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Ethereum Foundation Releases Alpha Casper Proof of Stake Testnet
- jv22222 9y agoA very interesting project that aims to get high value from proof of stake is Omise Go "We're looking to build the thing that will finally change the way money is handled the whole world over for the better, and leave a legacy that can sustain itself through all kinds of social and cultural changes. We're looking at accomplishing the spirit of the original Nakamoto vision of Bitcoin, the original Ripple vision (pre-blockchain Ripplepay), the original Paypal vision." https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-definitive-omisego-beginners-guide-f95dcdf8635c https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-definitive-omisego-begin...
- karlmcguire 9y agoI wonder if we will finally see more than ~13 transactions per second in 2018.
- snissn 9y agoPlan is for ethereum sharding to occur in the proof of work chain.
- tehlike 9y agodidn't ethereum pass 100 recently? Also, DAG based coins are seemingly the better in terms of efficiency.
- stri8ed 9y agoAnd unproven security models. E.g. IOTA has as of now, is completely centralized.
- tehlike 9y agoIOTA has other issues which smell big scam to me. Can you expand on unproven (for my education?). Thank you.
- wslh 9y agoUnproven means there is no research available on adversarial attacks.
- Kiro 9y agoWhat about RaiBlocks?
- tehlike 9y agoRaiblocks seem to be the darling these days - it has a good chance of success just because of the founder, but it also brings a bunch of new tech :)
- Agebor 9y agoIn case it does not handle HN traffic well, alternative: https://hackmd.io/s/Hk6UiFU7z https://hackmd.io/s/Hk6UiFU7z
- castratikron 9y agoI've been trying to understand why PoS is an improvement over PoW. To me PoS seems like a weaker requirement on network control than PoW. Since PoW requires possession of actual physical hardware and electricity it should be more difficult to obtain than a virtual currency. To me moving from PoW to PoS is analogous to moving off of the gold standard and placing trust in the value of the currency with whomever possesses it.
- pwaai 9y agoAs I understand it, it's designed to create price inflation that benefits those holding large amounts of Ether. Please feel free to correct me in case I'm wrong.
- acoye 9y agoYeah, why would smaller holders of ether would be excluded from PoS? Security probably. But it sucks that the small holders cant profit from their property. Maybe there is a need to create a "cooperative" of sorts hodling the eth of many users and running PoS thus rewarding the owners. (like a pool but safety would be way more of an issue compared to PoW)
- atentaten 9y agoThere will be validator pools available for those with small amounts of ETH
- acoye 9y agoIt feels a bit more risky than mining in a pool don't you think? If a validator pool is hacked you loose your stake. The equivalent in PoW world would be someone breaking in and leaving with all the GPUs of all the users of a pool, what I would consider not dooable for a large enough pool.
- tuxxy 9y ago
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- joeblau 9y agoI can't wait for this to be fleshed out and implemented on Mainnet. I'm working on a smart contract that I want to integrate with Casper's API. The site is having a hard time loading, but does anyone know where the official Casper solidity interface is hosted?
- DINKDINK 9y ago"Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work" - http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ I'm glad they're finally launching there PoS fork so it can have its inevitable outcome.
