Topic: Which Proof of Stake System is the Most Viable - page 12. (Read 25752 times)

correct me if i'm wrong, but saying "put a hash of a recent block in the tx"
does nothing more than duplicate the mechanism already in place in
any blockchain, which is to cryptographically link one block to the next.

You haven't eliminated the fact that there is absolutely no reason not to sign all possible chains in event of a fork.  It is just a small step in the right direction, albeit at the expense of larger txs.  Bitcoin in it's short history had had ~40M txs. Adding 32 bytes to each transaction would have bloated the blockchain by another 1.2 GB.  If that solved the problem it probably would be worth it but it doesn't so one has to weigh if that increased security is worth that increased cost (in terms of tx size & complexity).  I think it probably is but it isn't a magic bullet and it isn't free.

Nothing at stake covers a number of different scenarios that all have at their core are related to the fact that there is no (significant) cost for failure*.  One can perform a reorg with no cost by simply acquiring private keys which at one time had (past tense) a majority of the active stake.  Accounts which have no value have worth to an attacker for what they once had.  Nothing at stake also applies to the concept of selfish mining.  There is no reason to not continue your chain when you lose a race against a superior block.  You can work on the majority chain and simultaneously attempt to extend your minority chain.  There is a small chance you will out mine/mint/forge the rest of the network.  In PoW the cost doesn't warrant the small chance and thus it is more profitable to switch when you lose but if there is no cost why wouldn't you keep trying, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.  In NXT when you forge a block which is the best at current height but doesn't enable you to forge the next block (due to incompatible block signature) there is no reason to not use computing power to try and find an alternative which enables you to forge the next one as well.  The chance may be low but you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying.  With PoW there is a real cost associated with extending an inferior chain (one that has a less than 50% chance of remaining the longest chain) and that cost drives the network to reach a consensus quicker.  Inferior chains are abandoned and the network aligns around the best chain quickly.  How often have you seen reorgs more than 3 blocks deep in the blockchain?  This alignment doesn't happen out of some need to do the "right thing" but because it is prohibitively expensive to do anything else.   With no cost, forks will last longer, and reorgs will be deeper.  In any blockchain system, attackers with a minority of the stake can (infrequently) generate short lived chains that are better than the majority.  With PoW those attempts have a real cost which counteracts the gain of the double spend and unless the attacker has a high chance and profitable spend it is very likely a net loser to even try.  When the cost of an attempt is nothing there is nothing to lose by trying and thus why not double spend anything and everything.  Most of the time the attacker will fail but those failures cost nothing so any successful double spends is profit even if rare.

So saying "put a hash of a recent block in the tx and nothing at stake is a strawman" misses the larger context.  If there is no cost to attack the network there is no reason to NOT attack the network.


* Yes some will like to split words and point out there is always some cost in anything so saying there is "nothing" at risk is wrong.  Well you can split hairs all you want but if a legit node has a cost of X and an attack node has a cost of 10X it is essentially nothing.   X has to be pretty low such that non mining nodes have the resources to run a full node so 10x is still very low.  PoW doesn't require 10x the resources to solve a block than to run a non-mining node, or even 100x, or a billion times but (at current difficulty) 193,690,812,773,950,000,000,000,000,000x.
 

What are "migrating transactions"?

This doesn't make any sense.  Either a transaction is valid because its on the right chain,
or its invalid because its on the wrong chain.  That's what a distributed conensus
is all about.

Are you sure you understand the nothing at stake problem?

Nothing at stake is a strawman. Include a recent block hash in every transaction and allow migrating transactions cross-chain ("invalid" block headers in tx don't count for stake-vote). There's your motive for picking a chain.

Spinoffs are why nxt is trying to keep things as secret as possible for as long as possible.  We can hardly blame them for that.  Obviously the strategy would be to be far enough ahead in the innovation and adoption cycle that the rest would seen as imitators, not innovators.

I don't know if it's fair to say nxt has no technical promise.  They seem to already have created some in innovations.  Yet, the elephant in the room is the nothing at stake issue at this point.  Or seems to be anyway.
Whether they can solve that remains to be seen.

You bring up a good point about distribution though.  If nxt did create a major breakthrough, it would certainly be nice to capitalize on that with a bitcoin based distribution, rather than speculating on a new altcoin.

Would your bootstrapping protocol work with nxt even though the coins are so different?

NXT system blows because big stake holders can rake 30K NXT with their Mac. Why wouldn't you hoard?

Maintaining a spin-off requires one part-time developer.  His job is to copy the work that your "100 or so devs" do into the clone.

Good luck trying to spin-off the 100 or so devs working on dozens of Nxt projects as we speak you arrogant prick.

