11 ms·

Proof of Stake

73 points by jarsin 10y ago

lowglow 10y ago
Open for critique, but just by going off of this article: With "Proof of <wildcard>" you're essentially abstracting out how a community participates. Proof of Work exists to demonstrate good will by saying "This person works to participate and add value in the community" There is a buy-in a degree removed from the coin. Proof of Stake sounds like it just removes the work someone must do from the system and says "If they have money, they can buy in to the community without work". It's like saying: Instead of people putting in the work to contribute to the community through effort the community finds valuable (i.e. Proof of Work, e.g. Karma), we're going to let people just buy karma and trust that they have the community's best interest in mind. While this gives anyone the ability to buy into the community and participate in the consensus, this sounds like the opposite of what I want in a community, because these people don't have to work to demonstrate their value to the community that exists. Another issue is this doesn't encourage liquidity, it encourages people to hoard their coins/currency to participate. This might drive the price of the coin up I guess. Ethereum doesn't have a 'set amount' that will ever be released like bitcoin. They'll release coins indefinitely. Does this mean you'll have to participate in purchasing coins indefinitely to continue to participate to have a larger voice as the value of your coins gets diluted? There might also be the problem of who controls the coins might always maintain a majority, since the tokens/coins are just issued, there is no real work required to obtain them. That's a little weird and totalitarian and not utilitarian.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Proof of work demonstrates that a certain amount of work was done, which cost a certain amount of money to produce. It's burning money to get currency, nothing more.
  - Spivak 10y ago
    It also helps facilitate transactions, ensures the security and integrity of a network of mutually distrustful agents, and establishes a price floor for the currency loosely based on the price of electricity.
    - ikeboy 10y ago
      "establishes a price floor for the currency loosely based on the price of electricity." You have causality backwards: the difficult changes based on the price of the currency. If the price goes down, people will simply mine less.
- rocqua 10y ago
  There is an even larger issue with the basic proof of stake method. It's called 'nothing at stake'. With proof of work, you can only mine on any one block. You make sure this is the last block in the chain because otherwise you'd need to mine 2 blocks in a row to convince everyone. This ensures it is really hard to rewrite history. With proof of stake, nothing is preventing you from 'mining' on multiple base blocks on the same time. Anytime you spend a coin and get the goods, you might as well try and see if you can 'mine' 2 new blocks to erase your transaction. I've seen proposed solutions that combine these 2. Basically, a block then requires both proof of work and proof of stake. This doesn't help (much?) with electricity costs, but helps somewhat with centralization of power.
  - gst 10y ago
    > With proof of stake, nothing is preventing you from 'mining' on multiple base blocks on the same time. Anytime you spend a coin and get the goods, you might as well try and see if you can 'mine' 2 new blocks to erase your transaction. Ethereum's proof-of-stake approach appears to solve the "nothing-at-stake" issue, see the Mauve paper for more details: http://vitalik.ca/files/mauve_paper.html http://vitalik.ca/files/mauve_paper.html TL;DR of their approach is that if you mine off-chain blocks they can get later-on included by other (PoS-)miners via the "dunkle" mechanism. If this happens there's a penalty for the original miner who mined a block that didn't make it into the current chain.
    - rocqua 10y ago
      Seems like that site vitalik.ca is down. Do you have any other sources for that paper?
      - gst 10y ago
        It's available in the Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BPRBqz29DbcJ:vitalik.ca/files/mauve_paper.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BPRBqz...
- wmf 10y ago
  Money and work are interchangeable [1] and mining doesn't necessarily add value to the community since a miner could mine empty blocks. Mining is using real money to buy electricity to generate Internet money. [1] I'm ignoring hippiecoins based on the labor theory of value.
