6 ms·

One way I've come to think of it is that Sybil resistance comes from having the next block producer chosen by a raffle, with some resource used as the ticket. P

One way I've come to think of it is that Sybil resistance comes from having the next block producer chosen by a raffle, with some resource used as the ticket. PoW is an example of the resource being exogenous to the system and PoS is an example of the resource being endogenous. A problem I see with both is that they are inherently plutocratic, in that the wealthiest participants will have greater economies of scale in the resources they devote to the block production process.

kybernetikos 5y ago
This is true, however it's also not an unusual feature - pretty much every capitalist society has the characteristic that those with capital can gain more capital with a minimum of additional work. Alternatives that don't have that feature to at least some extent would be regarded as very radical, and difficult to implement.
- ordinaryradical 5y ago
  This has already been implemented in at least one other crypto successfully. See: Nano (formerly Raiblocks). The crypto community, however, seems to have a very narrow focus on reproducing these plutocratic systems and incentives because everyone wants that power for themselves and wants to be first in whatever the Next Big Thing is. Crypto development as a whole seems to be hampered by these incentives and by an excessive focus on the original technologies of Bitcoin as opposed to its original aims.
  - shanusmagnus 5y ago
    I don't think it's an excessive focus on BTC technology, so much as that BTC abstracts the core issues to their fundamental essence and forces the tradeoffs on those terms, without obfuscating them. For instance, POW is extremely clear: you make a sacrifice to create blocks / mint transactions. It's almost biblical -- the game theory doesn't work without the sacrifice, and sacrifice is, tautologically, a tradeoff of one precious thing for another. All other crypto projects either want free lunch someplace, or make very different tradeoffs and assumptions.
    - acjohnson55 5y ago
      Bitcoin is not a pure or minimal system, contrary to the hype. There are all sorts of decisions built in to it that can be varied, and if the concept of a cryptocurrency does, in fact, have society altering promise, it's very worthwhile to have other technologies explore the space.
  - meowface 5y ago
    No, I think most people (as in, core developers) just want whatever can actually be relied upon. If there were a silver bullet consensus algorithm that was decentralized and secure and also far less wasteful/plutocratic, everyone would probably switch to it. The idea that there's an easy, superior solution on the other side's grass and bad motives are just keeping people locked into a bad system is a convenient narrative, but rarely true. I don't know the details about Nano, but my guess is the reason other cryptocurrencies haven't adopted their algorithm is because they don't think it's sufficient, for whatever reason.
    - ordinaryradical 5y ago
      Nano/Raiblocks has been around for years, the original developer was also one of the first to work on Bitcoin, apparently, and the network has been live for some years and successfully transacting. I don’t think it’s a matter of the technology being unproven or unreliable. There was recently a 22 million dollar transaction that was both feeless and recorded to the network in <5 seconds. It seems obvious though that to adopt the protocol means sacrificing a plutocratic winner-take-all mining regime and everyone in the crypto space wants to be that winner. Why go through the trouble of developing a photonic mining system if there’s already a viable alternative to PoW/PoS in the real world being used? Why all these outlandish schemes to “green” PoW networks (that never come to fruition) when there’s a viable technology transacting at a literal 6 millionth of the cost of a single btc transaction? At a certain point, you begin to see that a large part of this space is not committed to the aims they espouse but to a kind of delirious financial brinksmanship that yields little in the way of progress but makes small numbers of people very wealthy.
      - meowface 5y ago
        I'm sure there are many people who share the mentality you describe, but I don't think it applies to most core developers of cryptocurrency protocols, and such developers also don't make more money the more expensive mining is.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        > Why go through the trouble of developing a photonic mining system if there’s already a viable alternative to PoW/PoS in the real world being used? Nano has some interesting ideas but also some fairly obvious flaws, most notably the fact that there is no built-in economic incentive to run a Representative node and participate in the voting. Running a node is an expensive operation (in CPU time, memory, and bandwidth) and the protocol basically leaves this important function up to individual enthusiasm or goodwill. As a result there are a limited number of active voting nodes making decisions for the network. The faucet-based initial distribution of Nano (XRB) is also arguably less egalitarian than Bitcoin's PoW-based mining rewards. If you weren't aware of Nano (RaiBlocks) while they were running the faucet then you had no chance to participate in that initial distribution. This is not quite as bad as full pre-mining where all the initial coins go to the developers and other may or may not be able to mine more later at a higher difficulty, but it seems likely that the developers and other early adopters would have received the majority of the output from the XRB faucet, which by design is all the XRB which will ever be produced.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    From what I know of Nano, I don't believe it would work correctly under situations where it was being attacked.

