Topic: Bitcoin needs to move to POS. Thoughts? - page 3. (Read 7512 times)

Satoshi discussed and anticipated the issue, so saying what Satoshi did was dead when wallet mining was dead is not a factual statement.

Some of what Satoshi said at various times in 2010:

IIRC there are some academic papers on the topic, however I don't have any interesting links to hand.

There are some deep problems with POS. The election of who should stake *should* be a lottery that participants have no control over. One vulnerability arises because the election process relies on the block chain to generate entropy. Elected people get to write to the block chain, thus changing who should stake next.

Without something like POW, it's possible for someone to retroactively take the block chain, alter it so *they* are chosen, and then they can create the next block. He can even produce a block that allows him to stake again.. and so on.

POW prevents this, making more difficult with every block to rewrite the chain. POS doesn't have anything like this, the CPU power required to grind variations of the chain which favour the attacker is rather small.

What Satoshi did was dead when wallet mining was dead.


CIYAM are you working on usable computation of pow, improved pos or something else?

Moving bitcoin to POS will make it dead, bitcoin POW mining is what makes it price stable and worth,if bitcoin algo changed to POS then its price will drop because if there will no investment and cost to mine people will start dumping it for lower then market price that will make it dead.

Sorry OP you are not Satoshi here. What Satoshi did was right and is still working immensely worldwide. POS coins will never ever succeed and most importantly it will decrease the scalability as more people will never trade with BTC anymore rather than staking it for more profits.

Tl;Dr; POS will never happen. If you are not satisfied then go find another POS altcoin.

I don't know if any math analysis has been done to work out at what % such an issue/attack would start to wreak havoc but as stated if all parties "acted selfishly" (which is what is assumed in Bitcoin) then there is no reason to think that even small % holders wouldn't create multiple blocks (one for each possible fork) so they would all end up colluding in what would then amount to most likely an even bigger problem than >50% (as the forks would never end).

Also note that to start a fork you only need to withhold your "better block" just long enough after an inferior one has been minted (clearly the more minting power you have the longer you can make such a fork before it is "published" but even a fork of 1 block could start such a chain reaction and that could be done unintentionally even).

It should be noted that "automatic checkpoint" mechanisms can limit the length of any particular fork but you are still potentially just going to start up a bunch of new forks after such a checkpoint has occurred (and once faith in such a blockchain has been dealt this kind of a blow I couldn't see the coin really having a future).

Basically POS only works if the coin is controlled by a cartel (which won't work against itself in creating and continually extending such forks) or if the (vast?) majority of players do not participate in such NAS behaviour (i.e. they only use the standard software that won't behave that way).

Those that argue "but we haven't seen this happen on XYZ" simply aren't admitting the most likely reason why that would be the case (i.e. because XYZ is actually under then control of a cartel and of course this is almost impossible to either prove or disprove). Also if an alt-coin that isn't worth very much is using POS then it is far less likely to be subject to such an issue as there simply isn't the financial incentive to care (and a smaller community is perhaps more likely to have more honest players).

Of course the standard software would have to be modified to take the NAS approach (but presumably that wouldn't cost much to do if there was potentially a lot of money to be made from wreaking such havoc).

IMO there are other ways that energy consumption could be dramatically reduced that don't carry such a risk (and I'll be elaborating more upon that later this year most likely).

CIYAM, thank you for the great explanation.

Is the kind of attack that you described can be successfully implemented without holding 51% of the coins?

I actually liked the way Bitcoin is right now - mining. If POS were to come, than the early adopters will have very huge advantage. Which will make more medias advertise Bitcoin as a 'ponzi'. I do not think the developers will make Bitcoin POS anyway. Your idea is good but I'd say a lot of Bitcoiners do not like it.

There are a number of possible attack vectors but perhaps the most well known is called the NAS (Nothing At Stake) issue.

Basically the whole "benefit" of POS is that it is ultra-low energy which means that solving a block takes virtually no effort (so creating 100+ different blocks at the same height would be fairly straight forward just using standard hardware).