  - mdashx 10y ago
    I'm still not convinced by PoS, but at first glance, since money = work then PoS might be viable, because what's the difference? Energy goes into creating proof of stake coins, just like it goes into producing proof of work coins, so they should be equally viable... that's what I thought the first time I seriously looked at PoS. I want to believe that PoS is not simply an attempt to get something for nothing, but I think that maybe it's attempt to get money to work twice. In PoW, the work is done to get coins. In PoS, the work is done to get fiat or whatever, then exchanged for PoS, and then put to work mining, but the value was created outside the PoS system and now it's not clear where additional work is taking place to fuel block validation. I haven't decided 100% that it's a scam, but it is definitely complex and confusing. The mental model that I'm still stuck with is that PoW is like normal combustion engine... ASICs being high-displacement V8s, while PoS is like some kind of complex perpetual motion machine.
TD-Linux 10y ago
Sadly, this article is mostly just a link to the Ethereum FAQ. It should be noted that every Proof of Stake altcoin has eventually collapsed, and there are arguments that this is inevitable: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
- Animats 10y ago
  It's not that distributed consensus is hard. It's that anonymous consensus is hard. Common stock has distributed consensus via voting based on share ownership. That's proof-of-stake. The real problem here, as with spam, is the ability to generate large numbers of anonymous identities cheaply. Zuckerberg figured this out a long time ago; hence Facebook's "real names" policy.
  - TD-Linux 10y ago
    That's partly the case, though note that in terms of Bitcoin, stock would be considered to be centralized, not distributed, as the exchange determines ordering of transactions. It's not really proof of stake because it doesn't have the problem that proof of stake is trying to solve in the first place.
    - kevinpet 10y ago
      Stock is centralized, but not in that way. There is no single ordering of transactions. Exchanges (which are distinct entities, i.e. decentralized) are legally required to report their trades, but the order actually happens at independent places. What is centralized is the record of ownership of the shares. All publicly tradable shares in the US are in a technical sense owned by Cede & Co., a partnership related to the DTCC. When shares change hands, all that happens is an entry in the database at the DTC. Since we're talking about the blockchain, it's interesting to know how this system is secured. The mechanism is that both parties report the expected transactions to DTCC, which ensures they match before the money changes hands. The trade that happens during market hours is only the agreement to trade, and the actual delivery happens three days later.
    - 10y ago
Rauchg 10y ago
My gut tells me the opposite. Here are some unscientific reasons why. Proof of stake: the mechanism to secure the coins, uses the coins it's trying to secure. Circular. Proof of work is simpler to describe and implement, which is attractive. Joining, then leaving, then joining and catching up is easy. Blockchain reorgs are easy. Compare the length of Bitcoin's whitepaper and any PoS whitepaper, or the cited link even. It'd be interesting for the author to share his intuitions for why it might be better.
- splintercell 10y ago
  >Proof of stake: the mechanism to secure the coins, uses the coins it's trying to secure. Circular. I think the term you're looking for is 'bootstrapping'. Once we have enough cryptocurrency via PoW, we can (and only then) implement PoS.
  - wmf 10y ago
    You can initially distribute a currency any way you want, like an auction.
  - Taek 10y ago
    No, it's not that simple. After you switch to a PoS system you still have all the problems. For example, who is allowed to vote is decided by who is currently voting. For example, PoS is typically signature based. What's to stop me from making more signatures after the fact? And how can a newbie tell which signatures I made first? These are hard problems, and they aren't the only ones, and solving the bootstrapping issue alone is not sufficient.
- SkyMarshal 10y ago
