Topic: Proof of stake mining of bicoin - page 3. (Read 25676 times)

There is no need to 'upgrade' Bitcoin now as such. A non-PoW complement to Bitcoin already exists in BitBTC, though granted at this particular moment the peg is not holding too well (it needs more volume). It can be used as BTC with bells and whistles and will also allow users to see how a non-PoW option works.

I eventually see Bitcoin moving on to a different scheme, whether its completely non-PoW or partly PoW. I expect Bitcoin holders to be not too happy in the future when they realize that they may not need to pay this much to secure the network thus reducing inflation.

DPoS (aka Delegated PoS) is a joke because it adds a social construct to chain security which is easily manipulated.  This makes it susceptible to Sybil attack and breaks it.  There is no way to prove the delegates are unique individuals.  THIS IS A FATAL FLAW!

An individual can create multiple delegates and get stakeholders to approve them via deception.  This gives the illusion that there are 101 unique delegates when in reality many delegates are in fact one individual.  When you consider that multiple individuals could collude to create these faux delegates, it becomes obvious that gaining control over 51% of the delegates would not be that difficult.  It's even more vulnerable because Bitshares is trying to attract "businesses and developers" as delegates.  All someone would have to do to get voted in as a delegate is to post a convincing but fake business plan or resume and the stakeholders would eagerly pull in the Trojan horse.

Some Bitshares' users ask about how to tell if delegates are unique, but they get no response from the devs.

Bitshares has already had a Sybil attack occur earlier this year when it was uncovered that an individual named "sfinder" actually controlled the TOP 5 DELEGATES!

It becomes laughable when the main Bitshares' dev, Daniel Larimer (aka Bytemaster), appears in the thread and starts asking if anyone else knows what other delegates "sfinder" controls.  The Bitshares' devs obviously know about this problem, but they still have the audacity to say that "Bitshares is your gateway to the decentralized world!"

The truth of this matter is, that as everyone knows who was around in 2013, Bitshares was originally going to be PoW.  The Bitshares' devs only decided to switch to PoS after they saw the success of NXT.  In a flawed attempt to look original, they added "delegates" to PoS which effectively destroyed it by adding centralization and opening it up to the aforementioned Sybil attacks.

It would need significantly more than 1% stake. Again, I am thinking in terms of DPoS, as I don't have a thorough knowledge of the alternatives.

Whether the security remains as robust with scaling remains to be seen, but that is only possible when it gets big. I haven't seen any good theoretical attack vectors which may compromise it on a bigger scale. In case it does, the developers have to look at improving the solution, like DPoS itself was an evolution through a series of steps.

First of all, I definitely agree that it's unlikely to happen due to the reasons you've just given (and because I don't think POS is a viable alternative [currently] but that's beside the point). I was only trying to point out that it's not a decision the miners have some ultimate say in. If a part of the community forks the bitcoin blockchain at some blockheight and changes to POS, there is little the miners can do about it. That being said, if such a fork would occur in the near future there probably wouldn't be a lot of support for it from the current userbase (partly because currently miners are also related to other parts of the ecosystem as you stated).

Who is that "significant part of the community"? If it excludes most core devs (who seem to hate POS) and most miners... which also means most big exchanges, since they have massive mining ventures too - e.g. Huobi and BTC-China. Adding then that most users are unmotivated to look into any of those issues, then we talk about a tiny minority that has to take over the system.
Technically possible - but improbable close to the point of "never gonna happen". And if it would (maybe because of a government attack), it will be major chaos.

It seems much more logical that people who don't like the system switch to an alt with the desired properties.

I am not seeing any realistic hopes of Bitcoin switching from PoW.

... unless governments themselves become BTC users, which they should.

It's a good question though. In the scenario of a single totalitarian world government PoW might not be the best option and instead a myriad of anonymous PoS coins will serve better. Though it would not be a perfect global money system for variety of reasons. This solution is temporary and so is the one world government. Once it falls apart PoW provides a neutral playground for competition.

We are far from the scenario described above, because there are clearly big countries who agreed to disagree. We need both systems as each serves its own purpose, so we will see how this plays out.

I don't think that is necessarily true.  If a government were to coerce or more likely impel pools and mining corporations to act a certain way, for instance, freezing some peoples' accounts, would the currency users running the TaPoS chain not abide by the PoW chain and revolt?  I think that would be very unlikely, because the PoW chain will still dominate.  The mass majority of TaPoS nodes will fall in line with whatever "rules" the PoW chain decides to enforce, because if they don't, they will fork and lose their investment.

You're giving miners way too much credit for being able to decide on the protocol specifications. If some significant part of the community decides that they would prefer a POS based bitcoin and to change to POS at blockheight x then the miners have no real power to combat this change. They can only decide on whether or not they think it is still profitable to keep mining on the POW fork of "bitcoin".

Governments aren't going to be 51% attacking each other to protect BTC users' autonomy.  The majority of governments work in concert with each other.  "Competing governments" are an illusion.

Or this: https://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Whitepaper:Nxt#Proof_of_Stake


Also I would straight up say: Switching bitcoin will be impossible. How would a transition even work without compromising the security of the network? What will happen to all the gear?

I think it's a good example of the problem of divided incentives. Should POS in theory prove to be better for the coin, the miners would still block it - and rather harm the coin to prevent their financial loss. They will have the ultimate decision.

Implementing PoS in Bitcoin is indeed a SlipperySlope
Nothing is coincidental.

Super! I wish his project well.

SlipperySlope started a project to implement PoS in Bitcoin. Looks like he gave up and tries to make his own new coin now: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ai-coin-development-diary-584719

Edit: Actually he didn't give up but is just going another way to make Bitcoin a PoS coin.

So the mass-debating continues


I wonder what happens if stakeholders hire a small group of miners and simply start checkpointing the blockchain they produce, even though it's not the longest one?


51% attacks is a cornerstone of PoW design.
If attack is not possible then the entity/mechanism preventing the attack becomes the central point of failure.

Depends upon what you mean by a 51% attack. It would not protect PoW layer at all directly but would protect the end user because after you receive payment you could depend upon the combined trust(with both the strengths and weaknesses of both consensus algos) of both systems. So If a 51% attack was occurring on the mining pools and the nodes on the TaPoS blockchain were not confirming than one could delay accepting and trusting the transaction until the community figured out what the problem was.

This brings up many other complicated questions though like if it is an act of supererogation and introducing new potential attacks but overall the benefits could be really nice as it would bring a lot more decentralization back into bitcoin, increase security overall, allow for decentralized instant confirmations,  and act as a backstop against the asic manufacturers or mining pools from any mis-behavior.

Would it help mitigate 51% attacks?

I am agnostic on side chains. There's a lot of ways to skin a cat.

What could happen is another consensus layer that gave the right features and supplemented PoW was added to Bitcoin or people just used it with the Bitcoin protocol. This may happen in the future.

What if you had a TaPoS layer that had 1-10 second confirmations which worked with the miners where peoples wallets reflected both the ~10 min confirmation and the 1-10 second ones for added security and to allow for on the sidechain transactions to occur while not giving up on PoW security.

So a TaPoS blockchain could indeed supplement Bitcoin and at the same time would not change any of the core principles like disinflation 21 million , PoW, ect..

The fact that this can be done does not bode well for Nxt or Bitshares and should have them concerned.

read this:  http://peercoin.net/assets/paper/peercoin-paper.pdf