No, 51% of the *coin holders* can't do diddly squat. 51% of miners can,
but in PoW, that's a different set to the coin holders.
The basic problem with PoS, anyway, is that it's not actually a
consensus system ("weak subjectivity"). Either you allow long reorgs,
and then you open the door to long-range attacks, or you don't, and then
you're not guaranteed that all nodes agree on the state of the chain,
which was the purpose of the system to begin with.
To put it more plainly: for PoS to work, you need a consensus on which
block was seen first. But if you had that, you could presumably apply
that method to determine which *transaction* was seen first, in which
case you could do away with the blockchain entirely. (Real-world
implementations of PoS, such that they are, do away with this
requirement, scrapping the global consensus on ordering in favor of
having each node decide for itself which block came first.)
In other words, even if you solved all the incentive problems, the fact
remains that PoS is not suitable for use as a consensus system, because
it is constitutionally incapable of producing a consensus.
On 2021-06-24 00:14, Billy Tetrud via bitcoin-dev wrote:
This is not true in a Proof of Work system and this difference
absolutely should not be trivialized.
That is in fact true of Proof of Work as well. If a colluding
coalition of miners with more than 50% of the hashrate want to censor
transactions, they absolutely can do that by orphaning blocks that
contain transactions they want to censor. This is not different in
proof of stake.
On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 11:14 AM Keagan McClelland
<keagan.mcclell...@gmail.com> wrote:
Premise: There is a healthy exchange market for PoS Coin X with
tens of thousands of participants bidding to buy and sell the coin
for other currencies on the market.
The difference here though is that Proof of Stake allows the quorum
of coin holders to block the exchange of said coins if they are
going to a particular destination. Nothing requires these staking
nodes to include particular transactions into a block. With that in
mind, it isn't just that you require the permission of the person
who sold you the coins, which I can agree is a less dangerous form
of permission, but you must also require the permission of at least
51% of the coin holders to even receive those coins in the first
place. This is not true in a Proof of Work system and this
difference absolutely should not be trivialized.
Keagan
On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 2:30 AM Billy Tetrud via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
Barrier to entry in PoS is being given permission by the previous
owner of a token
The idea that proof of stake is not permissionless is completely
invalid. It pains me to see such an argument here. Perhaps we can
come to an agreement by being more specific. I'd like to propose the
following:
Premise: There is a healthy exchange market for PoS Coin X with tens
of thousands of participants bidding to buy and sell the coin for
other currencies on the market.
If the premise above is true, then there is no significant
permission needed to enter the market for minting blocks for PoS
Coin X. If you make a bid on someone's coins and they don't like you
and refuse, you can move on to any one of the other tens of
thousands of people in that marketplace. Would you agree, Cloud
Strife, that this situation couldn't be considered "permissioned"?
If not, consider that participation in *any* decentralized system
requires the permission of at least one user in that system. If
there are thousands of bitcoin public nodes, you require the
permission of at least one of them to participate in bitcoin. No one
considers bitcoin "permissioned" because of this. Do you agree?
On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 1:15 PM Cloud Strife via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
Barrier to entry in PoW is matter for hardware and energy is
permissionless and exist all over the universe, permissionless cost
which exists for everyone no matter who because it's unforgeable.
Barrier to entry in PoS is being given permission by the previous
owner of a token for you to have it via transfer or sale, both
choices they never have to make since there are no continuous costs
with producing blocks forcing it. A permission is an infinitely high
barrier to entry if the previous owner, like the premining party,
refuses to give up the token they control.
You're skipping the part where you depend on a permission of a
central party in control of the authority token before you can
produce blocks on your rasberry Pi.
Proof of stake is not in any possible way relevant to permissionless
protocols, and thus not possibly relevant to decentralized protocols
where control must be distributed to independent (i.e.
permissionless) parties.
There's nothing of relevance to discuss and this has been figured
out long long ago.
https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-Fallacy
https://medium.com/@factchecker9000/nothing-is-worse-than-proof-of-stake-e70b12b988ca
On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 7:13 AM James MacWhyte via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
@Lloyd wrote:
Of course in reality no one wants to keep their coin holding keys
online so in Alogorand you can authorize a set of "participation
keys"[1] that will be used to create blocks on your coin holding
key's behalf.
Hopefully you've spotted the problem.
You can send your participation keys to any malicious party with a
nice website (see random example [2]) offering you a good return.
Damn it's still Proof-of-SquareSpace!
I believe we are talking about a comparison to PoW, correct? If you
want to mine PoW, you need to buy expensive hardware and configure
it to work, and wait a long time to get any return by solo mining.
Or you can join a mining pool, which might use your hashing power
for nefarious purposes. Or you might skip the hardware all together
and fall for some "cloud mining" scheme with a pretty website and a
high rate of advertised return. So as you can see,
Proof-of-SquareSpace exists in PoW as well!
The PoS equivalent of buying mining hardware is setting up your own
validator and not outsourcing that to anyone else. So both PoW and
PoS have the professional/expert way of participating, and the
fraud-prone, amateur way of participating. The only difference is,
with PoS the professional/expert way is accessible to anyone with a
raspberry Pi and a web connection, which is a much lower barrier to
entry than PoW. _______________________________________________
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