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Proof-of-Stake is indeed a good thing, and a worthy focus of the article. From the article we read "the long-term hope is that apps built from them will eventu
by chrispeel 8y ago
Proof-of-Stake is indeed a good thing, and a worthy focus of the article.
From the article we read "the long-term hope is that apps built from them will eventually make Ethereum the ultimate cloud-computing platform." Ethereum does not claim to be a computing platform in the same way that AWS is; it's for low-complexity business logic only. I think it's misleading to use "ultimate cloud-computing platform" to describe Ethereum.
- r32a_ 8y agoEthereum claims to be the "World Computer" that lets you build "Unstoppable Applications". If that doesn't sound like an AWS competitor then I don't know.
- plywoodtrees 8y agoSure, it's in some sense "an AWS competitor" but something like a billion times less efficient, measured by throughput, energy efficiency, or cost. So, in practice, no it's not.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y agoWell put! To put it another way, the problems that Ethereum will solve are not ones that could be solved by AWS.
- anoncoward111 8y agoTotally agree. Despite both being energy/transport companies, Embraer and Tesla are solving two very different consumer problems.
- ENGNR 8y agoAWS actually made an interesting product, a distributed ledger that's 'trustless' as long as you trust Amazon, but with none of the overhead of blockchain so at least it's efficient I think Ethereum is going big places, but the AWS ledger solution is probably also going to be good for smaller industries where competitors don't trust each other, they want a database that's shared, and they all might trust Amazon enough to control it (eg if they're all using AWS anyway) (https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/ https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/)
- runeks 8y ago> […] a distributed ledger that's 'trustless' as long as you trust Amazon […] This has been possible since the 80’s due to public key encryption. It’s not having to trust a central actor that’s the innovation behind e.g. Bitcoin.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- outside1234 8y agoCan we get real for a second? Ethereum has no chance of taking on AWS or Microsoft. Those are multi billion dollar business with billion dollar requirements in infrastructure investment on a yearly basis. Not going to happen.
- r32a_ 8y agoI agree! But that's what Ethereum was pitched as.
- bigiain 8y agoSeems to me you're making invalid assumptions about what "world computer" means. There's not a lot to go in in those two words, but claiming they mean Etherium is out to capture all (or any) of AWS's customers is a _very_ long stretch.
- Zhyl 8y agoI see it less of a computing platform and more like the spinning table from the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The goal isn't to compute faster or better than others, it's for parties with competing interests to trust the computations that have taken place.
- profalseidol 8y agoIt's a git with stored procedures that can push commits.
- 0x8BADF00D 8y agoComparing Ethereum to AWS is an apples and oranges comparison at best. One is first order, and the other is second order. You could make an argument it’s a competitor to AWS Lambda, but it would be akin to saying lxc is a serverless competitor.
- r32a_ 8y agoI'm not comparing them, Ethereum marketing team pitched Ethereum as a world computer not me.
- konschubert 8y agoYou are misunderstanding what they mean with “world” computer
- vvillena 8y agoThink of it as one, single "world computer" and it will be much closer to reality. Everyone can access that computer for free, and use it for a price.
- banachtarski 8y ago> ... for free ... for a price
- bigiain 8y ago"access" vs "use". Everybody can see the code/transactions that are run for free. Everybody can have their code run and execute transactions for a price.
- bigiain 8y agoI use quite a lot of AWS - and there's precisely zero chance I'll ever migrate, say, a mobile app backend platform to an Ethereum "unstoppable application"... There are quite probably innovative new things that can be built using Etherium's "world computer", but my guess is that almost _none_ of what's currently running on (and paying for) AWS resources will move to it.
- nivexous 8y agoProof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense (without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.
- r32a_ 8y agoAlso once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51% With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker by just throwing more hashing power at bitcoin
- solveit 8y agoYou can always buy them out. But honestly, a 51% attack seems like a much less likely way for ethereum to fail compared to it just not living up to the hype.
- village-idiot 8y agoBy the by, it’s not clear that proof of stake is good for crypto, although reducing the CO2 budget is unambiguously good for the rest of us. Most PoS systems I’ve seen basically reward the oldest money holders with the right to stamp new transactions. This reduces the cost, but is extremely centralizing, bordering on neo-feudal. The cynic in me also notes that developers of these chains are regularly the oldest money, making their motivations suspect at best.
- dlubarov 8y agoIn most PoS designs, registering a new validator account takes some fixed amount of time, just as a measure to prevent grinding attacks. If registration takes an hour, and I can't predict the random seed an hour in advance, then I can't predict how my account will be scored, so grinding would be futile. Most PoS designs don't otherwise favor old accounts. I know Peercoin does, but that's a very small project, and I'm not aware of any others. Ethereum 2.0 definitely won't have any such mechanism. In the current spec [1], staking is binary; either you have an active validator account or you don't. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/master/specs/core/0_beacon-chain.md https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/master/specs/c...
- DennisP 8y agoThat sounds like the "coin age" system of Peercoin. Ethereum's PoS ignores coin age, which probably couldn't be used anyway because Ethereum uses account balances instead of UTXOs.
- Sargos 8y agoPoS is actually more decentralized when PoW. PoW is controlled by a few mining pools but PoS will have tens of thousands or more validators. In PoW only a few people have the resources to build and run mining farms. Certainly not me. In PoS anyone can stake on a desktop or laptop. This greatly increases the amount of people who can participate in the network.
- StreamBright 8y agoWhat is it good for?
- keymone 8y agoPoS was known way before PoW. It simply doesn't solve the problem at hand - decentralized consensus between mutually distrusting parties.
- DJBunnies 8y agoBingo.
- robertAngst 8y agoThis guy knows his byzantine general's problem. If POS worked, great. I wouldnt trust it for a half decade of use.
- Sargos 8y agoIOHK has many conference accepted peer reviewed research papers that show that proof of stake has equivalent security properties as proof of work.
- keymone 8y ago> conference accepted sure. > peer reviewed not so sure.
- runeks 8y agoA peer reviewed paper saying WPA2 is secure also exists. That clearly didn’t make it so. Only if we enumerate all possible attack vectors, and prove resiliency against these, is the proof as general as you claim. The difficult part — as the WPA2 paper shows — is the former. How do you know when you’ve enumerated all possible attack vectors?
- Sargos 8y agoThat's a good question. It's impossible to prove that anything besides math itself is absolutely true but we can say that for all known knowledge what is in this paper is true and secure. Unless some new discovery is made the papers show that proof of stake has similar mathematical security properties as proof of work.