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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

#801

Post by TimJRobinson »

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…

Ethereum has over 260,000 validators right now [0], and you can run one on a Raspberry Pi. Some are on centralized exchanges but most are not.

Rocketpool [1] also recently launched which is a decentralized service that makes it super easy to setup your own node, and more profitable than staking anywhere else.

My node is generating the normal staking rewards (~5.5%), plus another 12% bonus (from ETH from individuals being paired with my node), plus another 50% in RPL rewards. That 50% will surely drop, but it will always be better than just staking by itself.

RocketPool also allows individuals to stake as little as 0.01 ETH, the same as centralized exchanges, but it's decentralized, and they get rETH in return, which they can use in Decentralized Finance, giving them even better returns.

Put together Rocketpool gives better returns in a more decentralized way than any centralized exchange does, and unless you're really new and don't want to move off your exchange, it's a no brainer better alternative.

[0]: https://beaconcha.in/

[1]: https://rocketpool.net/

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#802

Post by Jetrel »

cs702 wrote: post #693
teawrecks wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO people listing things that discourage an attack (people will hate him, his credit cards won't work, etc) are just people trying to comfort themselves. It's like saying, "No one would break into my home because they might hurt themselves breaking in, or I might hurt them up, or they might get caught by the police and go to jail. It's just too risky." At the end of the day, Dr. Evil will gladly spend 10s of billion…

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…

Arguably the same thing blockchain tech got away from — a primary stakeholder with a "monopoly on violence" (i.e. a government with armed police et al). If you attack the US banking system, they will stop you in quite short order. The FBI doesn't screw around.

If you attack the blockchain, well ... uh ... the owners will ... be really unhappy with you?

Realistically you're only in trouble for doing that if you're pissing off someone else with "the means to violence". If you screw up money laundering operations for a cartel, then what you're likely looking at is acts of violence between two criminal organizations, but if one of them has the upper hand, they can basically act with impunity.

When you're looking at the "small fry" – individual people with their own bitcoin/whatever stakes? They're just fucked. It's true if someone steals your wallet, but it's also true if someone torpedoes the whole system. That's the cardinal problem with all of these blockchain technologies — by deliberately designing the whole thing to disintermediate the authorities; they accomplished exactly that: there are no authorities to deal with systemic problems.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#803

Post by randomNumber7 »

keymone wrote: post #450
lottin wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain? No they don’t. Of course, they have a choice. If didn't, miners would serve no purpose. We would just have one block and that would be the block that would be appended. The consensus would be achieved automatically, without any need of guessing secret numbers. > And if it was an election, wouldn’t the result always be the same with largest miner always wi…

> Of course, they have a choice lol, no they don't. a certain hash wins, every ~10 minutes. that hash is calculated from sha(block, nonce), where nonce is the randomized part that miner mutates to get different hashes. once a hash that satisfies the protocol is found - that's it, you can't choose a different block to append to the chain. it is just laughable that i have to explain this level of basics.

lol, they don't understand you

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#805

Post by meribold »

nybble41 wrote: post #784
meribold wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that's how it's going to work, what stopped nations from making a treaty in which everyone commits to an immutable monetary policy so far? And how does Bitcoin result in whatever it was not being a showstopper anymore?

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#806

Post by nybble41 »

meribold wrote: post #805
nybble41 wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If that's how it's going to work, what stopped nations from making a treaty in which everyone commits to an immutable monetary policy so far? And how does Bitcoin result in whatever it was not being a showstopper anymore?

Many countries already use money internally such as the USD (outside the US) or Euro (outside the EU) for which they do not control the policy. Explicit agreements to use a common currency across nations and share control of the policy are relatively rare; no examples come to mind apart from the EU, and that hasn't always gone according to plan, as Greece can attest. But hard currency is still a fairly common basis for exchange between nation-states, and other countries' currencies are more likely to be adopted when they are governed by relatively immutable policies. Of course, if those policies change to be less immutable it can take time for the effects to manifest. The USD was relatively stable until recently, but other countries are probably reconsidering their dependence on it at this point given the increase in the supply over the past few years.