  >Circular. Circular, self-referential. Works great until it doesn't, then fails catastrophically. Most people don't think about the kind of risks that have low odds of occurrence but drastic consequences when they do occur (coughGFCcoughFukushimacough), especially not when blinded by $$$ in their eyes and/or the idea of being part of the next big thing. One interesting line of research in the field is in ways to anchor the security of the system or value of the network to something external. PoW does this by anchoring the value of the token and the security of the network in the cost of electricity. There are other experiments going on trying to anchor it to a basket of fiat currencies, for example, or other forms of cryptographic randomness. PoW I think will remain the most robust, but worth experimenting.
kwikiel 10y ago
Actually proof of stake can by hybrid one: You will need both mining power and staking. By having 2x coins you will have 4x voting power. That way you will reduce waste on mining while still having security coming from it.
- Taek 10y ago
  That's a naive solution that has dramatic centralizing effects. By owning more coins, you are stronger than the competition. The miner with the most coins will out compete the rest, and you will be left with one miner. This problem has been very well studied and there are not any simple solutions available. Many academics believe that it's fundamentally impossible.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Is it just me or does all this "Blockchain doesn't have to be Bitcoin" ideology sound like "Uber is worth billion dollars. Let's build an Uber for X"? Even before Bitcoin there were tons of attempts at implementing cryptocurrency, and none of them worked. It was Bitcoin that hit the jackpot for some reason, just like how human beings beat all the odds to become the top of the food chain on earth. I am not saying it's impossible, I just don't like how all this movement is driven by VCs, just like how all the "Uber for X" companies were driven by VCs, powered by naive entrepreneurs who thought just copycatting a successful model to a different domain would make them rich. I just think in most cases these copycat projects have no soul and that's why they fail, just like Uber for X companies never become Uber.
- pmorici 10y ago
  It think one of the issues at the core is that all these copy cats have a company or group of people behind them who stand to benefit if their block-chain gets traction. Because there is a lot of value if someone can control the block chain you see all these people trying. Bitcoin's creator on the other hand released their idea into the world and then disappeared. If it is eventually successful they don't stand to benefit any more than any other early adopter. It kind of reminds me of the early days of the Internet when you didn't get "Internet" you got AOL, or CompuServe, or whatever. All these companies wanted to control the network you connected into with their own branding. Eventually those companies all died and everyone realized that an open Internet with no one company controlling it at the core was the way things would go.
  - lsc 10y ago
    >It kind of reminds me of the early days of the Internet when you didn't get "Internet" you got AOL, or CompuServe, or whatever. All these companies wanted to control the network you connected into with their own branding. Eventually those companies all died and everyone realized that an open Internet with no one company controlling it at the core was the way things would go. But aren't we moving back that direction? Now your local business doesn't have a website, they have a facebook. Turns out? people like walled gardens just fine, it's just that it's not as easy as it looks to build a walled garden and a last mile transport network.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kristianp 10y ago
I'd like to point out Peercoin, which has been running since 2012. It's a hybrid POS/POW currency. http://www.coindesk.com/how-peercoin-got-a-boost-from-bitcoins-halving/ http://www.coindesk.com/how-peercoin-got-a-boost-from-bitcoi...
ars 10y ago
Are there any "Proof of storage" blockchains? This would force people to have physical objects (RAM or HDD) to mine, but doesn't consume the massive amounts of energy that POW mining consumes. (i.e. you only need the storage to mine a block, not longterm) The way I'm envisioning it each "tick" randomly X blocks are picked, and the more storage you have the more likely it is you will be picked (potentially more than once).
