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Topic: [Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate - page 2. (Read 3812 times)

newbie
Activity: 29
Merit: 46
Sure, but can't the same apply on Proof-of-Work too? Say that the chain splits to old-Bitcoin and new-Bitcoin that supports merged-mining. Miners that mine the old chain can use redundant hashes to mine for the new chain, with the exact same hash rate. All that's needed for new-Bitcoin is to prove you've worked for it. It'll be essentially a sidechain, but with no dependence on the mainchain.

I don't see how Proof-of-Stake defeats the point of split. It's not the miners/stakers who define the value of the coins, but the users. If a split occurs, there might be new money created, but the product remains the same. Market value of 1 BTC is just split to 1-old-BTC and 1-new-BTC.

But the chains become independent once they split. The hashes would be different for different blocks, so you'd either have to choose to point your miners at the new or the old chain.
The miners that believe they can make more out of the new chain would point their miners at the new chain, and miners who think they can make more out of the old chain would stay on the old chain.
The new chain would have different consensus parameters, which could not be subverted without significant cost to the miners who wish to subvert it.

Under PoS, this is not the case.
Since the staked amount persists on both tails, stakers could just stake the same way on both tails, and subvert the new chain, and its consensus parameters would end up being the same as the old chain.
member
Activity: 60
Merit: 89
I tried to explain some of the differences in PoW/PoS here https://phyro.github.io/nakamoto/. It doesn't go into theory or touches subjects like coin distribution. It focuses more on the difference in how a new block is added. Let me know if I got some things wrong.
legendary
Activity: 3472
Merit: 10611
To my understanding, in a PoS chain, both forks of a chain retain the staking balances on both sides, and it would only make sense for the stakers to validate the same blocks on both chains.
Sure, but can't the same apply on Proof-of-Work too? Say that the chain splits to old-Bitcoin and new-Bitcoin that supports merged-mining. Miners that mine the old chain can use redundant hashes to mine for the new chain, with the exact same hash rate. All that's needed for new-Bitcoin is to prove you've worked for it. It'll be essentially a sidechain, but with no dependence on the mainchain.
The difference is that there is still "work" being done on both chains, even the merged mined coin is being mined and it could actually have increased difficulty for it to no longer work as a merged mined coin.
In the PoS case, there is no actual "work" being done, and it is trivial for the staker to benefit from both chains at virtually no cost.
hero member
Activity: 882
Merit: 5834
not your keys, not your coins!
To my understanding, in a PoS chain, both forks of a chain retain the staking balances on both sides, and it would only make sense for the stakers to validate the same blocks on both chains.
Sure, but can't the same apply on Proof-of-Work too? Say that the chain splits to old-Bitcoin and new-Bitcoin that supports merged-mining. Miners that mine the old chain can use redundant hashes to mine for the new chain, with the exact same hash rate. All that's needed for new-Bitcoin is to prove you've worked for it. It'll be essentially a sidechain, but with no dependence on the mainchain.

I don't see how Proof-of-Stake defeats the point of split. It's not the miners/stakers who define the value of the coins, but the users. If a split occurs, there might be new money created, but the product remains the same. Market value of 1 BTC is just split to 1-old-BTC and 1-new-BTC.
I don't think there ever was a Fork-BTC that was designed to be able to be mined merged with the original BTC. This seems like a very constructed example.
So, while in PoW model this seems like a constructed, rare exception, in PoS this is the default. You can 'mine' / validate on both chains by default, while in PoW you must decide where you point your miners and what chain you burn your electricity on.
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 7340
Farewell, Leo
To my understanding, in a PoS chain, both forks of a chain retain the staking balances on both sides, and it would only make sense for the stakers to validate the same blocks on both chains.
Sure, but can't the same apply on Proof-of-Work too? Say that the chain splits to old-Bitcoin and new-Bitcoin that supports merged-mining. Miners that mine the old chain can use redundant hashes to mine for the new chain, with the exact same hash rate. All that's needed for new-Bitcoin is to prove you've worked for it. It'll be essentially a sidechain, but with no dependence on the mainchain.