Of course it is possible.  People can decide for themselves how probable it is.  For the record, I don't believe Come-from-Beyond "reached out" to D&T in a genuine way based on this logic:


What is interesting to me is that in the (IMO very unlikely) event that Nxt has technical promise, then as soon as the code is open-source it will be possible to create Nxt-clone using the spin-off mechanism and immediately bootstrap the clone with a more efficient distribution than Nxt-original.  

If you want to delay the "day of reckoning" then you obviously should want to invite the scrutiny of an expert who doubts you. Brilliant.

Yeah right. That's why Come from beyond wants to reach out to D&T to explain things and show him some code. Logical conclusion, genius.

It is also possible that certain Nxt insiders know that they don't have a solution, and simply want to delay the day of reckoning as long as possible in order to maximize the amount of pre-mine they can convert to bitcoin.

Even that is a questionable assumption.

They are most likely not sure if they are correct
and want to recruit you to their cause (not saying
that's bad or good)...

but if they were confident in their solution, they
would release it.  

To me, the (nothing at stake) problem is
not that hard to understand, after having
it been explained to me by yourself in
one of these threads.  Certainly, it is
easier to understand than the nuances of
ECDSA.

Intuition says that a solution to the problem,
if there is one, would be at least easily verified,
if not simplistic itself.  Although, that is just
my gut feeling on it.

It was an assumption.  I will share any "secret but open source" code I receive barring an NDA.  If they want the code public they can just post it publicly.  If they want to allow me to see the code under the condition that I not reveal it that would require an NDA.  I don't really see the point in secretly sharing code that can be released publicly, do you?

Where did you see the NDA demand?

I believe they believe they have a solution however based on what is publicly available I don't believe they are correct.    Still I don't see much sense in communicating privately.  I rarely sign NDAs and I can't remember ever signing one when I wasn't being compensated.   Even with compensation I doubt I would be willing to sign one as I would find it very frustrating if the code confirms my suspicious and then I am unable to use that code to support an argument.

Eventually the code will be open sources and we can debate it in the open.   At this point I can't definitively say the NXT team and their unreleased code hasn't solve the nothing at stake problem.  My argument is more than it is dubious to claim something is solved based on secret code.  The public can't independently verify that claim, nor can they look to skeptics for a counterargument.  I believe in Bitcoin but I do read articles written by skeptics but they are an outside viewpoint and sometimes that is useful.

@SomethingElse I wish you were wrong about the best marketing overruling everything, but I'm afraid I have to agree with you. Thing is marketing takes big bucks and massive manpower and time, not something most start-ups can provide unless they have big VC-backing or something like that and that doesn't help with the decentralization and low barriers to entry principles.

Crowdfunding/ipo seems to come with it's own set of problems, like an angry mob of "experts" who seem to think that harassing a small team with extra pressure, threats and rumors is a sound strategy to insure the success of their "investment". I'm seeing more and more kickstarter-projects suffering the same backlash. If anything, it looks like crowdfunding requires that the marketing and pr teams should be bigger than the dev-team.

One thing that worries me about overhyping like with Ethereum is that it could very well backfire, but then again some people just want to believe in a dream, so it might just work even if they aren't able to make true on their claims. Now that you mention it, where is Ethereum getting  the money for their marketing and travels if they haven't done their IPO yet, are they backed by VCs or something? Anybody have any info on that?

Elaborating on my remark about NXT, DeathAndTaxes answered that part very eloquently, also I was paraphrasing what ComeFromBeyond actually said on the nxt-forums as being the reason for not releasing the transparent forging code. The other part of it was referring to the code not being released for quite a while after the fundraiser and even then it had those 3 deliberate bugs in them (apart from the non deliberate ones of course). Opensource is the primary requirement for me in this space for several reasons especially when dealing with trust in anonymous/pseudonymous people.

The guy from Bitshares has a serious marketing problem.  Every time he opens his mouth, he sounds like he isn't sure of anything he is saying, and the project has been long in the making and regularly evolving so maybe he doesn't. 

NXT doesn't really have a good spokesman either, just lots of part time investors/developers.  They seem to be working hard and making it come together but the coordination/vision/message is a bit rough and unclear.

Peercoin?  What is Peercoin again?

Ethereum hasn't even released a single bit of working code, but if they did an IPO, its market cap would slaughter NXT and Bitshares and Peercoin put together.  A person might want to think that the best product wins, but that isn't often true.  Many times it is the product with the best salesman that wins.  That is why Ethereum would win and it doesn't even have a real product yet.

So you ask, which POS system is the best?  I say the one with the best salesman.  Sounds silly and isn't a direct answer to the question, but it is the real answer.  Many products on the shelves of Walmart spend far more in advertising than they spend in product development.  Why? Because they know you get to #1 not by being the best, but making people believe you are the best. 

Judging by all these PoS-revivals of old PoW coins, it seems PoS is catching on! Will be interesting to see dPOS in action.

Or you can visit our forum to ask about all of this;

https://nxtforum.org/