Topic: Proof-of-stake can never scale without blowing up, because PoS isn't trustless - page 7. (Read 5419 times)

I could say the same of you, always referencing your other writings as scripture instead of having a direct conversation,
pretending your smarter than everyone else gets old and too aloof to explain yourself.

You seem incapable of even attempting to grasp that your theories could be wrong and refused a direct debate per theory, claiming others do not understand.
Longest chain with the most difficulty Wins in PoS or PoW is not rocket science ,
Checkpoints are PoS or PoW , also not rocket science.
Nothing You have written , gives me any reason to see your OP as factual.
I find your theories lacking and your refusal to direct examination , as an obfuscation of truth seeking, merely your own pretense to hype your own upcoming coin.
Which you will claim as neither PoS or PoW, and superior to all, but be forewarned don't expect anyone to believe it because you post some contrived version of Logic, which turns out to be invalid.
IMO, this trust-less nonsense is no different than the permission-less nonsense that you and others have tried to pass off as concrete evidence in the past.

I do agree , we are both wasting our time, since your mind is closed and you claim mine to be.

So good luck with your coin.
And we will let Time decide the validity of our Choices.
ZEIT's Proof of Stake vs (Whatever you name yours)

 

That is one but not the only problem. I actually cited that attack vector in the OP. Did you find it?

Please stop trolling the thread with blue text. We can read your B&W text just fine.

Your stated reasons for disbelief are already refuted in the OP.

You are politically trolling the thread. You are not at all interested in learning nor having a factual debate. Until you raise your level of comprehension, we can't even debate each other, because you don't even comprehend what I am writing.

the problem is usually exchanger stake his altcoin then he can get a lot interest at that

Here is the problem, I don't believe your explanation.


 

You are trolling the thread. The OP already explains the detailed thought process, but it requires you to read the linked references and to take the time develop your comprehension of deep technical issues for block chain consensus. I have repeated this 3 times. How many times are you going to make me repeat the same "RTFM".

When you raise a point that isn't already explained in the OP, then I will elaborate. You have not yet done so.

OK,
you call me stupid and lazy and it has taken you a few posts to do so.
Yet you don't even make an attempt at explaining your detailed thought processes,
insults are not a detailed response, it actually shows a lack on your part.

 

Yes you do. Whether you admit it or not is your problem. Your ignorance is your own choice.


You are raising points which are already refuted in the OP and the linked references, but you are unaware because you are too lazy.

Actually, I don't need several hours of study ,
Your OP as stated is just a hit piece from the looks of it and if you are not willing to go into detailed discussions per talking point, why even post it.

 

I am sorry I will not rewrite the OP again just for you. You can read the OP (and all the linked documents) or not. I can't force someone to comprehend something which they are adamantly determined (or incapable?) of comprehending.

Understanding the OP requires a lot of effort. It is deep. You won't get it with 15 minutes of effort unless you are already very expert on the points being made.

I invested several hours writing it. You'll probably need several hours of study.

Ok,
You basically tell me I did not understand your OP , instead insisting on this trustless analogy on all PoS coins.
As far as Ethereum goes they destroyed trust because they decided to rewrite their code to control ownership of some coins, why you are lumping in all PoS coins when they have not even switch to PoS is beyond me.

You going to have to spell out what you mean, as to me the OP just looks wrong.


 

That is perfectly okay, but be prepared to be skewered because you didn't even read carefully the OP.


Checkpoints are not verifiable math. They are adhoc social trust. The entire point is that PoS is not trustless, because nothing can be verified about time with math. Please go back and re-read the OP, because you've not understood the OP.


Nope. See what I wrote above.

A properly designed PoW block chain with sufficient hashrate doesn't need checkpoints.


You are not factoring in the cost of bribing the stake and other strategies that must occur because PoS is a power vacuum due to the lack of mathematically verifiable time. You did not read carefully the OP and the links provided which elaborate in great detail. Go click all the links in the OP, because you are entirely incorrect.

Your ignorance (and being too lazy to read all the links) is not a valid rebuttal.


Absolutely not. You've not understood why trustless is important. You apparently don't understand why the fork of Ethereum destroys the trust that it will respect its own protocol rules. Etc. Read the OP again more carefully.

OK,
Forgive me if I disagree with you , but when it comes to Proof of Stake, we will have to disagree.

Your statement is a PoS history has no verifiable longest chain , actually it is the same as PoW , in that the Longest Chain with the most difficulty wins and normally will be the true chain.

Some coins use checkpoint servers or issue checkpoints in the wallet updates.
This actually gives those coins a protection from history attacks.
And it can be done by PoS or PoW coins, example : monero >https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/blob/master/src/cryptonote_core/checkpoints.cpp

In other words PoS is just as trustworthy as PoW, since they can both use or not use checkpoints.



Ok,
Drink some coconut water , you seem delirious from the heat on this one.
I can run a PoS network on an already running web server or PC, meaning my drain on resources will be nothing compared to a ASIC PoW Miner.

I think you just out doing a hit piece on Proof of Stake.
It is easily as secure as PoW if not more so, if done correctly.

 

FYI:

Vitalik reserved an obscene amount of coins out of the premine for himself. He dumped a quarter of his stash but still dominates the rich list. Whatever POW whales own is nothing compared to what he still owns. Moreover, I doubt any of the ICO buyers own as many coins as Vitalik still has. The "initial distribution" effects  are dominated by Vitalik's stash.

Probably not. The amount of PoW distribution in Ethereum is quite small compared to the ICO. The "initial distribution" effects discussed at the above link are dominated by the ICO.

Proof-of-Stake Isn't Trustless Because It Has No Time Objectivity

Out of all the analysis that has been done on proof-of-stake aka PoS (and all variants such as Bitshares' and Lisk's DPoS, NEM's PoI, and Vericoin's PoST), the most salient flaw is that a PoS history has no verifiable longest chain.