Choosing the "best" block for the consensus chain is normally based upon the previous block and something to do with either the UTXO's being used (for Bitcoin clones) or to do with an account id (for other implementations) but it would be very simple to withhold your "best" block whilst preparing more blocks (and the more of the UTXOs/accounts you control the easier this could become) in order to do a "re-org" (i.e. to re-write history).

It should be noted that blockchains by their very nature can't avoid re-orgs as P2P consensus is dependent upon timing between nodes which is unpredictable.

If such a fork happens and other nodes aren't sure which fork will win in the long run then they would have nothing to lose (hence NAS) to simply create blocks for every fork "just in case" (to make sure they don't end up losing out) which could lead to longer and longer forks (and it would make rational sense to create blocks for each and every fork if there is any sort of block reward or other benefit from minting new blocks).

Larger re-orgs due to such an issue/attack could likely lead to a very unstable blockchain that would presumably lose the faith of its user base (basically this could be thought of as being a sort of "tragedy of the commons" issue where the common property is the various forks).

Basically the only real defense against this kind of issue/attack is centralisation (which is not at all what one hopes would ever occur with Bitcoin).

There seems to be a consensus of some people here that PoS is not secure, but I didn't see anyone elaborate as to why. Is it the monopoly problem or is there something else?

Please (really, pretty please) don't send me to Google it. I'm a newb, I admit, but I also spent a while reading the PoS vs. PoW posts and articles, and couldn't find any other consensus argument beside the monopoly problem.

This.

Maybe another example:

The USA stands on nr. 1 in military spending.
If you look at the top 10 the USA spends as much as the following 9 nations together.

Isnt that a terrible waste of money?
The answer is: Security is damn expensive.

I think everyone should have ponies and we should invent free energy and matter transmutation tomorrow and all live in peace and harmony without need for any money.

why not?  It seems just as likely as bitcoin moving to POS.

interesting thought,  And it will not take another 100 years to mine the last 5 million coins.. miners should of decimated the blockchain by 2041 at the earliest.

The 'work' is not just work, its also work of distribution organized as a competitive model of creating the money supply, this value is partially preserved and part of it is wasted. Competition is a great mechanism for selecting quality, but fungible things have no difference in quality, so it has no function other than distributive, and the latter is centralizing very fast. When miners became different from the users an antagonism internal to the system was created. Users and miners now have different rationalities, the latter's optimal course of action isn't to increase the value or promote adoption, but to decrease it further and corner the market, so only the most cost efficent miners (the biggest farms with the lowest electricity costs) are able to make profit, driving the competition away, then pump to profit even more and then repeat the cycle if the pump spawns some competition. Because in PoW security also depends on distribution of money creation and PoW is centralizing I can't see how it could work without decentralizing mining profits. PoS isn't worse in this regard, but it is lacking in a better mechanism of dynamic distribution that wholly depends on distributing the profit of money creation.


I wonder what fork the miners would choose...
There will never be a chance for bitcoin to go to PoS, it was too late since before PoS was created.

Carlton is correct. "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."  Somehow, someone, somewhere is paying for the security. In POW, the work portion does that. The energy isn't wasted, it is the security. Whether the security comes from work or something else, you get the amount you pay resources for.  There are many long well written discussions about this if you google things like POS vs POW coins etc.

Regardless, the only way to settle it is to fork and let people decide for themselves. A top down, enforced approach has no chance of success in convincing everyone.  If you really think POS is better, fork it as above (or pay someone to do so) and let people decide for themselves which branch they want to use going forward from that point, maybe they use both - I think it would be a great experiment and would love to see how it turns out.  The thing is, no one has forked Bitcoin like this in the years since POS was proposed just lots of discussions about why they think POS is better without an empirical study.  So I think a lot is just argument for the sake of doing so without any intent of actually taking action while expecting "someone else" to implement it for them.


P.s.  QQ: "Dump" is not "dumb". :-)

POS and POW are not functionally equivalent. The so-called "waste" energy represents the "work" aspect of proof-of-work. Apparently too simple for some.

