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> Crucially, you can't solve this through a trusted third party, firstly because there is none that operates world-wide, and secondly because it would grant eno

by RC_ITR 4y ago

> Crucially, you can't solve this through a trusted third party, firstly because there is none that operates world-wide, and secondly because it would grant enormous power to that party, and no logistical actor is willing to give away this power. This is one of the weirder aspects of crypto. Why would entrusting 1000’s of random people with GPUs be preferable to trusting one party (who, in a black chain scenario could be one of the GPU-holders anyway).

idiotsecant 4y ago
That's not weird at all because the whole point of crypto is that nobody trusts anyone. A properly designed crypto system is just a game of incentivizing each player to do the thing you want them to do while assuming that they're all out to screw each other.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  But what does that mean? Why does it need to be decentralized? Why can’t one party have the same incentive structure? Listen, I’m all for cryptography and Block-chains, but the whole proof-of thing has never made any sense to me. Maybe to make myself more clear, there are levels of trust, and you 100% “trust” that the miners on your random blockchain will do work for you in exchange for money. We’ve seen examples on even big blockchains like Solana where that trust is broken, even. So why exactly is that sort of trust better?
  - aftbit 4y ago
    > But what does that mean? It means that the GPU-holders are trusted only to make sure that all the other GPU holders are following the rules of the network. > Why does it need to be decentralized? Why can’t one party have the same incentive structure? Because if there's only one party, then who is watching them and ensuring they follow the rules? Furthermore, if there's only a handful of parties, who knows that they are not colluding? This is a major problem for proof-of-X tokens as well, as both mining and staking have centralizing forces.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      >Because if there's only one party, then who is watching them and ensuring they follow the rules? Who is watching the 100's and making sure they're following the rules (and before you say that there are people monitoring the 100's of miners, then there could be people monitoring the 1 in the same way). Maybe I'll put it this way - decentralization is one way to accomplish what you want, but it's the least efficient way to do that possible. Instead we should focus on ways to make existing centralized systems more transparent, but it's hard to create ponzi schemes off that, so it gets less attention. Thais is actually a core concept of cryptography! The entire RSA algo. is based on the idea that it's way easier to check prime factors that it is to solve for them! So why did we decide to make it so that everyone has to solve for prime factors?
      - jsmith45 4y ago
        Its less about a bunch of people checking for crypto, as it is about designing the protocol to make it such that doing the right thing is inherently in the economic interest of the miners/stakers. Basically, unless you are able to get over 50% of the hashrate (or over 50% of the amount staked) you will be expected to make the most money by properly packing as many transactions into the block as you can (or more accurately packing in the set transactions that will net you the largest transaction fee). If you try to cheat your expected mining income will be less. For example if violate certain protocol rules no other node in the network will consider you block valid, so you get zero for your mining effort. Deliberately trying to mine based on an old block is technically legal. But the odds of your deliberate forked block becoming part of the longest chain is far less than the odds if you mine on top of the latest block, so again, it is in your economic interest to mine on the latest. Deliberately refusing to include valid transactions from specific users in the blocks you mine is possible, but (assuming those transactions have a large enough transaction fee to be sensible to include in the block) you are economically better off to include it, since otherwise one of your competitors will include it in a later block and get that money you lost out on. That is really the whole idea, to make it so that the economically rational thing to do is the correct thing. Now the system isn't perfect. if you can get over half the miners/stakers to collude with you, breaking some of the rules can become the more profitable approach. (and for some systems the relevant attack ratios could be larger or smaller than 50%, but the basic idea stands). The other part of the puzzle is that that collusion is a sort of prisoner's dilemma. Other people are not likely to want to join with you to collude unless they are pretty sure you will be able to get a large enough fraction of the hashrate to join with you, as otherwise they are risking making less money by joining with you. which is to say that the non-colluding case is a Nash Equilibrium. I don't see an obviously way to employ such an economic self interest approach against a single centralized server.
  - someonewhocar3s 4y ago
- lottin 4y ago
  No.. you're missing the point. The whole point of crypto is to create a market where a service is provided without relying on a contractual agreement between the provider and the consumer. If you don't have a problem using contractual agreements, then you're better off without using crypto.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    >No.. you're missing the point. So I just rely on economic incentives then? Because I can do that centrally too.
    - lottin 4y ago
      Not only economic incentives, but contracts as well. Contracts are promises between individuals that are enforced by a third party, namely the judicial system. This way we don't have trust that everybody will do what they say they'll do, but instead we only have to trust that any promises made (in the form of a contract) will be enforced, if needed, to by the judicial system. Crypto goes beyond that. Crypto doesn't want to have to trust the judicial system even, and therefore contracts are out of the question. So it can only rely on incentives.
      - RC_ITR 4y ago
        Wait lol what? You said if I were to use contract then don't use crypto? I'm saying if crypto relies on economic incentive, then what's decentralization have to do with that?
        lottin 4y ago
        I don't understand the question.
        RC_ITR 4y ago
        >The whole point of crypto is to create a market where a service is provided without relying on a contractual agreement between the provider and the consumer. If you don't have a problem using contractual agreements, then you're better off without using crypto. What does this have to do with decentralization?
Karunamon 4y ago
Because those thousands of random people are deeply incentivized to keep the network running, while being mathematically prohibited from doing anything untoward with data you send their way. The "trust" in this case is more about whether you believe the blockchain will be running and usable. The incentives and distributed nature of the system make for a very strong guarantee with more nines than any 1 provider in the world can reasonably promise or deliver.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  I agree the block-chain structure and cryptography are cool, but why do 1000 people need to be deeply incentivized instead of 1?
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    The same reason half the internet falls over when AWS us-east1 does: single points of failure suck. And this is a level of resiliency you automatically get by virtue of being on a public blockchain being used for other things.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      >The same reason half the internet falls over when AWS us-east1 So your argument is that the internet would be better if instead of the cloud, we had a bunch of tiny datacenters dispersed around the world? Didn't we do that for like the first 20 years of the Internet (you know, when it was a way way worse experience)? And couldn't a centralized operator do that anyway? Don't you remember how unreliable bittorrent peers were? You want to go back to that?