- corv 10y ago
  How would you prove having storage? Seems it would use a lot of bandwidth or computation when calculating hashes.
  - ars 10y ago
    I don't know. I was thinking something like write a bunch of random numbers to disk, and prove that you have the ability to retrieve any of them at will. This is obviously not a complete solution. I was asking if anyone knew of any such system. A positive, not negative, feature of the system is you must be able to rewrite all the storage each time. So the faster your can write the more blocks you win, but also the more storage you have the more blocks you win (and it's a tradeoff between them).
    - corv 10y ago
      I'm not aware of any Proof-of-Storage systems but Storj and similar projects are combining blockchain cryptocurrency with p2p storage. It's an interesting idea.
      - Taek 10y ago
        Happy to jump in as the founder of one of these, Sia. We build consensus using proof of work, and then we throw some smart contracts on top of the consensus system to build a secure marketplace for cloud storage. The result so far has been really potent. On the Sia network today, raw storage (pre-redundancy) costs about $0.30 per TB. Performed intelligently, you only need about 2x redundancy, putting the total cost at less than 1/10th of Amazon glacier. I project that as the network grows, demand will catch up to supply more and the price will settle closer to $2 / TB / Mo for raw storage. I can answer any questions.
SkyMarshal 10y ago
>Mining works. It has validated blockchain technology and allowed it to be commercialized. Well, it works at small scale, hasn't been validated at large scale yet. The entire Bitcoin community is undergoing a schism right now over a disagreement related to mining.
- JauntyHatAngle 10y ago
  No it isn't, its undergoing a schism related to protocol. The mining part has worked fine.
  - Taek 10y ago
    Well, you are not wrong about the schism, the schism is indeed about the protocol and not about the mining. But I don't think you'll find many of the developers agreeing with the idea that the mining has worked just fine. It's horribly centralized, and while it gets better and gets worse, at its best it's "jeez this is really centralized and I don't feel comfortable at all" and at it's worst it's "only two entities who happen to be in the same legal jurisdiction need to collaborate to do a 51% attack on the network, oh yeah and they are already collaborating in other nontrivial ways". Miner centralization is still a huge issue for Bitcoin.
    - JauntyHatAngle 10y ago
      >Miner centralization is still a huge issue for Bitcoin. That's a fair call, there is a little too much faith in the large pools being "rational" participants.
abrkn 10y ago
There is nothing at stake. That's the problem.
zitterbewegung 10y ago
As I attempt to understand the block chain as a tool I'm struggling to see an application useful other than bitcoin. Anyone have a example?
- Taek 10y ago
  Sure. For Sia we've used smart contracts to build a secure marketplace for cloud storage. Basically, we use the blockchain to create a contract between a host and a renter saying that the host will store X data for Y amount of time. The renter pays immediately, but the host only received the payment after Y time and only if the host can prove cryptographically that they still have the data. You can combine this with encryption and erasure coding to create a near-perfect marketplace for cloud storage that's very competitive, private and secure, and extremely reliable. Here's a good place to get started for more technical information: http://forum.sia.tech/topic/107/interesting-threads http://forum.sia.tech/topic/107/interesting-threads Our network today sells storage for less than 1/10th the cost of Amazon S3.
chm 10y ago
There are many questions yet to be answered wrt PoS, but one that I have yet to hear a good explanation for is the initial coin distribution. A blockchain would be mined for a set period of time, and then PoS turned on. A great advantage of PoW is its simplicity. Want some coins? Work.
wegi 10y ago
Proof of Stake is not free of fault. First and foremost it gives an inherent incentive for hoarding, which is the death of every currency.
bernardlunn 10y ago
Proof Of Stake tackles scale and cost. Perhaps Lightning Network or Open Transactions are better approaches?