I don't see how Proof-of-Stake defeats the point of split. It's not the miners/stakers who define the value of the coins, but the users. If a split occurs, there might be new money created, but the product remains the same. Market value of 1 BTC is just split to 1-old-BTC and 1-new-BTC.
legendary
Activity: 1568
Merit: 6660
bitcoincleanup.com / bitmixlist.org
Am I wrong? Is there some mechanism by which PoS supports chain splits in a robust way?

While I certainly do not count as a PoS'er by any definition of the term, the simple answer to your question is, bare PoS doesn't have such a mechanism.

There is financial incentive to mine on both chains, which leads to double-spend attacks and all that.

Ethereum has a financial deterrent in that you lose you stake if you try to submit a bad block, but there is actually no criteria deployed to the network yet to judge what is a bad block.
newbie
Activity: 29
Merit: 46
The only thing I can contribute to this thread is the following question (for PoSers):

How does PoS support chain splits?

The ability to fork the chain is fundamental for resilience.

Without this, you might as well just have an Excel spreadsheet on somebody's laptop IMO.

To my understanding, in a PoS chain, both forks of a chain retain the staking balances on both sides, and it would only make sense for the stakers to validate the same blocks on both chains.
This would end with two chains with the same parameters, which defeats the point of a split.

In a PoW chain, whenever a chain split occurs, miners have to pick which fork to continue mining on, so you would be left with two competing chains of different parameters, of which one would eventually win out as the coins on one chain slowly devalue relative to the other as people sell their coins on one chain to buy coins on the other (as it should be).

Am I wrong? Is there some mechanism by which PoS supports chain splits in a robust way?
legendary
Activity: 1568
Merit: 6660
bitcoincleanup.com / bitmixlist.org
Bump...

I'm adding info from this thread to bitcoincleanup, so it's important that I clearly understand what is being talked about here.

In both PoS and PoW, if the miners as a whole act badly, they will lose their investment. However, with PoW, the underlying coin will survive. This is an important distinction. If a large PoS miner were to successfully act badly, they could potentially enter into derraritive contracts to offset the coin they have "locked up" that is mining. This removes the requirement for a PoS miner to actually invest in their "mining" operation. OTOH, a PoW miner cannot easily hedge their investment if they intend to act badly while mining.

Can you elaborate how exactly such an attack could be carried out, from A to Z?
member
Activity: 74
Merit: 86
More sidechain demonstration: the normal 1 sat/vB fee means 110 bytes per each P2WPKH-P2WPKH pair. Here, each user can pay 105 satoshis per entry, and the validator pays only 85 satoshis for validating all of that, and for enforcing that on-chain. It is trustless, it is based on SIGHASH_SINGLE|SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY, and it allows reaching lower fees. Those low-fee transactions are broadcasted only on a sidechain, where they are collected, grabbed by some validator, and then that validator can be paid by getting a discount on its own transaction, it is a reward for the whole batching effort. In practice, that validator could earn even more by batching A->B and B->C sidechain transactions into A->C mainchain transaction. But this example shows, what is possible here and now, with no protocol changes, more sidechain features are ongoing.
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Edit: There is a validator that earned 97 satoshis, and provided Taproot validation, where users paid 105 satoshis, instead of 112. See transaction: 99459ff5ce058067ed87b99f326305768444068a5659dce5ea5f126bfd4b0bda.
full member
Activity: 168
Merit: 421
武士道
There are unlimited possibilities that depend on the details. If we don't have a paper that explains clearly how a Proof-of-Stake sidechain is somewhat superior, we can only do pointless speculation.
True.

[…]
Now the concept sounds much more sound. I’ll wait for the proposal to be here, so you have the time to work the details out. Good luck. This could have potential.
member
Activity: 74
Merit: 86
Quote
they need to move an existing asset into a weaker form of security
They usually have "weaker form of security" only because people don't know how to implement Merged Mining correctly (see: NameCoin). There should be one source of the Proof of Work, and each sidechain should commit to that, so users will first get everything sidechain-confirmed, and then Bitcoin-confirmed. After the latter, it is as strong and as resistant to chain reorganizations as Bitcoin itself. And again, Proof of Work can be replaced by Proof of Stake inside the sidechain, without affecting the mainchain consensus at all. Also, sidechains can be created and destroyed at will, it is just a matter of signing the right transaction, to deposit funds into the sidechain, and to take them back, just by moving them on the mainchain. Now I know that any testnet or signet can be easily deployed in that way, and I am trying to think about mainnet, and to deploy some test networks, just to show how it works.