This is important because it means the only possible way to enforce which is the valid chain is either via the externality of adhoc social agreement (which might include checkpoints and what Vitalik referred to as "weak subjectivity") and/or control of the majority of the stake by colluding whales. In both cases, this means the PoS block chain is not permissionless, trustless and is instead a forkable top-down controlled arbitrator which can't be trusted to honor the protocol, as evident by for example Ethereum forking itself to undo the protocol of the DAO contract because some of the users of Ethereum wanted to violate the protocol. The ability to fork the block chain is a power vacuum, meaning that it will always attract those who are powerful enough to lie to the masses and promise them everything they want, i.e. we are right back to flawed paradigm of fiat and democracy which was what block chains were supposed to liberate us from by being trustless and immutable.

Readers please make sure you re-read the above two paragraphs slowly (and several times if you have average reading comprehension skills) to fully comprehend/absorb the gravity of it.

The reason PoS's history is non-objective and indeterminate is because there exists no P2P clock without the randomness of PoW. Meaning that there is no way to determine via math which event occurred when in time order, without trusting some nodes who were online at that time to report to you their perspective of the truth (which even with their honesty might not be the objective truth due to each node having a differing subjective perspective due to propagation delays and network hiccups). In PoS, the Nash equilibrium is destroyed, because nodes have many game theory strategies for profit other than mining only on the objective longest chain. For example (and the example cases are too innumerable to enumerate all, e.g. the deterministic ordering due to the lack of randomness in the block event), Vitalik incorrectly argued that the costless "nothing-at-stake" problem could be fixed with deposits, but the confiscation of deposits can be undone by the attacker who has another "longer" long range attack chain lying in wait without the confiscations (unless the community is using adhoc checkpoints which is itself a violation of Nash equilibrium due to granting centralized control) and/or the strategy of forsaking the deposit while doing some malfeasance and then shorting the token to make gains.

Although PoS nodes can agree to adhere to NTP for timing, there is no way to prove that each successive designated node issued a block on time. There can only be discord and disagreement, because there is no mathematically objectively verifiable truth. This is a power vacuum as described in the second paragraph above. Although PoW needs to employ NTP (or some other form of consensus on time) to periodically adjust the hashrate difficulty, the exact precision can be decided by the node that wins the block that makes the adjustment and the other nodes need only to not mine on that block if the precision is too far from a reasonable tolerance zone. The mathematically verifiable agreement is thus encoded in the PoW longest chain.

Note Ethereum is (at this time) proof-of-work (aka PoW) and is planned to be hard-forked. There is a valid argument that when the developers of a PoW block chain have too much influence ("Vitalik is God"), have created a Turing-complete block design that commits to egregious failure (even after they were warned for 2 years by many experts of the certain failure of doing so) enabling the protocol-compliant transfer of $millions from unwitting n00bs in one swoop, and 51% of the miners are either highly centralized into an oligarchy (i.e. Bitcoin = ChinaCoin) or not comprised of every user that wasn't subject to the failure, then such degenerate PoW block chain systems are indeed not trustless thus not trustworthy and will of course die. But please note that some allege that Poloniex was using its huge store of ETH to influence the vote on the hardfork, because apparently Ethereum's developers organized the vote to be by ETH stake and not by mining hashrate.

There will exist all sorts of schemes to try to obscure the fact that PoS isn't objective nor trustless. For example, NEM's PoI intertwines some computation of frequency of transactions to try to rank stake by their "importance" to transaction use (although it is not clear that this can't be gamed to pay transaction fees to oneself as a whale stakeholder and even if transaction fees are burned to ether) but this doesn't change the fact that (no matter how modulated) stake has the insoluble nothing-at-stake and non-objectivity flaws. Ditto Vericoin's PoST which modulates stake by some time function to make large stakes less potent against small stakes in forking. Although it is claimed that DPoS is only vulnerable to the Long Range Attack, this is misleading because it still means DPoS is not a trustless block chain because the "weak subjectivity" requires adherence to the adhoc social majority and voting by stake is in control of any decisions to fork the block chain to modify the protocol.


Proof-of-Stake "Wastes" More Resources than Proof-of-Work

As a PoW block chains initial distribution completes, then mining costs are funded by transaction fees. So the security of PoW is dependent on scaling up transactions. Yet transaction fees must be a small % of the transaction value, so the cost of security is small. This does require a PoW block chain to be very popular. PoS is admission that the block chain is not intended to scale up (because it will blow up and be attacked at large market caps due to being a power vacuum failure just like fiat and democracy).

PoW and Proof-of-Burn are the only way to distribute coins that doesn't centralize the expenditure of the resource to a designated set of people (as in an ICO). So in that respect, the waste of expenditure on electricity is justified by the lack of centralization of the resources expended. Also instant distributions (ICOs and coin drops) are antithetical to developing a critical mass and a successful coin (Ethereum avoidedslightly mitigated this by adding PoW mining distribution to follow their ICO).

In terms of ongoing security funded only by transaction fees (no distribution of new tokens), PoS wastes the resources on gaming strategies (some of which might even be as computationally expensive as PoW), on the liquidity opportunity cost of bonded deposits, and one can argue wastes the entire ecosystem on a consensus system that is a power vacuum failure.

Any block chain consensus system which has 0 transaction fees can't provide a longest chain of PoW and thus will break Nash equilibrium. Even in my unprofitable PoW overhaul of Satoshi's design, it is not possible to make transaction fees 0 because the payers still have the cost of producing PoW. Without PoW, one must have some variant of PoS, which I already explained can't maintain Nash equilibrium.


Hopefully I have justified to why I refer to PoS as P(iece)o(f)S(hit).