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The biggest flaw in Proof of Stake IMO is that it then costs you nothing to fork. Forking bitcoin requires deciding which fork to spend your mining processing

The biggest flaw in Proof of Stake IMO is that it then costs you nothing to fork. Forking bitcoin requires deciding which fork to spend your mining processing time on. Forking a PoS coin does not, since you can use the same coins for stake on as many different chains as you want.

totony 7y ago
Why is this a flaw? Edit: it seems like it makes it more robust, basing ur interest in a fork not in your involvment in it but in its merit (e.g. you are incentivized to support them all)
- rocqua 7y ago
  Nothing to prevent you from staking honestly on one chain, and dishonestly on a chain that undoes some of the spends on the other chain. Hence people can band together to try and create forks without losing any money if the fork fails. Whereas with PoW, any effort spend on a fork is effort that did not to towards mining on the main chain.
  - totony 7y ago
    But you'd lose money on the second chain? Assuming >50% are honest. If <50% are honest the second chain is probably not worth anything anyway
    - Zamicol 7y ago
      Nothing at stake is never truly nothing at stake, but I've always considered "nothing at stake" not really a problem that's unfixable.
andrewla 7y ago
With Ethereum's algorithm I don't think this is the case (without some serious changes) because if you can prove that an address staked on a different chain then you can penalize that address on the main chain. I guess ultimately as long as you make sure that you empty out the address on the main chain, the main chain will simply disregard your attempts to claim a stake as being without merit. I don't know that anyone has analyzed the general case of an ongoing fork; the entire point of a proof-of-X is to be able to definitely prove from scratch that a given fork is the "correct" one simply by examining all alternative forks presented.
- gus_massa 7y ago
  What happens in case of a hard fork like the ETH/ETC fork? (Assuming something similar happens in the future after the PoS has been released.) Can you move the proof from a chain to the other across hard forks?
  - andrewla 7y ago
    During the ETH/ETC fork replay attacks were terrible until people figured out how to make a contract that was guaranteed to act differently in the two chains; you would send your ETH to that address, providing two output addresses, and your ETH would go to one and your ETC would go to the other. Before that was commonplace there were numerous problems of transactions being replayed causing all sorts of problems. If someone wanted to fork post-PoS ETH, chances are they would have to do so very deliberately, with code on the new fork deliberately designed to prevent replay attacks, as was done in the BTC/BCH fork.

totony 7y ago

Why is this a flaw? Edit: it seems like it makes it more robust, basing ur interest in a fork not in your involvment in it but in its merit (e.g. you are incentivized to support them all)

rocqua 7y ago
Nothing to prevent you from staking honestly on one chain, and dishonestly on a chain that undoes some of the spends on the other chain. Hence people can band together to try and create forks without losing any money if the fork fails. Whereas with PoW, any effort spend on a fork is effort that did not to towards mining on the main chain.
- totony 7y ago
  But you'd lose money on the second chain? Assuming >50% are honest. If <50% are honest the second chain is probably not worth anything anyway
  - Zamicol 7y ago
    Nothing at stake is never truly nothing at stake, but I've always considered "nothing at stake" not really a problem that's unfixable.

andrewla 7y ago

With Ethereum's algorithm I don't think this is the case (without some serious changes) because if you can prove that an address staked on a different chain then you can penalize that address on the main chain. I guess ultimately as long as you make sure that you empty out the address on the main chain, the main chain will simply disregard your attempts to claim a stake as being without merit. I don't know that anyone has analyzed the general case of an ongoing fork; the entire point of a proof-of-X is to be able to definitely prove from scratch that a given fork is the "correct" one simply by examining all alternative forks presented.

gus_massa 7y ago
What happens in case of a hard fork like the ETH/ETC fork? (Assuming something similar happens in the future after the PoS has been released.) Can you move the proof from a chain to the other across hard forks?
- andrewla 7y ago
  During the ETH/ETC fork replay attacks were terrible until people figured out how to make a contract that was guaranteed to act differently in the two chains; you would send your ETH to that address, providing two output addresses, and your ETH would go to one and your ETC would go to the other. Before that was commonplace there were numerous problems of transactions being replayed causing all sorts of problems. If someone wanted to fork post-PoS ETH, chances are they would have to do so very deliberately, with code on the new fork deliberately designed to prevent replay attacks, as was done in the BTC/BCH fork.