5 ms·

Slightly off topic, but does anyone have any good resources on how alternative consensus protocols work, like proof of stake and proof of importance? I either s

Slightly off topic, but does anyone have any good resources on how alternative consensus protocols work, like proof of stake and proof of importance? I either see really simplistic explanations or ones that assume a lot of domain knowledge. I also recently saw a crypto coin that claims to be energy efficient, and I don’t quite understand how that’s possible without the possibility of a 50.1% attack.

aspic 6y ago
You're perhaps thinking of https://nano.org https://nano.org ? A brief description of it's Open Representative Voting (ORV) consensus mechanism: "A consensus mechanism unique to Nano which involves accounts delegating their balance as voting weight to Representatives. The Representatives vote themselves on the validity of transactions published to the network using the voting weight delegated to them. These votes are shared with their directly connected peers and they also rebroadcast votes seen from Principal Representatives. Votes are tallied and once quorum is reached on a published block, it is considered confirmed by the network." Suggested read: https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/orv-consensus/ https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/orv-consensus/
- gnrlst 6y ago
  If only Nano had first-mover advantage! I'm rooting for it though, it's everything BTC should have been.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  I'm a huge Nano fanboy since the RaiBlocks days. It definitely deserves more attention, since it's a pretty solid technology and was distributed pretty fairly. But even in this crypto bull market, everybody seems to ignore it, except for the fanboys on Reddit.
- nightcereal 6y ago
  Satoshi would be really proud of nano.
- harwoodleon 6y ago
  ORV is as revolutionary as PoW. Nano still uses PoW but in a far far far more efficient way.
leesec 6y ago
Eth prolly has the best constructed PoS system, just starting to roll out. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
- eecks 6y ago
  What about Cardano? Isn't it already rolled out with >70% of ADA staked?
chrisco255 6y ago
Proof of stake is relatively simple. You agree to stake a minimum amount of tokens (decided on by the network) and you get to run a node and validate transactions. If you attest to a malicious block and other validators call you out on it, you get slashed (i.e. you lose some portion of your stake, if not all of it): https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... One of the problems with it is that it's difficult to bootstrap a network on a proof-of-stake system with a fair distribution. You end up with the pre-sale participants (i.e. VCs or founders) having the majority of the tokens. I think what Ethereum is doing is a decent approach. They started as Proof of Work, so they were able to bootstrap the network for 6 years and now ETH is widely distributed and no single holder owns more than 1% of ETH, for example. So now they can migrate to Proof of Stake and they won't suffer from the centralized allocation problem.
- alexmingoia 6y ago
  How is the correct chain decided?
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/#how-does-validation-work https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
    - alexmingoia 6y ago
      That page does not explain how the correct chain is chosen... I searched and found a blog that claims a chain is chosen by trusting other nodes: “In PoS systems, weak subjectivity arises because the longest chain rule is not sufficient to determine the main chain due to the (nearly) costless process of creating an up-to-date chain. Creating up-to-date competing chains would take little effort in PoS as opposed to in PoW. Therefore, new nodes or nodes that have been a long time offline have to trust the information they receive from other nodes about which chain is the valid one, causing weak subjectivity. In the case of weak subjectivity, to ensure that the information about the valid chain is accurate, a node that is new or comes online after a significant period would have to get a recent block hash from a reputable source, such as a blockchain explorer, and insert that as a “checkpoint” into their blockchain client. This is the method of dealing with weak subjectivity, which relies on the trust with a reputable source. Although not completely in line with a trustless system, it shouldn’t really be an issue unless the reputable source is compromised.” - https://medium.com/better-programming/the-problems-that-ethereum-2-0-proof-of-stake-aims-to-solve-5361c155461a https://medium.com/better-programming/the-problems-that-ethe...

aspic 6y ago

You're perhaps thinking of https://nano.org https://nano.org ? A brief description of it's Open Representative Voting (ORV) consensus mechanism: "A consensus mechanism unique to Nano which involves accounts delegating their balance as voting weight to Representatives. The Representatives vote themselves on the validity of transactions published to the network using the voting weight delegated to them. These votes are shared with their directly connected peers and they also rebroadcast votes seen from Principal Representatives. Votes are tallied and once quorum is reached on a published block, it is considered confirmed by the network." Suggested read: https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/orv-consensus/ https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/orv-consensus/

gnrlst 6y ago
If only Nano had first-mover advantage! I'm rooting for it though, it's everything BTC should have been.
koonsolo 6y ago
I'm a huge Nano fanboy since the RaiBlocks days. It definitely deserves more attention, since it's a pretty solid technology and was distributed pretty fairly. But even in this crypto bull market, everybody seems to ignore it, except for the fanboys on Reddit.
nightcereal 6y ago
Satoshi would be really proud of nano.
harwoodleon 6y ago
ORV is as revolutionary as PoW. Nano still uses PoW but in a far far far more efficient way.

leesec 6y ago

Eth prolly has the best constructed PoS system, just starting to roll out. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

eecks 6y ago
What about Cardano? Isn't it already rolled out with >70% of ADA staked?

chrisco255 6y ago

Proof of stake is relatively simple. You agree to stake a minimum amount of tokens (decided on by the network) and you get to run a node and validate transactions. If you attest to a malicious block and other validators call you out on it, you get slashed (i.e. you lose some portion of your stake, if not all of it): https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... One of the problems with it is that it's difficult to bootstrap a network on a proof-of-stake system with a fair distribution. You end up with the pre-sale participants (i.e. VCs or founders) having the majority of the tokens. I think what Ethereum is doing is a decent approach. They started as Proof of Work, so they were able to bootstrap the network for 6 years and now ETH is widely distributed and no single holder owns more than 1% of ETH, for example. So now they can migrate to Proof of Stake and they won't suffer from the centralized allocation problem.

alexmingoia 6y ago
How is the correct chain decided?
- chrisco255 6y ago
  https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/#how-does-validation-work https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
  - alexmingoia 6y ago
    That page does not explain how the correct chain is chosen... I searched and found a blog that claims a chain is chosen by trusting other nodes: “In PoS systems, weak subjectivity arises because the longest chain rule is not sufficient to determine the main chain due to the (nearly) costless process of creating an up-to-date chain. Creating up-to-date competing chains would take little effort in PoS as opposed to in PoW. Therefore, new nodes or nodes that have been a long time offline have to trust the information they receive from other nodes about which chain is the valid one, causing weak subjectivity. In the case of weak subjectivity, to ensure that the information about the valid chain is accurate, a node that is new or comes online after a significant period would have to get a recent block hash from a reputable source, such as a blockchain explorer, and insert that as a “checkpoint” into their blockchain client. This is the method of dealing with weak subjectivity, which relies on the trust with a reputable source. Although not completely in line with a trustless system, it shouldn’t really be an issue unless the reputable source is compromised.” - https://medium.com/better-programming/the-problems-that-ethereum-2-0-proof-of-stake-aims-to-solve-5361c155461a https://medium.com/better-programming/the-problems-that-ethe...