32 ms·

By 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

By 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 ago
In 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 ago
That 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 ago
PoS 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.

32 ms·

By 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

by village-idiot 8y ago

dlubarov 8y ago
In 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 ago
That 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 ago
PoS 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.