73 points by jarsin 10y ago

Open for critique, but just by going off of this article: With "Proof of <wildcard>" you're essentially abstracting out how a community participates. Proof of Work exists to demonstrate good will by saying "This person works to participate and add value in the community" There is a buy-in a degree removed from the coin. Proof of Stake sounds like it just removes the work someone must do from the system and says "If they have money, they can buy in to the community without work". It's like saying: Instead of people putting in the work to contribute to the community through effort the community finds valuable (i.e. Proof of Work, e.g. Karma), we're going to let people just buy karma and trust that they have the community's best interest in mind. While this gives anyone the ability to buy into the community and participate in the consensus, this sounds like the opposite of what I want in a community, because these people don't have to work to demonstrate their value to the community that exists. Another issue is this doesn't encourage liquidity, it encourages people to hoard their coins/currency to participate. This might drive the price of the coin up I guess. Ethereum doesn't have a 'set amount' that will ever be released like bitcoin. They'll release coins indefinitely. Does this mean you'll have to participate in purchasing coins indefinitely to continue to participate to have a larger voice as the value of your coins gets diluted? There might also be the problem of who controls the coins might always maintain a majority, since the tokens/coins are just issued, there is no real work required to obtain them. That's a little weird and totalitarian and not utilitarian.

ikeboy 10y ago
Proof of work demonstrates that a certain amount of work was done, which cost a certain amount of money to produce. It's burning money to get currency, nothing more.
- Spivak 10y ago
  It also helps facilitate transactions, ensures the security and integrity of a network of mutually distrustful agents, and establishes a price floor for the currency loosely based on the price of electricity.
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    "establishes a price floor for the currency loosely based on the price of electricity." You have causality backwards: the difficult changes based on the price of the currency. If the price goes down, people will simply mine less.
rocqua 10y ago
There is an even larger issue with the basic proof of stake method. It's called 'nothing at stake'. With proof of work, you can only mine on any one block. You make sure this is the last block in the chain because otherwise you'd need to mine 2 blocks in a row to convince everyone. This ensures it is really hard to rewrite history. With proof of stake, nothing is preventing you from 'mining' on multiple base blocks on the same time. Anytime you spend a coin and get the goods, you might as well try and see if you can 'mine' 2 new blocks to erase your transaction. I've seen proposed solutions that combine these 2. Basically, a block then requires both proof of work and proof of stake. This doesn't help (much?) with electricity costs, but helps somewhat with centralization of power.
- gst 10y ago
  > With proof of stake, nothing is preventing you from 'mining' on multiple base blocks on the same time. Anytime you spend a coin and get the goods, you might as well try and see if you can 'mine' 2 new blocks to erase your transaction. Ethereum's proof-of-stake approach appears to solve the "nothing-at-stake" issue, see the Mauve paper for more details: http://vitalik.ca/files/mauve_paper.html http://vitalik.ca/files/mauve_paper.html TL;DR of their approach is that if you mine off-chain blocks they can get later-on included by other (PoS-)miners via the "dunkle" mechanism. If this happens there's a penalty for the original miner who mined a block that didn't make it into the current chain.
  - rocqua 10y ago
    Seems like that site vitalik.ca is down. Do you have any other sources for that paper?
    - gst 10y ago
      It's available in the Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BPRBqz29DbcJ:vitalik.ca/files/mauve_paper.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BPRBqz...
wmf 10y ago
Money and work are interchangeable [1] and mining doesn't necessarily add value to the community since a miner could mine empty blocks. Mining is using real money to buy electricity to generate Internet money. [1] I'm ignoring hippiecoins based on the labor theory of value.
- mdashx 10y ago
  I'm still not convinced by PoS, but at first glance, since money = work then PoS might be viable, because what's the difference? Energy goes into creating proof of stake coins, just like it goes into producing proof of work coins, so they should be equally viable... that's what I thought the first time I seriously looked at PoS. I want to believe that PoS is not simply an attempt to get something for nothing, but I think that maybe it's attempt to get money to work twice. In PoW, the work is done to get coins. In PoS, the work is done to get fiat or whatever, then exchanged for PoS, and then put to work mining, but the value was created outside the PoS system and now it's not clear where additional work is taking place to fuel block validation. I haven't decided 100% that it's a scam, but it is definitely complex and confusing. The mental model that I'm still stuck with is that PoW is like normal combustion engine... ASICs being high-displacement V8s, while PoS is like some kind of complex perpetual motion machine.

TD-Linux 10y ago

Sadly, this article is mostly just a link to the Ethereum FAQ. It should be noted that every Proof of Stake altcoin has eventually collapsed, and there are arguments that this is inevitable: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

Animats 10y ago
It's not that distributed consensus is hard. It's that anonymous consensus is hard. Common stock has distributed consensus via voting based on share ownership. That's proof-of-stake. The real problem here, as with spam, is the ability to generate large numbers of anonymous identities cheaply. Zuckerberg figured this out a long time ago; hence Facebook's "real names" policy.
- TD-Linux 10y ago
  That's partly the case, though note that in terms of Bitcoin, stock would be considered to be centralized, not distributed, as the exchange determines ordering of transactions. It's not really proof of stake because it doesn't have the problem that proof of stake is trying to solve in the first place.
  - kevinpet 10y ago
    Stock is centralized, but not in that way. There is no single ordering of transactions. Exchanges (which are distinct entities, i.e. decentralized) are legally required to report their trades, but the order actually happens at independent places. What is centralized is the record of ownership of the shares. All publicly tradable shares in the US are in a technical sense owned by Cede & Co., a partnership related to the DTCC. When shares change hands, all that happens is an entry in the database at the DTC. Since we're talking about the blockchain, it's interesting to know how this system is secured. The mechanism is that both parties report the expected transactions to DTCC, which ensures they match before the money changes hands. The trade that happens during market hours is only the agreement to trade, and the actual delivery happens three days later.
  - 10y ago