Quote
In the case of a PoS sidechain the security will be based on how much capital is inside it, let’s say it starts out with 200.000 € worth of Bitcoin locked inside. It would be easy for any whale, to take control over the network in the beginning.
It is not that easy to take control, because things will be committed on-chain, and after that, it will be very hard for any whale to overwrite that.

Quote
can an attacker who controls majority of the capital send everyones funds back to the main chain, or make the coins inaccessible forever?
Users are protected from stealing in the same way as in LN: there are penalty transactions. Also, they are automatically broadcasted, without any watchtower, because revealing any previous transaction will allow unlocking the penalty transaction and broadcast it on-chain. All nodes observe both the mainchain and the sidechain, any malicious action of some wealthy sidechain wallet will be noticed by the sidechain network, and all honest nodes will react immediately, by broadcasting penalty transactions to the mainchain.

Quote
Isnt the whole promise of sidechains, we’re used less, so we can offer services more cheaply? But this incentive to even use them falls apart once they gain traction, because then they face the same problems as the main chain. In terms of scalability, decentralization and security.
If sidechains are done in the right way, then they have one nice property, that is not possible on the mainchain: it is possible to prune the history, as it gets confirmed on the mainchain. Coins are created by signing mainnet coins, and then they are destroyed, when mainnet coins are moved. That means, the sidechain history can be regularly pruned, when it gets confirmed on the mainchain. In this way, if the sidechain will be too big, then people can always move them directly, from one sidechain to another, a single mainchain transaction can clear the old sidechain history, and move everything to the new, fresh sidechain. And users can decide, if they want it or not, because they have to do it explicitly, by signing transactions. Imagine a Bitcoin, where you could download only the UTXO set, the Proof of Work headers, some recent blocks, and then the Initial Blockchain Download would take, I don't know, 10 GB? Maybe 20 GB? Only sidechains has such properties, because the mainchain has no upper layer.

Quote
Sure, staking is cheaper and easier for validators, but if the task is providing security and consensus, and this method cant do it, then how was the task solved?
It just makes it two-steps and fills the gap between zero and one confirmation.
Without my system: you have zero confirmations with full RBF, so anything can be always replaced, at any time.
With my system: you still have zero confirmations, but you can pay validators to sign your transaction, so the chance for it being unconfirmed forever is much lower.

Quote
You can’t have higher fees or the side chain won’t get used.
Fees will be automatically regulated by the network itself, as it is in Bitcoin. There will be just some market fee.

Quote
If the side chain has more throughput and thus make the average transaction cheaper, it will suffer the centralization problems, the main chain is trying to avoid.
You can worry about "centralization problems" in LN, they are exactly the same as in my proposal.

Quote
How will they get more coins?
Users will pass their coins to the validators explicitly, just like in LN.

Quote
How isn’t PoS more and more concentration of wealth at the top, automatically built-in, no work required?
Again, LN has the same problem, my proposal won't make it any worse than that.

Quote
Lightning is completely different it’s competitive and takes skill and planning to run successfully, it doesn’t work on the premise to give people more fees, sure the highest capital nodes can get more fees, but there can still be competition from smaller nodes, because most people won’t be needing to send high amounts everyday.
The same will be here. Also, note that mining should be decentralized, that means each validator should validate its own set of transactions, and their efforts should be then combined, to create a superblock for the whole network.

Quote
It actually helps the main chain, instead of being in competition with it, both balance each other out.
My proposal also helps the main chain, for example by taking some traffic outside of it, and then posting a batched state of the sidechain every sometimes.

