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Not to mention that the central consensus mechanism is completely broken. You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive: Quoted from my pos
by wildbunny 9y ago
Not to mention that the central consensus mechanism is completely broken.
You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive:
Quoted from my post linked below:
o) Network hashrate is the overall power of the network - in bitcoin, this is the computing power needed to generate a block.
o) Bitcoin employs a mining reward which creates a competition between miners to produce a block and claim their reward for doing so. Slower miners lose out to faster miners, but they still participate in the competition to produce a block because they stand a chance of winning occasionally.
o) This mining subsidy provides a positive incentive to miners to play by the rules, and encourages them not try to double spending, because they might as well claim the mining reward instead of trying to double spend which is often much more difficult than producing a single block.
o) The mining subsidy also encourages all miners to participate in the mining process, which gives an overall metric for total network hashing power, which you can then use to give an estimate of when it is safe to accept a transaction of a given size, as confirmed, because (on average), the block reward is equal to the electricity cost of mining that block. That means that when your transaction has been buried under enough blocks that the mining subsidy equals the transactions size, it is more or less safe to accept that transaction as confirmed.
Now, imagine the situation with no mining reward.
o) Instead of participating in a competition to win the block reward, miners have no positive incentive to participate anymore. They now are left with the negative incentive to try and double spend.
o) Since these miners are not contributing their hashing power to the network anymore, the overall hashrate of the network in unmeasurable, since these miners are quite likely to leave their ASICs in sleep mode until they want to double spend
o) With the network hash rate unmeasurable, there is no way to put an estimate on when it is safe to accept a transaction as confirmed.
When there is no way to estimate when it is safe to accept a transaction as confirmed, that currency is now useless because any transaction can potentially be reversed.
This is why both byteball and iota use trusted third parties to secure the network, but at that point, you might as well be using VISA.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1799665.msg20108439#msg20108439 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1799665.msg20108439#...
- elmar 9y ago> both byteball and iota use trusted third parties to secure the network and Byteball looks more secure than IOTA you can have several witnesses that can bee different entities and you have to conclude more than half to change consensus state.
- wyldfire 9y ago> You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive This is not true, Proof-of-stake creates a suitable incentive to verify transactions and maintain the network. It's a legitimate alternative to proof-of-work.
- erikj 9y agoIs proof-of-stake actually deployed anywhere yet?
- elmar 9y agoNothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work (2015) http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
- wyldfire 9y agoThat's not an answer to the question. The answer to the question is "yes". DPoS coins: Nano, Lisk, Ark, etc. I think it's a good article but "equitable distribution" is a big function of PoW that I thought was a critical ingredient but now I'm not so sure.
- elmar 9y ago> That's not an answer to the question I submitted in the wrong thread
- andrewla 9y agoI have yet to see a convincing argument that proof-of-stake can be made trustless. The only designs that I've seen that seem realistic rely on some notion of checkpointing to prevent large scale chain rewrites. While it may be possible to make that checkpointing distributed, the only way that I'm aware of is to use proof of work. The easier path is to just checkpoint in the client, so that the trust comes from the github repository that pushes the client, or gets trusted updates from some trusted authority. That's not to say that trustless consensus is necessary for a currency. I used to be a very strong believer that that was a necessary component, but I've begun to question that belief. The notion of censorship-resistance is an important part of why I liked Bitcoin in the first place, but may turn out not to be sufficiently valuable to people to impact coins that don't have that property.