Rauchg 10y ago

My gut tells me the opposite. Here are some unscientific reasons why. Proof of stake: the mechanism to secure the coins, uses the coins it's trying to secure. Circular. Proof of work is simpler to describe and implement, which is attractive. Joining, then leaving, then joining and catching up is easy. Blockchain reorgs are easy. Compare the length of Bitcoin's whitepaper and any PoS whitepaper, or the cited link even. It'd be interesting for the author to share his intuitions for why it might be better.

splintercell 10y ago
>Proof of stake: the mechanism to secure the coins, uses the coins it's trying to secure. Circular. I think the term you're looking for is 'bootstrapping'. Once we have enough cryptocurrency via PoW, we can (and only then) implement PoS.
- wmf 10y ago
  You can initially distribute a currency any way you want, like an auction.
- Taek 10y ago
  No, it's not that simple. After you switch to a PoS system you still have all the problems. For example, who is allowed to vote is decided by who is currently voting. For example, PoS is typically signature based. What's to stop me from making more signatures after the fact? And how can a newbie tell which signatures I made first? These are hard problems, and they aren't the only ones, and solving the bootstrapping issue alone is not sufficient.
SkyMarshal 10y ago
>Circular. Circular, self-referential. Works great until it doesn't, then fails catastrophically. Most people don't think about the kind of risks that have low odds of occurrence but drastic consequences when they do occur (coughGFCcoughFukushimacough), especially not when blinded by $$$ in their eyes and/or the idea of being part of the next big thing. One interesting line of research in the field is in ways to anchor the security of the system or value of the network to something external. PoW does this by anchoring the value of the token and the security of the network in the cost of electricity. There are other experiments going on trying to anchor it to a basket of fiat currencies, for example, or other forms of cryptographic randomness. PoW I think will remain the most robust, but worth experimenting.

kwikiel 10y ago

Actually proof of stake can by hybrid one: You will need both mining power and staking. By having 2x coins you will have 4x voting power. That way you will reduce waste on mining while still having security coming from it.

Taek 10y ago
That's a naive solution that has dramatic centralizing effects. By owning more coins, you are stronger than the competition. The miner with the most coins will out compete the rest, and you will be left with one miner. This problem has been very well studied and there are not any simple solutions available. Many academics believe that it's fundamentally impossible.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

Is it just me or does all this "Blockchain doesn't have to be Bitcoin" ideology sound like "Uber is worth billion dollars. Let's build an Uber for X"? Even before Bitcoin there were tons of attempts at implementing cryptocurrency, and none of them worked. It was Bitcoin that hit the jackpot for some reason, just like how human beings beat all the odds to become the top of the food chain on earth. I am not saying it's impossible, I just don't like how all this movement is driven by VCs, just like how all the "Uber for X" companies were driven by VCs, powered by naive entrepreneurs who thought just copycatting a successful model to a different domain would make them rich. I just think in most cases these copycat projects have no soul and that's why they fail, just like Uber for X companies never become Uber.

pmorici 10y ago
It think one of the issues at the core is that all these copy cats have a company or group of people behind them who stand to benefit if their block-chain gets traction. Because there is a lot of value if someone can control the block chain you see all these people trying. Bitcoin's creator on the other hand released their idea into the world and then disappeared. If it is eventually successful they don't stand to benefit any more than any other early adopter. It kind of reminds me of the early days of the Internet when you didn't get "Internet" you got AOL, or CompuServe, or whatever. All these companies wanted to control the network you connected into with their own branding. Eventually those companies all died and everyone realized that an open Internet with no one company controlling it at the core was the way things would go.
- lsc 10y ago
  >It kind of reminds me of the early days of the Internet when you didn't get "Internet" you got AOL, or CompuServe, or whatever. All these companies wanted to control the network you connected into with their own branding. Eventually those companies all died and everyone realized that an open Internet with no one company controlling it at the core was the way things would go. But aren't we moving back that direction? Now your local business doesn't have a website, they have a facebook. Turns out? people like walled gardens just fine, it's just that it's not as easy as it looks to build a walled garden and a last mile transport network.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kristianp 10y ago

I'd like to point out Peercoin, which has been running since 2012. It's a hybrid POS/POW currency. http://www.coindesk.com/how-peercoin-got-a-boost-from-bitcoins-halving/ http://www.coindesk.com/how-peercoin-got-a-boost-from-bitcoi...