Edit:
Quote
The Lightning Network doesn't; you can't double-sign transactions.
The same in my network: it will be rejected in the same way as double spends are rejected. Unless it will have a higher fee, then full RBF kicks in, exactly in the same way as it is on the main network. But after getting at least one sidechain confirmation, it will be very hard to do, in the same way as it is hard to do one-block-reorg on the main chain.

Quote
This just doesn't sound right.
Why not? Users should have a choice. If they can sell their bitcoins, and buy some useless altcoins, then why not provide them a different choice: just sign the same coins, but instead of selling them, get some sidechain coins, of the same amount in satoshis, and use new features as you wanted. Why not go that way? That proposal could be used to get rid of altcoins, which create new coins out of thin air. They should all be based on Bitcoin, there should be always no more than 21 million coins, some of them should fly on the mainchain, and the rest should be moved inside LN, sidechains, or different (not known yet) networks.

Quote
Therefore doing the work and staking will always be more profitable than staking alone.
Well, so miners will mine and stake. It is still better than mining alone, it is just the first step to convince them into staking. If they will stake, then they can see the benefits of staking, and later, if they decide to turn off their machines for any reason (for example because the endlessly growing difficulty will force them to do so), they can focus on staking, instead of leaving the crypto altogether.

Quote
If we don't have a paper that explains clearly how a Proof-of-Stake sidechain is somewhat superior, we can only do pointless speculation.
Keep calm, I'm working on it. Meanwhile, I can answer some questions and make my proposal harder to stop, based on your responses. I don't want to share something that could be easily destroyed by me, or by some regular people from forums. So, this discussion is definitely helpful to speed up the whole process, and I appreciate it. It is like in artificial intelligence: the smarter you are, the faster and the better your model can be trained.

Edit: You wanted more details, so here we go. Let's assume there is Alice, sending coins to Bob. And there is some Zack that wants to validate it. How it should be done? For example in this way:
Code:
+---------------------------------------------------------+
| ZackOne 1.00 BTC                    -> ZackTwo 1.01 BTC |
| SIGHASH_SINGLE|SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY                     |
+---------------------------------------------------------+
That means, Zack is going to sign something, for a 0.01 BTC fee, and wants to put 1.00 BTC at stake. By using such sighashes, Zack can attach this single input and single output into any transaction that will pay him. Then, let's assume that Alice wants to send some coins to Bob:
Code:
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| Alice 0.51 BTC                      -> Bob 0.50 BTC |
| SIGHASH_SINGLE|SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
Guess what, both parts can be combined into a single transaction, that will have zero on-chain fee:
Code:
+--------------------------------------+
| ZackOne 1.00 BTC -> ZackTwo 1.01 BTC |
| Alice 0.51 BTC      Bob 0.50 BTC     |
+--------------------------------------+
That means, on-chain miners can of course mine it, but then they will get nothing. And imagine using some smaller fee than on-chain, so many sidechain transactions will be combined, and they will later reach the minimal on-chain fee, so they could be then broadcasted, as a single, huge, batched transaction. Impressive, isn't it? Also, sidechain can optimize things even more, by storing transactions in encrypted form (by using Homomorphic Encryption), then Pedersen Commitments can be used to manipulate encrypted transactions, that could be later decrypted and broadcasted to the mainchain. There are endless possibilities, I don't know what users will invent, I am trying to just provide the base standardized layer for that.
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 7340
Farewell, Leo
Yes, it's the same kind of Proof of Stake, but it has a chain. And that difference allows direct payments between participants, and that's the key difference between my proposal and Lightning Network.
We still don't know most of your network's details, though. For example, Proof-of-Stake-alone systems (can) suffer from subjectivity, as I've said in the OP. The Lightning Network doesn't; you can't double-sign transactions.

