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Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos has existed for more than 30 years. If it were easy or simple to issue a money wi

• moralestapia 5y ago
  I went through that as it was happening. Vitalik Buterin & co. have no integrity. Most people should be aware about how they defrauded everybody with the DAO and subsequent fork of Ethereum. But, of course, it has been conveniently sweeped under the rug.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • vvillena 5y ago
    In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork. Switching consensus to a different set of rules is entirely within the scope of a PoW system, and it's based on the same mechanism that gives legitimacy to the rest of the blockchain. The original Bitcoin paper explains this perfectly, so I won't replicate it here.
    • didericis 5y ago
      I don't see how switching consensus from a proof of work system to proof of stake system "is entirely within the scope of a PoW system". If the majority of the network decides to do that, I understand why that makes it valid, and this is intentionally hyperbolic/don't think proof of stake is properly viewed like this, but to me that reads like "voting in a dictatorship is entirely within the scope of a democratic system". Technically it might be true, but the moment you make that valid democratic decision a decision like that can't happen the same way again.
    • rcxdude 5y ago
      > In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork. No, it means nothing unless users use, buy, and sell the coin. The miners' are subservient to them, assuming the miners are trying to make money. Miners do not decide or approve which set of consensus rules people decide to use, though they can, at a potentially quite significant loss, disrupt the functioning of the network somewhat.
      • incrudible 5y ago
        > Miners do not decide or approve which set of consensus rules people decide to use, though they can, at a potentially quite significant loss, disrupt the functioning of the network somewhat. Miners are users. If they don't mine the blocks, the system literally doesn't work. Suppose that a large majority of miners refuses to upgrade for some reason. One part of the users can upgrade and wait for new blocks for a long time, while the users that don't upgrade can actually use the system as if nothing happened. Who is going to throw in the towel first? Maybe it's the miners, maybe it's the ETH holders, you can't know.
        • CryptoPunk 5y ago
          No, other users can easily institute a new lower difficulty in the upgrade to counteract the drop in POW from the defection of miners. The subservience of miners to users at large in the determination of the market leading fork is best exemplified in the scenario of users switching to a PoS chain. In this case the miners have no power to sabotage the upgraded chain.
  • programmarchy 5y ago
    Creating a fork is not a fraud. That was and is always a possibility, people were free to disagree, and Ethereum Classic represents that disagreement. If you went through that, then you would have ETH and ETC, and a choice of what to use, develop, mine, etc.
    • moralestapia 5y ago
      If I had created the DAO and I was the one going to lose 50 million, no fork would have happened, and Buterin (and you probably) would have told me, from their high horses, "though luck pal, you see, that's the beauty of smart contracts, they're final and no one should be able to do anything about it". If you preach a set of principles and then backtrack on them when it's convenient for you, you're a hypocrite and have no integrity. If you do this on purpose, to deceive people, and there's money involved then you arrived at the definition of fraud, +- some extra words.
      • short 5y ago
        When a pretty well known main ethereum developer lost $ 250 million due to a smart-contract bug, nothing was reverted https://news.bitcoin.com/parity-calls-for-ethereum-hard-fork-to-reverse-230-million-bug/ https://news.bitcoin.com/parity-calls-for-ethereum-hard-fork...
      • npip99 5y ago
        That's because the $50M were owned by a large percentage of the users of Ethereum, not a single person. It represented 15% of the total ETH in circulation, back when the currency was in a very nascent state and the flagship product that ETH provided that BTC didn't, was the DAO. When the DAO break happened ETH lost 60% of its value, so not only did 15% of people have their money stolen, but everyone across the board lost 60% of their ETH value. There was simply immense demand for people to get their money back, so people much preferred the fork that kept their money than the fork where the robber stole their money. Simple as that, it's decentralized, that's the whole point, you fundamentally can't tell people which fork to believe, people use whatever fork they want. And the people mostly wanted the fork with their money in the DAO preserved. People who wanted the unaltered chain stayed there, no big deal.
