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Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of merely depositing them somewhere?

• ogogmad 5y ago
  In a blockchain, the chain keeps splitting. Your tokens live on multiple competing chains simultaneously. In PoW, you are forced to pick one of those chains to mine on. In PoS, you can stake on all of them simultaneously. The splitting is unavoidable and happens constantly. Multiple competing future states are constantly being created, and the network has to eventually arrive at a consensus about which possible future is the true one. > Where is the difficulty in making miners expend their tokens (i.e. in a way that is irrevocable) instead of merely depositing them somewhere? Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS. Your question reads to me like "In trying to solve problem x, why don't you assume that you've already solved problem x, and use that to solve problem x."
  • lottin 5y ago
    > Figuring out how to make spending your tokens irrevocable is the whole point of PoW/PoS. Maybe I'm missing something... if miners are required to send the tokens to an invalid address, are these tokens not lost irrevocably?
    • ogogmad 5y ago
      No. Did you not read the comment you were responding to?
      • lottin 5y ago
        Yes, I read it. As far as I can see, it talks about 'staking', so it doesn't address what happens when the tokens and 'expended' as opposed to 'staked'.
        • ogogmad 5y ago
          You have two competing chains: Chain 1 and chain 2. On chain 1, you spend a token on a good. On chain 2, you spend no token. You wait for chain 1 to win the race. You then stake on chain 2 to get your money back. If chain 2 then overtakes chain 1, you've executed a double-spend attack. An equivalent attack wouldn't work on a PoW chain. If you do the equivalent of "staking" on chain 2, then you're computing hashes, which is costing real-life resources. In the PoS case, without slashing, staking on chain 2 is free. In fact, this is the rational move to make every time you spend a token; stake on competing chains to get your token back.
          • cutemonster 5y ago
            Thanks for explaining (I'm a different someone) There was a PoS mechanism that makes people who cheat lose all their coins? I wonder if it is relevant here ... Aha, that's "slashing" -- the other members in the network would look at the two chains, and notice that you were misbehaving, and add transactions that remove parts of your coins? (They'd add to both chains? Or just the winning one?)
    • seoaeu 5y ago
      What stops miners from sending their tokens somewhere, then hard forking from a previous block where they didn’t send them? This has a clear answer in PoW, but not in your scheme
      • lottin 5y ago
        Easy, you put the transaction in the previous block. So the miner can only mine a block if they have already made the expenditure.
        • seoaeu 5y ago
          What stops me from doing a hard fork to roll back both blocks?
          • lottin 5y ago
            If you spend more tokens than the tokens that were spent mining the last two blocks you can erase the transactions in those blocks, but isn't that also the case with PoW?
            • seoaeu 5y ago
              You aren’t following. The hard fork lets me double spend the tokens from those blocks.
              • lottin 5y ago
                Indeed, I'm not following your argument.
                • ogogmad 5y ago
                  Stop asking people to do your homework.
        • deleted 5y ago
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