Topic: Proof-of-stake can never scale without blowing up, because PoS isn't trustless - page 4. (Read 5405 times)

Bottom-up organization is also an aspect of nature, because if it was not then it would require that a top-down omniscience was possible, which is impossible because it would require an innumerable speed-of-light, which would collapse the future and the past into nothingness (read two pages of my posts following the linked one in order to capture my complete reasoning).

There are systems in nature which have successfully resisted top-down organization thus are not power vacuums, e.g. sexual reproduction. Their key trait is that they can't be top-down organized, because they have a local, real-time environment relevance that can't be managed nor captured by the top-down organizer. This was essentially the key fundamental insight of my famous essay about the Rise of Knowledge being that individually empowered (by the Internet) knowledge creation is individually serendipitous and accretive, not capable of being captured by top-down finance:


Satoshi's design was an attempt to create such a permissionless, trustless system, that unlike fiat and democracy, would not be captured by any top-down oligarchy. Unfortunately his design is a power vacuum that fails to power distribution of control (e.g. Bitcoin = ChinaCoin) due to economies-of-scale in profitable proof-of-work mining.

I have conceived of a design for unprofitable proof-of-work mining which I believe has the necessary trait to not be a power vacuum.

Note that even phenomena which are not currently a power vacuum, can later become one. CoinCube has been arguing that human reproduction is soon to come under the control of the State or Corporations due to advances in technology for reproduction such as In Vitro Fertilization and other factors. I don't completely recall his reasoning off the top of my head.

The proof hash for PoS coins has always been hashed in SHA, the block hash algorithm really has no direct relevance to the difficulty of producing a PoS block.

In regards to Algo discussion from a page ago ,
Why PoS coins mention algo like Scrypt or sha256d or X15

Blackcoin White Paper may offer an explanation
http://blackcoin.co/blackcoin-pos-protocol-v2-whitepaper.pdf


 

IMO and In Reality,
you're a better Proof of Stake programmer than iamnotback.
Which is why I told him he should ask you , since you have more experience in this specific area.

My premise has been Longest Chain with the most difficulty wins in Proof of Stake or Proof of Work and can overwrite a shorter chain of less difficulty.
In his misleading conclusions , he claims this is only valid for Proof of work.
Which makes absolutely no sense and makes this whole topic just seem like a misleading hit piece against PoS.

 

All consensus algorithms have cons. PoW, PoS, etc... by focusing on the shortcomings of anything, I can make it look like a pile of crap. Everything and everyone in existence has shortcomings. Nothing is perfect. Anonymity is fooling himself thinking he can come up with a perfect consensus algorithm, and is definitely fooling himself thinking he can come up with a perfect cryptocurrency.

There is 1 issue that always seems to be overlooked in the POW vs POS coins debate.

UNLESS you write the client yourself, from scratch, using the white paper, how do you know that your POW client is not malware / hacked ?

There is an element of 'trust' when you download the client for any coin, as even if the website notes the SHA of the executable, source, whatever, that could have been hacked as well. So you need to find the SHA of the 'correct' client.. (Ask a friend, has he been hacked !?)

Although POW does give you the official 'heaviest' chain, it is hard to argue that 99.99% of people will not need to trust the client they have downloaded. Yes - they go to the official page, etc etc.. but they are not 100% unless they wrote / checked / compiled it themselves. (Hackers find a way to infiltrate..)

FOR MOST people - the POS checkpoints have the same trust level requirement. You would still have to trust the client has a correct checkpoint, just as you have to trust the POW client is not hacked.

What I am saying is that the requirement of knowing a single HASH from the POS block chain, does not utterly destroy POS.

..Unless you can think of a way of distributing an executable that I can check is valid without requiring any extra knowledge ? (Like a POW chain.. hmm.. is there such a thing as a POW-executable..)

looks like proof-of-capacity (PoC) could be the winner here    I do enjoy people getting angry,  thanks, great read. 

I think you are just misdirecting your intellect, which seems above average, on a wild-goose chase.
Power distributions are a fact of nature, whichever system you will build, if it is valuable to humans, power over it will be unfairly distributed. If it isn't, that just means there is a power vacuum waiting to be claimed by someone with the means to.
But I suspect you know this already and you might be on some high level trolling or something.

You are up against very, very many people who have come to the same conclusion, including the authors of the BitFury white paper I cited, Peter Sztoric, smooth, myself, all of us together have 100+ years of programming experience. Dude you have an enormous ego considering you aren't even a programmer. Do you realize how much a prick you are? Those other guys wouldn't even bother replying to you, because they think you are so stupid.


You who is not even a programmer, is going to correct all of us expert programmers.  


I was also referring to the accumulated sum of the thresholds you call difficulty. That is irrelevant and that you don't understand why, goes directly to the heart of your slobbering Dunning-Kruger ignorance.

I already explained to you there is no computational cost. Adding thresholds which have no computation cost does not prevent the fast construction of a chain from any point in history. The coin age delays are entirely relative to what the attacker constructs on the chain of transactions.

You are making a fool of yourself and you are proudly being a real jerk to me wasting my time and thinking you know more than an expert programmer. And I'm done wasting my time on your ignorance. Just because you listened to some technobabble from your lesser programming friends, doesn't make you qualified to regurgitate their incorrect technical understanding in a debate with me.

You wasted several hours of my time today. This is very expensive. You are making me very angry.

PLEASE FUCKING STOP PRICK.

Why do you think you are important enough to justify putting your text in bright blue when everyone else here is cordial enough to write in black text.

You've been asked several times to be cordial and respectful and stop writing in blue text. You seem to think very highly of your ignorant, slobbering self.

LOL,
Nope you're not, believing G.Maxwell B.S. won't make you right.