So you are proposing a POS coin change but keeping the 21 million limit? That imho is NOT gonna happen in my lifetime...

they can't even get the politics out of a 'hard fork' try taking transaction fees away from the network folk that are still doing pow

when it is no longer in any way/shape/form due to extreme difficulty makes any sense to mine BTC (or rely on that as major $$$ point)

(above is from my limited view on how this works..but I mean really ..the devs of any flavor core/classic get into nerd slap fights on a hard fork
or not.....a POS coin change would never happen (again imho) just from the egos/politics/power involved ..or lost there of....so it a no go from that start

again imho

(always take what I say with a grain of salt at one time in my newbie BTC youth of 2013 I DRANK the BFL kool aid of 'In 2 weeks' (tm BFL) always best

to keep that in mind on my posts) (such a happy clueless kool aid drinker I was in 2013...alas now I'm a a cynical ..is it all gonna go FUD and "Tulips' thru dev stupidity skeptic)

I miss my 'cute' newbie world view

POS would require less energy therefore POW is wasting energy. Simple enough.

Well, the "easy" answer is to fork Bitcoin software into a POS coin. Once that is done, announce that in 50000 (or whatever) blocks it will fork the block chain itself.  Then see how many people follow. You'd have a bit less than a year to convince people with 50000 blocks.

At worst you'd end up with Bitcoin and POS-Bitcoin. Discussions here will (I wager) do nothing (it has been discussed ad nauseam), putting the time into the software to implement it will show people that you are serious.

Once the split happens, watch to see what happens to the price of coins on the two chains in fiat terms. That will tell you what everyone thinks of the POW vs POS debate and whether it is a winning idea - or not.

(And to me this seems really off topic for the Dev and Tech section)

@Banks

Well, maybe you are right.
But if all would do the same, because it is the right way, there never would be winners.
Winners are those, who try that what other people are afraid of or change the ways.
Btw Bitcoin was such a "changing way" and you decided to stay @money?
Is there moneytalk.org, too?

Sometimes it can be a point of time, only.
A lot of products, inventions, stuff, books, pictures, music, political "correctnes" and whatever was just 100 years, 1000 years or sometimes just month to early.

What will happen if the last bitcoin was found?
On Bitcoin is no 1% per year rule like with some crypto´s, who already are trying to find a solution that mining will never stop with those coins.

Even if POS failed and it is not a matter of time --- it will just stay a garbage-solution.
Then the thinking behind this solution and why ever POS was invented was to prevent power waste at the end and stop the need of miner to get the system working.

POW is working. For now, only.
POS was maybe a step to more ---- maybe to early ---- or just garbage. If we use water-, sun- and windpower it is well (no it isnt!!!)

But anyways, Soul_eater is right that maybe Bitcoin can´t handle it at the end.

Banks, what would you say to "such a mix". POW, but the calc-power is for usefull things like science research and not just for 1+2+1+3+1+?
Just for the time it is POW and mining is used and nothing else - whatever "else" could be.

And Banks, your are an older member to this board. Ofc you know more and you already read a lot of more and maybe you are addicted to Bitcoin many more years - but never give up to help other people. This is a board for talking and I am always happy, if I search something, that there is maybe the ONE USER who is spending a nice and usefull answer to me.
Even if you are 10 level higher - if you have a question somebody on level 15 has to explain you - you want to get an answer with respect, or? Dont want to hang into this too much. Maybe you know each other from older posts already (big friends) - but have fun or work hard on a board or take a day of break and relaxing time  

A buddy is saying this sometimes and I like it much:
Dump people will maybe your nurse, cook or paramedic later - be gentle and you can live longer

And if you tell the dump people, that they are dump, then maybe they will change it and get smart.
And then you are as smart as the dump people and they dont like you
But if you help them, then they are as smart as you and the like you - and maybe then they can and will help you.

Ofc - I am one of those dump people, too. Because if I ever would say that I am smart, I proofed that I am not with the same sentence