It will be a gradual way from 100% mining and 0% staking into 1% mining (the minimal difficulty is one) and 99% staking.
This just doesn't sound right.

then people will find a good balance between that, and will see that staking can give them more profits
Miners' income comes from mining, where there's a cost. Staking coins has no cost. Therefore doing the work and staking will always be more profitable than staking alone. (If miner's income is greater than the cost)



can an attacker who controls majority of the capital send everyones funds back to the main chain, or make the coins inaccessible forever?
There are unlimited possibilities that depend on the details. If we don't have a paper that explains clearly how a Proof-of-Stake sidechain is somewhat superior, we can only do pointless speculation.
full member
Activity: 168
Merit: 421
武士道
I don't need any new coins. Each validator can take fees, in the same way as LN nodes take fees.
If each validator takes fees in the same way as Lightning, then it's the same kind of Proof-of-Stake. Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake are mechanisms used to tackle decentralized minting and transaction processing. If your PoS-sidechain idea excludes the former, then I don't understand how it's different.
Btw this wasn’t my quote.

I think this also opens the question of incentives and security. Sidechains always have a dilemma, they need to move an existing asset into a weaker form of security.

In the case of a PoS sidechain the security will be based on how much capital is inside it, let’s say it starts out with 200.000 € worth of Bitcoin locked inside. It would be easy for any whale, to take control over the network in the beginning. And in general the amount of capital required to make a majority attack on a PoS sidechain, would always be less than the amount of capital that’s inside it, this is different than on a PoS main chain, because the value that’s destroyed on the sidechain makes the attackers holdings worth more on the Bitcoin main chain. He could destroy 200k with just putting 101k in. This would actually make attacks that wanna destroy the side chain profitable.

Then my question is, because im not that familiar with how PoS and bridging in a side chain will work: can an attacker who controls majority of the capital send everyones funds back to the main chain, or make the coins inaccessible forever?

Isnt the whole promise of sidechains, we’re used less, so we can offer services more cheaply? But this incentive to even use them falls apart once they gain traction, because then they face the same problems as the main chain. In terms of scalability, decentralization and security.

It has to be gradual, because instant change will be rejected by Proof of Work enthusiasts. They don't want to switch immediately, they have to be convinced over time, that a different system is better, and can reward them with more coins.
I still don’t understand how this is economically possible. Sure, staking is cheaper and easier for validators, but if the task is providing security and consensus, and this method cant do it, then how was the task solved?

- You can’t have higher fees or the side chain won’t get used.
- If the side chain has more throughput and thus make the average transaction cheaper, it will suffer the centralization problems, the main chain is trying to avoid.

How will they get more coins? There’s a limited amount of coins, more coins means you gotta worsen the distribution of it. How isn’t PoS more and more concentration of wealth at the top, automatically built-in, no work required? This fate is set by the system, there’s no competition that can change it. Lightning is completely different it’s competitive and takes skill and planning to run successfully, it doesn’t work on the premise to give people more fees, sure the highest capital nodes can get more fees, but there can still be competition from smaller nodes, because most people won’t be needing to send high amounts everyday. It actually helps the main chain, instead of being in competition with it, both balance each other out.
member
Activity: 74
Merit: 86
Quote
If each validator takes fees in the same way as Lightning, then it's the same kind of Proof-of-Stake.
Yes, it's the same kind of Proof of Stake, but it has a chain. And that difference allows direct payments between participants, and that's the key difference between my proposal and Lightning Network: it is like if you could watch all channels and their state. Also, in this case, no watchtower is ever needed, and mining is also possible, because if you can watch all channels and transactions, then you can collect all of them, make a sidechain block out of it, and sign it, then you take all fees from all users as your reward (by default your reward is zero, and can be increased by validating transactions). So, the situation is clear: people can wait a long time for mainchain confirmation and pay on-chain fees, but they can instead use minimal on-chain fees, and pay much less, to have it signed by stakers. In this way, the stakechain can fill the gap between zero and the first confirmation, for a few satoshis you can get it validated, instead of accepting zero-confirmation. No coins will be created out of thin air, users will agree voluntarily to move their coins into stakers' hands, just by signing transactions.

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I don't understand why not doing both.
You can, I guess that will be the case during bootstrapping, then people will find a good balance between that, and will see that staking can give them more profits, while having less power requirements, because then no mining equipment is needed. It will be a gradual way from 100% mining and 0% staking into 1% mining (the minimal difficulty is one) and 99% staking.