  • sktrdie 5y ago
    Didn’t he just donate a billion to India?
    • boruto 5y ago
      That's a very simplistic way of putting it.
    • yaa_minu 5y ago
      He donated a billion dollar worth of an illiquid shitcoin[0] sent to him by the scammers who created. 0. https://shibatoken.com/ https://shibatoken.com/
      • tornato7 5y ago
        Plus millions of dollars worth of ETH
  • short 5y ago
    can you be more specific? on blockchains, differences of opinion are always solved with forks - and users follow the chain they agree with which makes it the most valuable chain.
• Matthias1 5y ago
  > Without mining, less electricity is used in mining, and less silicon is used in mining chips. Are these resources available for extra production? Yes. However, these “non-wasted” resources are offset by other resources which are “wasted”. This would seem to be the main argument of that second article you posted summarizing the economics around PoS. The idea is that if you’re backing your crypto with itself (like in a PoS), the value that is locked in the staking system could be doing something else. (This is a very real point in that it doesn’t help decentralization—the same people that would stake their coin could spend that money mining Bitcoin.) But it doesn’t seem to address any points in the conversation around the ethics of using electricity as a basis for proof of work.
  • fredfoobar 5y ago
    Electricity is the best form of energy to use as the basis for Proof of Work, because there is no pre-requisite on how to generate the required electricity. compare: electric cars vs ice cars, electric cars can also end up consuming "dirty" electricity from coal fired plants, but that's an option vs. ice cars.
    • Reason077 5y ago
      Could the concept of proof-of-work be extended to prove that work was done cleanly, ie: using only renewable electricity rather than that produced from fossil fuels? Perhaps renewable electricity producers could issue some sort of signed token which is then incorporated into the blockchain as proof that renewable electricity was purchased?
      • rcxdude 5y ago
        You've now introduced a set of trusted entities validating something for consensus. Why bother with proof of work at that point? You only need it because you can't agree on a trusted subset of participants with the rest of the network.
      • fredfoobar 5y ago
        If we had a way to do this, why would we just limit it to crypto?
• nootropicat 5y ago
  >https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ By the logic of that article asymmetric cryptography doesn't, because the value equal to what's protected by the key is magically wasted somewhere. Of course, that isn't true, because it's not possible to break asymmetric cryptography by brute force with expenditure equal to whatever is protected. Same applies to PoS. It's maliciously created nonsense, which is most visible when he slyly equates locked tokens to wasted glucose. Wasted glucose is _real_ energy, while locked tokens are inherently worthless patterns of bits. Locking them is just a _trick_ to convince people to cooperate with each other - a game theory setting where everyone finds it most beneficial to cooperate. The whole point of the economy is to manipulate real resources - various forms of matter and energy [1] and locking tokens is just a different way of social organization. "Liquidity" (of digital tokens) isn't a real resource. "Money" isn't a real resource. If there's less _real_ energy wasted, the new social organization system is more efficient. That's the objective metric underneath it all, and clearly PoS is a more efficient way of organizing massive human cooperation than PoW. [1] theoretically matter is a different form of energy, but at the current technological level they are separate inputs to the human economy, except for nuclear power
  • jude- 5y ago
    > By the logic of that article asymmetric cryptography doesn't, because the value equal to what's protected by the key is magically wasted somewhere. Of course, that isn't true, because it's not possible to break asymmetric cryptography by brute force with expenditure equal to whatever is protected. Same applies to PoS. Not quite. He's arguing that MC = MR implies that PoS is really PoW through obscure means. There's more to securing PoS than asymmetric cryptography -- namely, you have to convince everyone that your keys (and the coins attached to them) are legitimate, and not the next guy's keys and coins on a fork. Convincing people of this isn't a cost-free task, especially if there's wealth to be accumulated through convincing more and more people that your coins are legitimate, and everyone else's conflicting coins on different forks are not. This game of convincing people that your fork is the true fork is exactly what stake-grinding is. Given a choice, and no a priori knowledge, which history of the PoS chain is the true history? What would