2 ms·

Chia has weaker guarantees than Nakamoto consensus. Every proof-of-work solution in Bitcoin commits to the transaction history, but the proofs-of-space in Chia

by tromp 5y ago

Chia has weaker guarantees than Nakamoto consensus. Every proof-of-work solution in Bitcoin commits to the transaction history, but the proofs-of-space in Chia only commit to the farmer public key. Which is used to separately sign for a block of transactions. Which allows a collusion of recent farmers to produce alternate transaction histories at no cost.

Glench 5y ago
You could be right! Do you have any evidence, research, or other supporting arguments that show what you're claiming?
- tromp 5y ago
  See https://docs.chia.net/docs/03consensus/foliage/ https://docs.chia.net/docs/03consensus/foliage/ "farmers could theoretically create a foliage re-org where foliage is replaced" As you can see, Chia devs consider this an impractical attack. But it's definitely a weaker security guarantee than what PoW provides.
  - Glench 5y ago
    Ah, thanks for the link! It seems what you're saying is right — the security guarantees of Chia are not the EXACT same as Bitcoin, but it's not clear to me that this means they're "weaker" for the reason you described. > As soon as one honest farmer has added a foliage block, the foliage becomes impossible to re-org beyond that height with the same PoSpace With ~350k Chia full nodes, the likelihood of colluding farmers being able to pull this off is a lot lower than if there were only the ~14k full nodes of Bitcoin, no? And Chia is still pretty new — it had a maximum of ~750k full nodes before. I guess it's kind of a trade-off, huh? Bitcoin's big centralized pools are a worrying source of attack that's not there in Chia (the official pooling protocol has the farmers sign blocks so it's completely decentralized and pools using it can't orchestrate attacks). https://docs.chia.net/docs/11pooling/pooling https://docs.chia.net/docs/11pooling/pooling

2 ms·

Chia has weaker guarantees than Nakamoto consensus. Every proof-of-work solution in Bitcoin commits to the transaction history, but the proofs-of-space in Chia

by tromp 5y ago

Glench 5y ago
You could be right! Do you have any evidence, research, or other supporting arguments that show what you're claiming?
- tromp 5y ago
  See https://docs.chia.net/docs/03consensus/foliage/ https://docs.chia.net/docs/03consensus/foliage/ "farmers could theoretically create a foliage re-org where foliage is replaced" As you can see, Chia devs consider this an impractical attack. But it's definitely a weaker security guarantee than what PoW provides.
  - Glench 5y ago
    Ah, thanks for the link! It seems what you're saying is right — the security guarantees of Chia are not the EXACT same as Bitcoin, but it's not clear to me that this means they're "weaker" for the reason you described. > As soon as one honest farmer has added a foliage block, the foliage becomes impossible to re-org beyond that height with the same PoSpace With ~350k Chia full nodes, the likelihood of colluding farmers being able to pull this off is a lot lower than if there were only the ~14k full nodes of Bitcoin, no? And Chia is still pretty new — it had a maximum of ~750k full nodes before. I guess it's kind of a trade-off, huh? Bitcoin's big centralized pools are a worrying source of attack that's not there in Chia (the official pooling protocol has the farmers sign blocks so it's completely decentralized and pools using it can't orchestrate attacks). https://docs.chia.net/docs/11pooling/pooling https://docs.chia.net/docs/11pooling/pooling