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Unless your proposal is to move to another layer gradually.
It has to be gradual, because instant change will be rejected by Proof of Work enthusiasts. They don't want to switch immediately, they have to be convinced over time, that a different system is better, and can reward them with more coins.
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 7340
Farewell, Leo
I don't need any new coins. Each validator can take fees, in the same way as LN nodes take fees.
If each validator takes fees in the same way as Lightning, then it's the same kind of Proof-of-Stake. Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake are mechanisms used to tackle decentralized minting and transaction processing. If your PoS-sidechain idea excludes the former, then I don't understand how it's different.

Yes, but the current difficulty means that a lot of energy has to be used. It is possible to convince people to turn off their miners gradually (by convincing them that they can earn more by making signatures and staking their bitcoins), so the difficulty would gradually reach the minimal value.
I don't see how's that the case. The moment a block is solved, it stops having a cost. The miner can stake those coins, but there's nothing discouraging him to continue mining. If it's profitable to mine, and earns extra income from staking, I don't understand why not doing both.

Also, if difficulty reaches the minimum value, the main layer has no security, and along with it, all the sidechains as well. Unless your proposal is to move to another layer gradually.
member
Activity: 74
Merit: 86
Quote
No, I didn't think of it that way, just simply if you want to participate in the hypothetical POS Network, you need Bitcoin and can ONLY use Bitcoin to receive the POS token.
That's the plan: to have a network, where you can receive coins, only if you sign your bitcoins. Of course someone else could sign its own coins on your behalf, there is no way to stop that.

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You can buy if you want to, but the context still is, all Bitcoins in existence are created into existence as block rewards received from mining.
Yes, but the current difficulty means that a lot of energy has to be used. It is possible to convince people to turn off their miners gradually (by convincing them that they can earn more by making signatures and staking their bitcoins), so the difficulty would gradually reach the minimal value. Then, it is possible to protect the whole network mainly by Proof of Stake, and leave a little protection of the Proof of Work, just to make it backward compatible.
legendary
Activity: 2898
Merit: 1823


Here's another shower thought. What if a developer builds, and bootstraps a new cryptocurrency network based on POS, and if you want to join the network as a validator, you can buy the tokens, BUT, only through Bitcoin.


Isn't this Merged mining Proof of Stake?


No, I didn't think of it that way, just simply if you want to participate in the hypothetical POS Network, you need Bitcoin and can ONLY use Bitcoin to receive the POS token.


Does that make the new POS cryptocurrency network backed by Bitcoin's POW?


It is definitely backed by bitcoin, and since bitcoin relies on PoW, it's indirectly backed by PoW. Not something "environmental evangelists" like LegendaryK are going to support of.


Bitcoin needs to be mined, to buy the POS token.  Cool


So... Why don't you buy bitcoin?


You can buy if you want to, but the context still is, all Bitcoins in existence are created into existence as block rewards received from mining.
legendary
Activity: 2870
Merit: 7490
Crypto Swap Exchange
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Lightning doesn’t create coins out of thin air
Of course, because millisatoshis not divisible by 1000 are enforced on-chain, right?

When you close LN channel, it's rounded down (e.g. 1.9876 satoshi become 1 satoshi).
full member
Activity: 168
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武士道
Quote
Lightning doesn’t create coins out of thin air
Of course, because millisatoshis not divisible by 1000 are enforced on-chain, right?
Maybe we misunderstood each other, i meant inflating the amount of coins, which would be possible in a sidechain itself, but that’s not your goal. I just mentioned it, because i don’t think a side chain can outincentivize Bitcoin.

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Now there’s a problem, Bitcoin is fixed supply, so you can’t just create  new coins as a staking reward out of thin air on the side chain, without breaking the exchange rate, because then the side chain has more Bitcoin in circulation, than can be redeemed or actually were put in.
I don't need any new coins. Each validator can take fees, in the same way as LN nodes take fees.
Then it’s a legit side chain for whoever wanna use it and it’s fine.

