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The original article asserts that this does not work according to their requirements since there's no way to independently verify which is the "real successor c

The original article asserts that this does not work according to their requirements since there's no way to independently verify which is the "real successor chain" - they just have to trust someone's word that chain A is true and chain B is not, and a convincing liar could provide them with opposite data. In schemes like Bitcoin, there's objective validation of the "longest chain" with the most work invested; in your example where would that "record of the real successor chain" come from, and how can it be validated/verified in a decentralized manner in a way that a major ex-staker can't satisfy? Like, this is trivially solved with a central authority (e.g. have some trusted core developer every day publish a signed message saying "this is the real successor chain"), but it does enable that central authority to arbitrarily bless a fake ex-staker's fork.

EthanHeilman 5y ago
> they just have to trust someone's word that chain A is true and chain B is not, and a convincing liar could provide them with opposite data. In schemes like Bitcoin, there's objective validation of the "longest chain" with the most work invested; Note that in Bitcoin you can have a fork in which both chains have equal length. The idea is that eventually the longest chain will be established, but if say 90% of the mining is malicious that malicious miner could ensure that most of the time both chains are of equal length. With a PoS fork you can ask, which fork has the most amount of stake voting for it. An attacker that controls enough stake might be able to balance the total stake vote in the same way as a malicious miner could on Bitcoin. In both cases if the core security assumption of the blockchain is violated, that blockchain should halt until that assumption is made sound again. If someone orphans the last two years of Bitcoin's blockchain something has gone horribly wrong. The fact that Bitcoin now switches to the longest chain doesn't actually address the problem that two years of transactions may have been rendered invalid.

EthanHeilman 5y ago

> they just have to trust someone's word that chain A is true and chain B is not, and a convincing liar could provide them with opposite data. In schemes like Bitcoin, there's objective validation of the "longest chain" with the most work invested; Note that in Bitcoin you can have a fork in which both chains have equal length. The idea is that eventually the longest chain will be established, but if say 90% of the mining is malicious that malicious miner could ensure that most of the time both chains are of equal length. With a PoS fork you can ask, which fork has the most amount of stake voting for it. An attacker that controls enough stake might be able to balance the total stake vote in the same way as a malicious miner could on Bitcoin. In both cases if the core security assumption of the blockchain is violated, that blockchain should halt until that assumption is made sound again. If someone orphans the last two years of Bitcoin's blockchain something has gone horribly wrong. The fact that Bitcoin now switches to the longest chain doesn't actually address the problem that two years of transactions may have been rendered invalid.