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- 1053r 9y agoThis article is full of problems, but the biggest one is failing to look at the global perspective: While it is true that an individual miner/validator will be indifferent to spending money on electricity and mining equipment vs. purchasing coin to stake with, the difference between the two is a meaningful to non-miners/non-validators. In the mining case, the miner is purchasing equipment and electricity that divert real resources away from the production of other goods and services. In the validating case, the validator purchases coin, which causes prices of that coin to adjust upward. The economy keeps producing the exact same goods and services as if the validation activity did not exist (after a short dislocation, which would be very short in this case because few contracts are denominated in cryptocurrency). So "nothing is cheaper than proof of work" is a true statement if you are a miner/validator. However, it is a false statement if you are cryptocurrency designer. Obviously, it is easy to design a coin which is MORE wasteful globally than BTC. Instead of running on electricity and hashing, make it run on proof of extinction (verified in major newspapers) of critically endangered animals. The miners will spend time and energy doing terrible things to the planet, but they will spend no more money time or energy on it than they would have spent on electricity and ASICs. Why should it be impossible to design a currency that is LESS wasteful than proof of work? I recommend against reading the truthcoin.info blog in general. This kind of wooly headedness is widespread, and the writing style is obtuse enough to make it hard to figure out exactly why the author is correct or incorrect. Edited for grammar/clarity.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago>>In the mining case, the miner is purchasing equipment and electricity that divert real resources away from the production of other goods and services. >>In the validating case, the validator is purchasing coin which simply causes prices to adjust and the economy keeps producing the exact same goods and services as if the validation activity did not exist (after a short dislocation, which would be very short in this case because few contracts are denominated in cryptocurrency). The value diverted to coin purchases ultimately has a cost in goods and services. It diverts economic activity to non-economically productive activity in cycling capital into and out of deposits, which results in less liquidity. I think Proof of Stake could potentially be better than Proof of Work, but the point about cost being equal across validation methods is correct in general in my opinion. There are specific circumstances where it is not true, like if producing the mining resource creates negative externalities. Where I think the article is wrong is in neglecting other aspects of consensus algorithm efficacy, like the potential security benefits from Proof of Stake totally aligning the incentives of owners of mining capital (which in the case of PoS is the network coins) with the success of the network.
- ilaksh 9y agoBesides the lack of transaction scaling, the other slightly tough thing for me about cryptocurrencies is downloading many GB of data. If my Casper node is not a validator, does it still have to download the whole blockchain? Or can it operate on a smaller dataset? Also does anyone know what the timeframe is supposed to be for sharding to be implemented or end up in an Alpha release? It seems that will probably also reduce the minimum storage requirements for most nodes in addition to increasing network transaction rates. Thanks.
- stri8ed 9y agoYou can prune the chain after you sync. As for the general issue of storing the state, there is research being done on "stateless clients". https://ethresear.ch/t/the-stateless-client-concept/172 https://ethresear.ch/t/the-stateless-client-concept/172 Instead of storing entire state, Validator just needs to the current state root, and transactions must prove the state that they access.
- coolspot 9y agoYou cannot prune in official geth client. Source: having 300+Gb geth node and researched prunning recently. Only parity can do that.
- anonfunction 9y agoFirst, you will need to have enough testnet ETH to become a validator. ... Replacing 2000 with whatever amount of ETH you want to deposit (min 1500). Is this minimum just for the Testnet or ingrained into the final spec?
- acoye 9y agoI'm reading the paper looking for an answer. (as I'm hopping to be able to run a PoS node in the future) As I understand PoS, for security to be achieved, you need to be able to lose a non trivial amount of ether. I guess the 1K5 ETH is designed to stay roughly above 1 million USD of stake.
- dangero 9y agoThis is the question and is there a way to lease/pool your coins to a validator if you have less than that because if not that basically sets up supernode-like behavior like Dash where the rich get richer. 1500 coins is currently 1.1 million USD
- dmix 9y agoFor people who don't know what this is (like me), they have a good FAQ explaining "Proof of Stake" vs "Proof of Work": > In proof of work (PoW) based public blockchains (e.g. Bitcoin and the current implementation of Ethereum), the algorithm rewards participants who solve cryptographic puzzles in order to validate transactions and create new blocks (i.e. mining). In PoS-based public blockchains (e.g. Ethereum's upcoming Casper implementation), a set of validators take turns proposing and voting on the next block, and the weight of each validator's vote depends on the size of its deposit (i.e. stake). Significant advantages of PoS include security, reduced risk of centralization, and energy efficiency. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
- ehsankia 9y agoWouldn't sites like Coinbase which "hold" a huge amount of stake, basically have a huge control over these currencies?
- stouset 9y agoYes, but the simplistic version of the argument is that any entity with such a large stake would be inherently incentivized to preserve the value of the currency and act in good faith. My intuition is that this is a risky proposition. If an entity can benefit themselves $x by making a bad-faith transaction, but it only costs them $y such that $y < $x, it’s rational to do it even if the costs to others are orders of magnitude greater. As a concrete example, if Coinbase double-spent a transaction for $10m and had enough stake to make the network accept this, would it necessarily devalue the currency through loss of trust by enough to make this unprofitable? Is this true for all possible actions by a 51% stakeholder?
