Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#2I'm reading Charlie Stross's (cstross here) "Neptune's Brood" at the moment, which envisions an interstellar society constrained by physics (i.e. no FTL)... I can imagine the SCP would play a role in such a society perhaps!
Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#3The authors of this protocol made a valiant effort to defend against sybil attacks by requiring intersecting quorums. However, it's not clear to me that they succeeded. Specifically, I worry that they are depending on people running nodes to vet other nodes in some out of band fashion. Clever and patient sybil attackers could insert themselves into the network over weeks or months, and then disrupt it while shorting it on exchanges, or by conducting double spend attacks against exchanges.
As was shown in Bitshares, which relied on holders of BTS to vote on "good" block producers, users can not be relied upon to make these judgements. They will either vote at random, or vote based on trivial stats like uptime. The holders of BTS ultimately paid the price when the creators of the coin forced through a proposal to increase the supply cap and the price collapsed as a result, but the creators have since moved on to other coins.
It seems to me that proof of work works, and proof of stake (as implemented in Tezos) may work, although it's not been running successfully for very long. I'm very suspicious of other consensus algorithms protecting billions of $s worth of assets.
Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#4Good discussion on an old thread between D.Mazieres (protocol author), Greg Maxwell and Vitalik https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342348
Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#5The authors of this protocol made a valiant effort to defend against sybil attacks by requiring intersecting quorums. However, it's not clear to me that they succeeded. Specifically, I worry that they are depending on people running nodes to vet other nodes in some out of band fashion. Clever and patient sybil attackers could insert themselves into the network over weeks or months, and then disrupt it while shorting…
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Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#6I'm reading Charlie Stross's (cstross here) "Neptune's Brood" at the moment, which envisions an interstellar society constrained by physics (i.e. no FTL)... I can imagine the SCP would play a role in such a society perhaps!
I don't think it'll spoil anything to say Stross actually invented his own digital currency protocol for that book, taking advantage of the speed of light limit.
Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#7The authors of this protocol made a valiant effort to defend against sybil attacks by requiring intersecting quorums. However, it's not clear to me that they succeeded. Specifically, I worry that they are depending on people running nodes to vet other nodes in some out of band fashion. Clever and patient sybil attackers could insert themselves into the network over weeks or months, and then disrupt it while shorting…
https://stellar.stackexchange.com/questions/160/how-does-the...
Seems like this has been discussed before.
Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#8The authors of this protocol made a valiant effort to defend against sybil attacks by requiring intersecting quorums. However, it's not clear to me that they succeeded. Specifically, I worry that they are depending on people running nodes to vet other nodes in some out of band fashion. Clever and patient sybil attackers could insert themselves into the network over weeks or months, and then disrupt it while shorting…
I think the whole blockchain-based consensus model is wrong, as it is not very scalable AND it is susceptible to 33% attacks.
Here is what I propose instead:
https://community.intercoin.org/t/intercoin-technology-conse...
Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#9Who cares? The vast majority of Stellar's currency XLM is owned by the founders just like Ripple, and their efforts to distribute this currency to the public are entirely disingenuous. For example, their 2017 airdrop purported to distribute up to 16% of the initial XLM to Bitcoin holders, while less than 10% of that amount was actually claimed (as to be expected when you make people jump through hoops to claim something of dubious value).
The crypto space has an near-infinite supply of new coins and new whitepapers to trap the naturally curious into a hopeless cycle.
Re: Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
#10Who cares? The vast majority of Stellar's currency XLM is owned by the founders just like Ripple, and their efforts to distribute this currency to the public are entirely disingenuous. For example, their 2017 airdrop purported to distribute up to 16% of the initial XLM to Bitcoin holders, while less than 10% of that amount was actually claimed (as to be expected when you make people jump through hoops to claim someth…
Did you read the post? It’s not about the cryptocurrency, or even the network. It’s about abstract ideas for distributed consensus, which are applicable beyond any cryptocurrency. It’s probably interesting even if you’re not interested in Stellar!