You mistake trolling for correcting, and if you are blind to the truth that is your choice.
And if someone thinks G.Maxwell lies are valid or he himself thinks he can prove it.
Tell him to prove it with ZEIT , I'll be waiting for him. (Scary Music Playing) Muu Ha Ha  

 

FYI:
If you reread the earlier posts , I used the term accumulated difficulty.
But declare victory if it makes you feel better, I will settle for the truth.

I understand now that by "difficulty" you are referring to the threshold to sign your stake over. And as I told you from this start, this is not computational work that prevents a Long Range attack. One can go back and sign for some state of the chain as far back as the genesis block and pretend that signature was issued back at that time. And rebuild a completely new chain this way, because there is not computational work that has to be done to prevent the attacker from building a very long chain quickly. That is precisely what is meant by the "nothing-at-stake" problem and why checkpoints are required.

So after several pages of you trolling me, now you see I was correct. I warned you.

Hey,
if you don't want to believe it , your choice.
I gave you the name of two guys that could talk code , it is up to you whether it is worth your time.

I think many of those articles on PoS were written by people like G.Maxwell that push BTC.
The difficulty increase is also the reason , maxwell's line about the nothing at stake is a bunch of B.S. .
Because if he stakes online, he increases the difficulty , so that his offline coins will never reach a difficulty as high as his online coins, since they are competing with others so he can never overwrite the chain as long as he is trying to stake in both places.

Here is a Proof of Stake formula for you
hashProofOfStake <= [Coin-age] x [Target]   
[Coin-age] = [amount of coins] x [days in stake]   
Target = Difficulty

Later,
 

kiklo, you can't just claim that 'difficulty' field has any relevant meaning in PoS, unless you know what in code is driving the value of that field. Programming isn't like "the UI is always correct". We have to actually understand what the hell "difficulty" means in this PoS algorithm your code is using. Who knows maybe the programmer is setting some value there what is random or just some gibberish hash of some other data. The programmer might have just wanted to use a consistent set of fields between the two UI (PoW and PoS). I really can't determine any thing from that. I'd have to dig into the code, which really isn't fair since I am not being paid to do that.

Every reference I have studied on PoS has never mentioned a difficulty. There is some talk about strategies that an attacker might use which end up using a lot of computation thus being sort of like PoW, except these aren't in the official client and there is no record of the level of that difficulty recorded (since it is an attack, thus not designed into the protocol).

I am sorry but your point about PoS having difficulty doesn't make sense as far as what I know about PoS and the numerous references I have read. The reason your coin hasn't been attacked is it isn't worth doing so. Ethereum wasn't attacked until the marketcap reached $billion and DAO $160m. It has nothing to do with you not needing to use checkpoints. You just got lucky because your coin doesn't have a large enough marketcap to be worth attacking.

That is not intended to be an insult to your coin effort. Everyone should be free to create and market an altcoin. I am not out to destroy all these smaller coins with my words. If you ever manage to reach your larger goals with it, I assume you'll hire a full time programmer then you will start to deal with some of the issues I am pointing out.

Frankly it is pretty rude of you to argue programming issues with me, as I have written perhaps a few 100,000s lines of code in my lifetime ranging from 68000 assembly to C to C++ to PHP to SQL to Android to Java to Javascript to Scala to Haskell, etc, etc, etc


r0ach you are very much correct I haven't launched shit in CC. It is pretty fucking embarrassing. If my health is really like this as I felt past days, then I have no more excuses. Hopefully I won't be posting on the forum. I think it was important to get my thoughts about PoS written down in carefully written post, because someone PM'ed me asking me to evaluate Verticoin's new white paper. So I just wanted to do that PoS vs. PoW thing once and for all  last time.

The Steemit tangent was unexpected today but I think it is important to finish the analysis on that.

Has he released a Proof of Stake coin?
Never heard of him.

Hmm,
his background lists emunie, which claim to fame is no blockchain, so I don't see how he would have as much experience with Proof of Stake as Presstab or Rat4.


 

Fuserleer is a smarter and better programmer than those guys, and Fuserleer thinks Anonymint is probably better than him, so you're basically asking a pro golfer to ask the audience how to play.  I can keep up with Anonymint and Fuserleer on a conceptual design level, but my programming started in graphics with MEL then going to Python, so going from theory to reality is a lot easier for someone like Anonymint who has been programming for a couple centuries (even though Anonymintcoin is still vaporware).

Here is a Raw Block #10 in ZEIT generated by PoW

Here is a Recent Raw Block #2672978 Generated by Proof of Stake if that helps


 

Not side stepping , pointing you in the direction of the devs/programmers as I never claimed to be a dev or programmer.
Here is what I know All PoS coins still claim an Algo, Mintcoin & ZEIT scrypt , whether this algo was only used at the initial PoW creation , is unknown to me, but I have a feeling there is more to it with the PoS side.
Reason Being Scrypt, X15, X11, Groestl is stated with many PoS coins, so you will need to talk to a programmer or look at the code for a better understanding.
Like I said, PM Presstab or Rat4 and they can probably answer exactly if the algo affects the PoS or was only used in the PoW generation.

Whether you speak with them or not, the checkpoint server discussion is over, many of us don't use one and that is all that is needed to defeat your earlier claim.

 

You are side-stepping my inquiry which is I want to know the algorithm specific definition of "difficulty" that you were referring to in the context of a PoS algorithm. How is it computed, how is it stored in the block chain, how is it similar or different to "difficulty of hashrate" in PoW.

I need to know that in order to determine if the claim that checkpoints are not needed is valid. Then to determine if you are just doing PoW after all and calling it PoS.

I need the specifics in order to address your claim specifically.

If you provide the specifics, then we can discuss how checkpoints relate specifically. Until you provide this information, we can't talk specifics.