ars 10y ago

Are there any "Proof of storage" blockchains? This would force people to have physical objects (RAM or HDD) to mine, but doesn't consume the massive amounts of energy that POW mining consumes. (i.e. you only need the storage to mine a block, not longterm) The way I'm envisioning it each "tick" randomly X blocks are picked, and the more storage you have the more likely it is you will be picked (potentially more than once).

corv 10y ago
How would you prove having storage? Seems it would use a lot of bandwidth or computation when calculating hashes.
- ars 10y ago
  I don't know. I was thinking something like write a bunch of random numbers to disk, and prove that you have the ability to retrieve any of them at will. This is obviously not a complete solution. I was asking if anyone knew of any such system. A positive, not negative, feature of the system is you must be able to rewrite all the storage each time. So the faster your can write the more blocks you win, but also the more storage you have the more blocks you win (and it's a tradeoff between them).
  - corv 10y ago
    I'm not aware of any Proof-of-Storage systems but Storj and similar projects are combining blockchain cryptocurrency with p2p storage. It's an interesting idea.
    - Taek 10y ago
      Happy to jump in as the founder of one of these, Sia. We build consensus using proof of work, and then we throw some smart contracts on top of the consensus system to build a secure marketplace for cloud storage. The result so far has been really potent. On the Sia network today, raw storage (pre-redundancy) costs about $0.30 per TB. Performed intelligently, you only need about 2x redundancy, putting the total cost at less than 1/10th of Amazon glacier. I project that as the network grows, demand will catch up to supply more and the price will settle closer to $2 / TB / Mo for raw storage. I can answer any questions.

SkyMarshal 10y ago

>Mining works. It has validated blockchain technology and allowed it to be commercialized. Well, it works at small scale, hasn't been validated at large scale yet. The entire Bitcoin community is undergoing a schism right now over a disagreement related to mining.

JauntyHatAngle 10y ago
No it isn't, its undergoing a schism related to protocol. The mining part has worked fine.
- Taek 10y ago
  Well, you are not wrong about the schism, the schism is indeed about the protocol and not about the mining. But I don't think you'll find many of the developers agreeing with the idea that the mining has worked just fine. It's horribly centralized, and while it gets better and gets worse, at its best it's "jeez this is really centralized and I don't feel comfortable at all" and at it's worst it's "only two entities who happen to be in the same legal jurisdiction need to collaborate to do a 51% attack on the network, oh yeah and they are already collaborating in other nontrivial ways". Miner centralization is still a huge issue for Bitcoin.
  - JauntyHatAngle 10y ago
    >Miner centralization is still a huge issue for Bitcoin. That's a fair call, there is a little too much faith in the large pools being "rational" participants.

abrkn 10y ago

There is nothing at stake. That's the problem.

zitterbewegung 10y ago

As I attempt to understand the block chain as a tool I'm struggling to see an application useful other than bitcoin. Anyone have a example?

Taek 10y ago
Sure. For Sia we've used smart contracts to build a secure marketplace for cloud storage. Basically, we use the blockchain to create a contract between a host and a renter saying that the host will store X data for Y amount of time. The renter pays immediately, but the host only received the payment after Y time and only if the host can prove cryptographically that they still have the data. You can combine this with encryption and erasure coding to create a near-perfect marketplace for cloud storage that's very competitive, private and secure, and extremely reliable. Here's a good place to get started for more technical information: http://forum.sia.tech/topic/107/interesting-threads http://forum.sia.tech/topic/107/interesting-threads Our network today sells storage for less than 1/10th the cost of Amazon S3.

chm 10y ago

There are many questions yet to be answered wrt PoS, but one that I have yet to hear a good explanation for is the initial coin distribution. A blockchain would be mined for a set period of time, and then PoS turned on. A great advantage of PoW is its simplicity. Want some coins? Work.

wegi 10y ago

Proof of Stake is not free of fault. First and foremost it gives an inherent incentive for hoarding, which is the death of every currency.

bernardlunn 10y ago

Proof Of Stake tackles scale and cost. Perhaps Lightning Network or Open Transactions are better approaches?