4 ms·

That's the social consensus, or "L0 consensus". It's a fork, so on only on this fork the attackers would lose the ETH. The social consensus means that actual h

That's the social consensus, or "L0 consensus". It's a fork, so on only on this fork the attackers would lose the ETH. The social consensus means that actual humans, in front of these 2 forks of ETH , the original chain being attacked, and the one where all the attackers stake has been deleted so it's safe (and also non-attackers "richer"), humans would call the latter "Ethereum" and use that. And the former would fall into irrelevance.

cowtools 4y ago
Why not just ditch the whole Proof-of-Stake system and use a classical consensus system then?
- redox99 4y ago
  Because people won't all agree and update their software every 12 seconds for each new block.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    In classical consensus, users don't need to agree on every block, they need to agree on who signs the blocks on their behalf.
- operator-name 4y ago
  Sybil attacks caused by the nothing at stake problem.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Any reasonable implementation of classical consensus isn't susceptible to Sybil attacks. You manually select which peers sign transactions for you, in the same way that you manually select CA's to sign TLS keys for you.
    - operator-name 4y ago
      Manually selecting peers doesn't prevent sybil attacks, it just moves the problem one layer up (to the social level). Either you have some trust in all participating parties or you don't. Classical consensus algorithms assumes the former. Achieving consensus when a percentage of parties cannot be trusted and may even be bad actors is a seperate problem.
      - cowtools 4y ago
        The problem is already on the social level, it's just that in Classical Consensus, trust is established explicitly. Whereas in Proof-Of-Stake, it's established implicitly by means of controlling monopoly money. If the stakers disagree with each other, or if the users disagree about who ought to be stakers, then that's a social problem. That's really no different than the problem of notaries disagreeing with each other or with users disagreeing about who ought to be notaries. The difference is that in PoW, Miners have to stop when it becomes unprofitable for them (due to economies/dis-economies of scale). PoW is decentralized so long as normal people have great economies at a small scale (They have free access to electricity, they are using hardware they already own anyways, they would pay for heating anyways). In PoS, Stakers just get more and more power.
- somebodythere 4y ago
  Because social consensus can be achieved on which Ethereum fork to use but not on every transaction that fork processes.
  - amluto 4y ago
    Solving that doesn’t sound nearly as difficult as a full PoS (or proof of anything) scheme.
    - somebodythere 4y ago
      What would be an easy way to solve that?
amluto 4y ago
Does that really work? Suppose I stake enough ETH to create a fork that passes muster (which may include quite a bit of inactivity penalties for the honest folks, etc). Then I validate honestly, withdraw my stake, and launder those ETH for different ETH. Now I make my anachronistic fork. I use those same private keys, invent inactivity penalties for everyone else, etc. This fork is of dubious value. If I publicize it, anyone can prove that cheating happened, although I can’t actually be slashed because, on the real chain, I’ve already withdrawn and, on my chain, I won’t slash myself. Anyone who looks at (centralized!) websites will know my chain is fake. Anyone who sees both chains will clearly know that funny business happened. But perhaps I can fool a node that was simply offline during the attack. As far as a regular node is concerned, both chains are a bit funny — slashable votes occurred. But I can probably fudge my chain so it wins over the real chain, and I can potentially attack my victim node. The best part of this attack is that it cost essentially nothing. The computing resources I used are negligible. I spent 0 ETH, although I needed access to some private keys that required having money at some point to obtain. At least with PoW, I need a lot of hashing to do this. Sure, the L0 consensus means I’m unlikely to be able to double-withdraw $10bn from a pair of exchanges, but that’s a pretty weak argument for using Ethereum over a centralized system.

cowtools 4y ago

Why not just ditch the whole Proof-of-Stake system and use a classical consensus system then?

redox99 4y ago
Because people won't all agree and update their software every 12 seconds for each new block.
- cowtools 4y ago
  In classical consensus, users don't need to agree on every block, they need to agree on who signs the blocks on their behalf.
operator-name 4y ago
Sybil attacks caused by the nothing at stake problem.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Any reasonable implementation of classical consensus isn't susceptible to Sybil attacks. You manually select which peers sign transactions for you, in the same way that you manually select CA's to sign TLS keys for you.
  - operator-name 4y ago
    Manually selecting peers doesn't prevent sybil attacks, it just moves the problem one layer up (to the social level). Either you have some trust in all participating parties or you don't. Classical consensus algorithms assumes the former. Achieving consensus when a percentage of parties cannot be trusted and may even be bad actors is a seperate problem.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      The problem is already on the social level, it's just that in Classical Consensus, trust is established explicitly. Whereas in Proof-Of-Stake, it's established implicitly by means of controlling monopoly money. If the stakers disagree with each other, or if the users disagree about who ought to be stakers, then that's a social problem. That's really no different than the problem of notaries disagreeing with each other or with users disagreeing about who ought to be notaries. The difference is that in PoW, Miners have to stop when it becomes unprofitable for them (due to economies/dis-economies of scale). PoW is decentralized so long as normal people have great economies at a small scale (They have free access to electricity, they are using hardware they already own anyways, they would pay for heating anyways). In PoS, Stakers just get more and more power.
somebodythere 4y ago
Because social consensus can be achieved on which Ethereum fork to use but not on every transaction that fork processes.
- amluto 4y ago
  Solving that doesn’t sound nearly as difficult as a full PoS (or proof of anything) scheme.
  - somebodythere 4y ago
    What would be an easy way to solve that?

amluto 4y ago

Does that really work? Suppose I stake enough ETH to create a fork that passes muster (which may include quite a bit of inactivity penalties for the honest folks, etc). Then I validate honestly, withdraw my stake, and launder those ETH for different ETH. Now I make my anachronistic fork. I use those same private keys, invent inactivity penalties for everyone else, etc. This fork is of dubious value. If I publicize it, anyone can prove that cheating happened, although I can’t actually be slashed because, on the real chain, I’ve already withdrawn and, on my chain, I won’t slash myself. Anyone who looks at (centralized!) websites will know my chain is fake. Anyone who sees both chains will clearly know that funny business happened. But perhaps I can fool a node that was simply offline during the attack. As far as a regular node is concerned, both chains are a bit funny — slashable votes occurred. But I can probably fudge my chain so it wins over the real chain, and I can potentially attack my victim node. The best part of this attack is that it cost essentially nothing. The computing resources I used are negligible. I spent 0 ETH, although I needed access to some private keys that required having money at some point to obtain. At least with PoW, I need a lot of hashing to do this. Sure, the L0 consensus means I’m unlikely to be able to double-withdraw $10bn from a pair of exchanges, but that’s a pretty weak argument for using Ethereum over a centralized system.