convince you that one is legitimate, and the other is not? The article argues that the act of convincing you is, itself, a form of PoW. After all, without PoW, looking at the chainstate isn't convincing -- if you have staked coins today, you could easily create a fork of the chain history where everyone else stopped spending except for you. Without no 3rd party way to verify if that actually happened, you could go around trying to bribe people to accept that your subsequent transactions on this fork are the chain's "true" transactions. There's many tactics for doing this -- you could go on Twitter and spam everyone; you could organize events and rallies; you could even take malicious actions and disable your rivals. You and everyone trying to do the same thing would be in competition to convince everyone else that your fork is the "true" fork. But regardless of the tactics, all of them require expenditures on your part in the forms of time, energy, health, stress, etc. Hence the "PoW by obscurity" argument. But at the end of the day, you'd be unwise spend any more than you'd expect to receive in return because of MC = MR. Here's a concrete example. The reason you can tell that there's a lot more belief that ETH is the true Ethereum fork, and not ETC, is because ETH has a much higher PoW score than ETC. Miners can choose between ETH and ETC to mine, and they mine the one whose tokens are worth more. ETH is worth more because more people value it. Therefore, PoW is a proxy measurement of the social consensus -- more people believe in ETH than ETC. If ETH were PoS at the time of the split, it would be a lot less obvious from the chainstate which one people would choose to use. Both chains' participants would try to make it look like their chains had more users by some other means. But the point in the article is that those "other means" are not only costly actions, but also the marginal cost each fork can afford for these actions is, in equilibrium, equal to their respective marginal revenues.
• elif 5y ago
  "about to release" nothing We use Eth 2.0 since December. Staking is even available with insurance on coinbase. If you keep your copy pasta up to date, your FUD will be more believable.
  • kordlessagain 5y ago
    Energy usage and price are related. Should be interesting.
    • hanniabu 5y ago
      If there's no other utility than speculation like is the case with BTC, then yes I agree.
• eloff 5y ago
  Paxos solves a different consensus problem than PoW or PoS. The former is for when you control and trust all nodes in your network. The latter is for the more difficult problem of consensus when you don't trust the nodes - otherwise known as the Byzantine Generals problem in distributed systems research.
  • xtracto 5y ago
    Exactly. And paxos is not the best algorithm at it. There is Raft which is an alternative that is easier to understand.
    • tlamponi 5y ago
      Best in what metric? raft and paxos are basically the same, besides leader election, which raft's take makes it simply easier and possible even more efficient[0]. I say "possible" because that depends very much on the consensus state over time, which in most actual workloads can be pretty stable, so at least in some practice, e.g., with hypervisor-cluster like we do, they perform almost the same. The simpler approach of raft can help if you create a library for it from scratch, or for easier understanding when coming into that space, otherwise the differences does not matter too much (in practice), IMO. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074
      • eloff 5y ago
        I gather OP means best because it's understandable and easier to implement. Paxos has a tough reputation and even Google fucked it up in the beginning according to their Chubby distributed lock paper.
  • Vervious 5y ago
    Pretty sure Paxos is easily extended to the byzantine setting with digital signatures (i.e. Byzantine Paxos has also been around forever). Also PBFT has been around since the 1980s. Only distinction is classical consensus is permissioned whereas blockchains are typically permissionless.
• kolinko 5y ago
  Paxos requires multiple parties to vote on what’s the correct result. The killer issue there is that it doesn’t solve a sybil attack - you either need a central authority in Paxos that chooses which machines run it, or you will end up with an attacker setting up a million machines in a cloud and overvoting everyone.
• gnramires 5y ago
  I think it's hypocritical to call this fraud: this contract itself was exploited for a loophole; if you declare it valid as allowed by the protocol, then simply changing the protocol (which is what was done temporarily) is also valid and according to the working of the system. I think it was within the spirit of the system to work this way.
  • jude- 5y ago
    The same people who loudly proclaimed "Code is Law" also wrote The DAO. Therefore, any action the code takes is legitimate.