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Then miners get less fees on the PoS chain again, because people are disincentivized to even use it. So what problem was fixed in the first place?
The problem of creating new features without any forks, of course. People have a lot of ideas, and create a lot of altcoins to reach them. There is no reason to create any new coins out of thin air, if they could sign their bitcoins instead.
Sure, but if it’s about features then it’s a different motivation than solving the block reward problem and i was just referring to that. Maybe you won’t gain me as a supporter for this, but im not a dictator and people are free to do what they want. This idea will still need users to use the chain, even if no fork is needed. I have nothing against you trying this.

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The only thing the PoS does in this case is moving the relative wealth to the top holders, meaning they can redeem more Bitcoin over time, while everyone else can less.
And people accept that by signing their own coins. They accept to gain and lose coins, by signing messages, and there is no way to stop anyone from signing any message they want. That's the best part of this "unstoppability", that there are some ideas, where even Proof of Work enthusiasts cannot destroy easily. That's why if you try to stop my proposal, you may hurt Lightning Network at the same time. Then, you have to choose wisely, to not kill too many networks with one shot.
They’re free to do what they want, i still think PoW Bitcoin is better and will keep its users regardless, because it’s better, not if it can suppress your idea or not.  There’s 19.000 different cryptos out there and even more other assets, and i still chose Bitcoin, because it is like it is now. If i want other features, there isn’t more to choose from than rn. So let’s see how the actual demand for your proposal is. I believe that some people also want more features on Bitcoin specifically, so maybe there’s some demand. If you can build it in a safe way, that doesn’t have the tradeoffs of other systems, i for sure won’t have anything against it.

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And then there’s still the question how will they do it better than lightning?
Simple, in LN you cannot transact with all participants directly, in sidechains you can. If you are completely new, with fresh keys, you cannot be introduced into LN, without touching on-chain coins. In sidechains, it is possible.
Correct, but to me this is one of the reasons why lighting gained more acceptance than sidechains, the tradeoffs lightning has are fine for the utility it offers.
member
Activity: 74
Merit: 86
Quote
Lightning doesn’t create coins out of thin air
Of course, because millisatoshis not divisible by 1000 are enforced on-chain, right?

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There’s no peg to be broken here. It’s just a trust minimised way to transfer Bitcoin off-chain and hasn’t much to do with a consensus mechanism, it’s not even a chain. A huge difference.
I can say the same about my idea, just cut this "it’s not even a chain" part, and you can copy-paste it 1:1 into my proposal.

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Now there’s a problem, Bitcoin is fixed supply, so you can’t just create  new coins as a staking reward out of thin air on the side chain, without breaking the exchange rate, because then the side chain has more Bitcoin in circulation, than can be redeemed or actually were put in.
I don't need any new coins. Each validator can take fees, in the same way as LN nodes take fees.

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If you don’t create coins to reward staking, then if the transaction fees are higher on the side chain, why wouldn’t people just use the main chain again?
They always can. There is no way to stop them, they can put their coins in and out as they will, it is just a matter of signing some transaction.

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Then miners get less fees on the PoS chain again, because people are disincentivized to even use it. So what problem was fixed in the first place?
The problem of creating new features without any forks, of course. People have a lot of ideas, and create a lot of altcoins to reach them. There is no reason to create any new coins out of thin air, if they could sign their bitcoins instead.

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The only thing the PoS does in this case is moving the relative wealth to the top holders, meaning they can redeem more Bitcoin over time, while everyone else can less.
And people accept that by signing their own coins. They accept to gain and lose coins, by signing messages, and there is no way to stop anyone from signing any message they want. That's the best part of this "unstoppability", that there are some ideas, where even Proof of Work enthusiasts cannot destroy easily. That's why if you try to stop my proposal, you may hurt Lightning Network at the same time. Then, you have to choose wisely, to not kill too many networks with one shot.

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How isn’t this vastly different from Lightning.
I still cannot see any difference. Each Lightning participant decide, how to make a closing transaction. The same with sidechains, the act of moving coins on-chain simply means, that everyone agreed to destroy sidechain coins, and take them on the mainchain.

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And then there’s still the question how will they do it better than lightning?
Simple, in LN you cannot transact with all participants directly, in sidechains you can. If you are completely new, with fresh keys, you cannot be introduced into LN, without touching on-chain coins. In sidechains, it is possible.
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