If Bitcoin does eventually become a common instrument of trade at this level it will fill the same niche currently occupied by gold and other precious metals.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#807

Post by puchatek »

javert wrote: post #775
iostream23 wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin proof-of-work difficulty must always increase, the electrical needs are always ever-growing. While you claim that incentivizing electrical production is what POW does, in reality it is a large drain of electricity on a finite electrical grids capacity and it DOES take away from other uses of electricity LIKE aluminum smelting or running hospitals. It is an active and actual source of pollution and uses more e…

Bitcoin difficulty does not always increase and needs not always increase. As for the rest... so what? It uses a lot of electricity and there is some pollution---but a lot of bitcoin mining is done with hydro or geothermal (and will be nuclear if bitcoin continues to grow), so, so what about some pollution?

Some mining is powered sustainably. And for some of THAT power it is true that it wouldn't be used for residential anyway. But for the majority of BTC's power needs the sources are not renewable.

So there's a simple question: how much value do we get out of this tech per CO2e it emits and per ton of e-waste it creates. And AFAICT the answer is: not enough to keep tolerating it in a time where humanity as a whole is seriously worried about climate change for the first time ever.

If you can magically move _all_ the miners to sites with excess renewable electricity and permanently slash the hash rate by 99.9% then maybe it can be tolerated. Until then I would welcome more China-style crackdowns on mining activity across the world.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#808

Post by light_cone »

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…

With VDF you cannot rebuild the 100 minutes worth of blocks in less than 100 minutes, because with the VDF logging, you just proved that you would need at least 100 minutes to go from block n to n+(100 minutes). You can check in 10 seconds, but can only produce in 100 minutes, just like you can check in an instant that a bitcoin block starts with enough zeroes. So it defines the rate of generating blocks.

Of course, nothing can stop anyone from creating parallel 100-minute long branches if that was the only thing, as, unlike PoW, it does not cost anything (except time) to create branches.

So you still need a consensus mechanism, a way to, as an agent of the network, decide what is the right branch. On bitcoin, it is very simple: go to the longest chain, it's where the majority of mining power went, so that is clearly the consensus (with 1 joule = 1 vote).

On ethereum, it's much more complex, involving promises with money at stake locked somewhere, so that anyone can detect cheaters, automatically unlock and take their money as punishment, and reward the whistle-blower with it. So, unless everyone is foolish enough to watch their money seized by the network, it does not happen.

The exact way the correct branch is decided is by random election of one staker, where the randomness is proved to be actually random. After all, using a VDF, you can now prove that its output won't be known until x seconds have passed, if you put the most recent block hash as input. So during that time, you can agree on an fair pseudo-random election algorithm that will take this VDF output as a seed when it becomes available.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#809

Post by keymone »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #770
keymone wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Red flag, sure. But when they say things like "The peer-reviewed paper to which I linked, which I am not proposing as a replacement for Bitcoin, explains (to those who are willing to read it) why the block being chosen before or after the leader election does not matter when it comes to the security and consensus properties of Bitcoin." it seems very clear to me that they do understand the mechanism, despite that red…

There are variants of PoS where stakers can delegate their "votes" to other stakers and there are variants where validators compete for "leader" timeslots. These words carry certain meaning and none of it is useful or applicable to bitcoin. As with flat earth analogy, I agree that it's possible to have this perspective, i just think it's harmful for conveying the idea of bitcoin correctly.

Re: Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

#810

Post by javert »

puchatek wrote: post #807
javert wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin difficulty does not always increase and needs not always increase. As for the rest... so what? It uses a lot of electricity and there is some pollution---but a lot of bitcoin mining is done with hydro or geothermal (and will be nuclear if bitcoin continues to grow), so, so what about some pollution?

Some mining is powered sustainably. And for some of THAT power it is true that it wouldn't be used for residential anyway. But for the majority of BTC's power needs the sources are not renewable. So there's a simple question: how much value do we get out of this tech per CO2e it emits and per ton of e-waste it creates. And AFAICT the answer is: not enough to keep tolerating it in a time where humanity as a whole is s…

I can't tolerate the global exploitation of non-ruling people in every nation by their rulers via fiat money manipulation. (And every nation calling itself a "democracy" is actually a "bureaucracy.")

If you aren't upset about this, you probably haven't studied it. I say that in a spirit of helpfulness. Fiat money grossly distorts all of humanity's economic output and therefore retards our progress on all things, including fixing climate problems. Just one example: The US is becoming a nation of renters because enormous funds are buying up the houses with fiat money they borrow nearly for free.

Fortunately, with bitcoin, we can do something about that, without (eventually) harming the environment.

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