kybernetikos 5y ago

This is true, however it's also not an unusual feature - pretty much every capitalist society has the characteristic that those with capital can gain more capital with a minimum of additional work. Alternatives that don't have that feature to at least some extent would be regarded as very radical, and difficult to implement.

ordinaryradical 5y ago
This has already been implemented in at least one other crypto successfully. See: Nano (formerly Raiblocks). The crypto community, however, seems to have a very narrow focus on reproducing these plutocratic systems and incentives because everyone wants that power for themselves and wants to be first in whatever the Next Big Thing is. Crypto development as a whole seems to be hampered by these incentives and by an excessive focus on the original technologies of Bitcoin as opposed to its original aims.
- shanusmagnus 5y ago
  I don't think it's an excessive focus on BTC technology, so much as that BTC abstracts the core issues to their fundamental essence and forces the tradeoffs on those terms, without obfuscating them. For instance, POW is extremely clear: you make a sacrifice to create blocks / mint transactions. It's almost biblical -- the game theory doesn't work without the sacrifice, and sacrifice is, tautologically, a tradeoff of one precious thing for another. All other crypto projects either want free lunch someplace, or make very different tradeoffs and assumptions.
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    Bitcoin is not a pure or minimal system, contrary to the hype. There are all sorts of decisions built in to it that can be varied, and if the concept of a cryptocurrency does, in fact, have society altering promise, it's very worthwhile to have other technologies explore the space.
- meowface 5y ago
  No, I think most people (as in, core developers) just want whatever can actually be relied upon. If there were a silver bullet consensus algorithm that was decentralized and secure and also far less wasteful/plutocratic, everyone would probably switch to it. The idea that there's an easy, superior solution on the other side's grass and bad motives are just keeping people locked into a bad system is a convenient narrative, but rarely true. I don't know the details about Nano, but my guess is the reason other cryptocurrencies haven't adopted their algorithm is because they don't think it's sufficient, for whatever reason.
  - ordinaryradical 5y ago
    Nano/Raiblocks has been around for years, the original developer was also one of the first to work on Bitcoin, apparently, and the network has been live for some years and successfully transacting. I don’t think it’s a matter of the technology being unproven or unreliable. There was recently a 22 million dollar transaction that was both feeless and recorded to the network in <5 seconds. It seems obvious though that to adopt the protocol means sacrificing a plutocratic winner-take-all mining regime and everyone in the crypto space wants to be that winner. Why go through the trouble of developing a photonic mining system if there’s already a viable alternative to PoW/PoS in the real world being used? Why all these outlandish schemes to “green” PoW networks (that never come to fruition) when there’s a viable technology transacting at a literal 6 millionth of the cost of a single btc transaction? At a certain point, you begin to see that a large part of this space is not committed to the aims they espouse but to a kind of delirious financial brinksmanship that yields little in the way of progress but makes small numbers of people very wealthy.
    - meowface 5y ago
      I'm sure there are many people who share the mentality you describe, but I don't think it applies to most core developers of cryptocurrency protocols, and such developers also don't make more money the more expensive mining is.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      > Why go through the trouble of developing a photonic mining system if there’s already a viable alternative to PoW/PoS in the real world being used? Nano has some interesting ideas but also some fairly obvious flaws, most notably the fact that there is no built-in economic incentive to run a Representative node and participate in the voting. Running a node is an expensive operation (in CPU time, memory, and bandwidth) and the protocol basically leaves this important function up to individual enthusiasm or goodwill. As a result there are a limited number of active voting nodes making decisions for the network. The faucet-based initial distribution of Nano (XRB) is also arguably less egalitarian than Bitcoin's PoW-based mining rewards. If you weren't aware of Nano (RaiBlocks) while they were running the faucet then you had no chance to participate in that initial distribution. This is not quite as bad as full pre-mining where all the initial coins go to the developers and other may or may not be able to mine more later at a higher difficulty, but it seems likely that the developers and other early adopters would have received the majority of the output from the XRB faucet, which by design is all the XRB which will ever be produced.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  From what I know of Nano, I don't believe it would work correctly under situations where it was being attacked.