validators meaning that they can direct transactions. Congratulations. You’ve just went full circle and invented central banks. Am I wrong? Would gladly…

In a chain like Tezos, the validator software is relatively easy to run if you have a Raspberry Pi and some terminal chops, and a lot of hobbyists do stake this way. But it’s easier for most people to delegate to another party. This is where decentralized staking pools for ETH2[1] built around smart contract interactions could be a good alternative for many users, and may compete with centralized staking platforms. T…

> The mere fact that these peer-to-peer and decentralized alternatives exist, and that some portion of users will prefer to use them, is what makes this technology distinct.

I can imagine projects that can run on cheap hardware thriving but what happens when you put the weight of exchanges like Coinbase and their users against the hobbyst node count?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#797

Post by randomNumber7 » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #662

SilasX wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wh…

But that's also true for PoW as you can use hardware which after an attack you can use for other things.

You cant reuse the electricity you have already burned...

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#798

Post by randomNumber7 » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

joshuajbouw wrote: post #649

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 eac…

Do you mind explaining what the author understands wrongly?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#799

Post by TimJRobinson » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 1:34 PM UTC

pmorici wrote: post #778

rank0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because if you’re not decentralized, then you don’t need a blockchain.

The issue is what constitutes a sufficient amount of "decentralization". Extremists who may or may not have ulterior motives seem to oppose any change which by their estimation might decrease the decentralization. They want to minimize the cost of running a full node without consideration for the fact that optimizing that to the extreme causes transaction fees to go parabolic and thus also prices less well off users…

I see you haven't discovered the wonders of ZKRollups yet. Have a read of the works of Polynya [0]. Ethereum will be a settlement layer for these execution chains that can do thousands of TPS at a fraction of the current fee, and their only limit on TPS is data storage, which will be expanded with data shards.

[0] https://polynya.medium.com/

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#800

Post by TimJRobinson » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 1:36 PM UTC

duped wrote: post #584

janeroe wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over a century of monetary policy has shown that decentralization isn't aligned with political or economic goals. Or rather it has shown that decentralization isn't aligned with the political or economic goals of those who conceive the monetary policy.

Which often aligns with the people that elect them. Central banking fixes serious flaws in money systems, and provides levers to mitigate disasters caused by external forces. Compare it to a boat. Central banking gives you the ability to steer, sure someone might be bad at it and lead you into dangerous waters. But decentralized currency is like shooting the helmsman and ripping out the rudder because someone did a b…

Decentralized currency is the lifeboat if the captain goes mad and decides to steer into iceberg territory. It's harder to steer, but better than sinking in freezing waters (hyperinflation).