- konschubert 9y agoIf somebody holds 51% of the capital in bitcoin (In form of 51% of the mining hardware), he can mount a 51% attack as well.
- angel_j 9y agoProof of Stake should mean running the software. If it's not good enough for that little bit of a stake, you must provide incentives for others* to run it, and this is going create imbalances somewhere. * - in a real sense, this is users, not-using, and offloading the work to those who would probably not actually use without incentive; the only difference between a PoW and a "put your money" type of stake, is that now you've added an entry fee that is hardly different than licensing (as in professional licenses, for various trades).
- 1_over_n 9y agoThis page isn’t working notes.eth.sg didn’t send any data. ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE :)
- itoenocha 9y agoweb3 = Web3(HTTPProvider('http://52.87.179.32:8545') http://52.87.179.32:8545')) Stuck at this step, since the host 52.87.179.32 appears to be off-line
- itoenocha 9y agoOnce the node is running and validating, how do we get our account balance? eth.services.accounts.accounts[0] <Account(address=55029b23a9b2ca77ac012e184452b682edc82a67, id=None)>
- coolspot 9y agoTry web3.eth.getBalance(web3.eth.accounts[0], console.log);
- lostmsu 9y agoHave they completed scientific and adversarial review of the proposed guarantees and their respective proofs already? If I'd knew a flaw in Casper, I'd wait until the final release and deployment. Without respective proofs, what is the point?
- drcode 9y agoThey have a series of formal proofs written by a mathematician to verify the staking algorithm, though that is only a small part of what is needed to secure a modern consensus system.
- runeks 9y ago> They have a series of formal proofs written by a mathematician to verify the staking algorithm […] Under what assumptions? WPA2 was also formally proven secure, but it turned out that the assumptions of the proof didn’t hold in the real world.
- drcode 9y agoI already said formal proofs are not sufficient, what more do you want me to say?
- runeks 9y agoI'm interested in knowing which assumptions these formal proofs rely on. My general point is that, without stating which assumptions lay ground to a formal proof, the statement that something has been "formally proven" conveys no useful information at all, since the assumptions in question can either make or break the proof (as in the case of WPA2).
- drcode 9y agoOk, in that case apologies for snapping back at you :) sounds like you are genuinely interested in the details I'm no expert on ethereum POS, but afaik the proofs guarantee that when two conflicting blocks reach the "finalised" state then two thirds of stake are owned by parties that failed to follow a rule in the staking protocol and therefore their deposit can be forfeited. There are also proofs relating to validator cycling and long range attacks (which can never be completely prevented with POS, clients need to sync periodically to make sure they aren't receiving bad data)
- kruhft 9y agoWill there be a 'fork' when PoS is released such that there will be 2 types of Ethereum after the split (one PoW and the other PoS), much like Ethereum and Ethereeum Classic?
- ukd1 9y agoIf you want to checkout a PoS system that's been around for longer, https://decred.org https://decred.org has a hybrid PoW / PoS system which seems to get around a bunch of the issues listed here.
- runeks 9y agoThe usual explanation for how proof-of-stake works — compared to proof-of-work — is that it uses the scarce resource that is the chain’s own token, as opposed to the scarce resource that is electricity. The fundamental problem with this approach is that, in the absence of consensus, a token is not scarce at all — but rather its supply is unlimited — since infinitely many tokens exist on an infinite number of valid chains. So, in order for a token to be limited in supply, consensus on which chain is the canonical one must already exist. Thus, proof-of-stake reaching consensus depends on consensus existing beforehand. Scarcity of a digital decentralized token requires consensus on which chain to view as the truth. Therefore scarcity cannot be used as a requirement for reaching consensus.
- aoeusnth1 9y agoDoesn’t having a long lock-in period fix that problem?
- dausama 9y agoNEM chain has a modified POS algorithm that not only takes in account the stake, but also the network effect of a node. For instance a node with a high stake would need to move a lot of its stake around to overtake the network. I believe it uses an algorithm called EigenTrust++ and it has been working great for the last 2-3 years, since it was first coded into the chain.