by RC_ITR 4y ago

idiotsecant 4y ago

That's not weird at all because the whole point of crypto is that nobody trusts anyone. A properly designed crypto system is just a game of incentivizing each player to do the thing you want them to do while assuming that they're all out to screw each other.

RC_ITR 4y ago
But what does that mean? Why does it need to be decentralized? Why can’t one party have the same incentive structure? Listen, I’m all for cryptography and Block-chains, but the whole proof-of thing has never made any sense to me. Maybe to make myself more clear, there are levels of trust, and you 100% “trust” that the miners on your random blockchain will do work for you in exchange for money. We’ve seen examples on even big blockchains like Solana where that trust is broken, even. So why exactly is that sort of trust better?
- aftbit 4y ago
  > But what does that mean? It means that the GPU-holders are trusted only to make sure that all the other GPU holders are following the rules of the network. > Why does it need to be decentralized? Why can’t one party have the same incentive structure? Because if there's only one party, then who is watching them and ensuring they follow the rules? Furthermore, if there's only a handful of parties, who knows that they are not colluding? This is a major problem for proof-of-X tokens as well, as both mining and staking have centralizing forces.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    >Because if there's only one party, then who is watching them and ensuring they follow the rules? Who is watching the 100's and making sure they're following the rules (and before you say that there are people monitoring the 100's of miners, then there could be people monitoring the 1 in the same way). Maybe I'll put it this way - decentralization is one way to accomplish what you want, but it's the least efficient way to do that possible. Instead we should focus on ways to make existing centralized systems more transparent, but it's hard to create ponzi schemes off that, so it gets less attention. Thais is actually a core concept of cryptography! The entire RSA algo. is based on the idea that it's way easier to check prime factors that it is to solve for them! So why did we decide to make it so that everyone has to solve for prime factors?
    - jsmith45 4y ago
      Its less about a bunch of people checking for crypto, as it is about designing the protocol to make it such that doing the right thing is inherently in the economic interest of the miners/stakers. Basically, unless you are able to get over 50% of the hashrate (or over 50% of the amount staked) you will be expected to make the most money by properly packing as many transactions into the block as you can (or more accurately packing in the set transactions that will net you the largest transaction fee). If you try to cheat your expected mining income will be less. For example if violate certain protocol rules no other node in the network will consider you block valid, so you get zero for your mining effort. Deliberately trying to mine based on an old block is technically legal. But the odds of your deliberate forked block becoming part of the longest chain is far less than the odds if you mine on top of the latest block, so again, it is in your economic interest to mine on the latest. Deliberately refusing to include valid transactions from specific users in the blocks you mine is possible, but (assuming those transactions have a large enough transaction fee to be sensible to include in the block) you are economically better off to include it, since otherwise one of your competitors will include it in a later block and get that money you lost out on. That is really the whole idea, to make it so that the economically rational thing to do is the correct thing. Now the system isn't perfect. if you can get over half the miners/stakers to collude with you, breaking some of the rules can become the more profitable approach. (and for some systems the relevant attack ratios could be larger or smaller than 50%, but the basic idea stands). The other part of the puzzle is that that collusion is a sort of prisoner's dilemma. Other people are not likely to want to join with you to collude unless they are pretty sure you will be able to get a large enough fraction of the hashrate to join with you, as otherwise they are risking making less money by joining with you. which is to say that the non-colluding case is a Nash Equilibrium. I don't see an obviously way to employ such an economic self interest approach against a single centralized server.
- someonewhocar3s 4y ago
lottin 4y ago
No.. you're missing the point. The whole point of crypto is to create a market where a service is provided without relying on a contractual agreement between the provider and the consumer. If you don't have a problem using contractual agreements, then you're better off without using crypto.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  >No.. you're missing the point. So I just rely on economic incentives then? Because I can do that centrally too.
  - lottin 4y ago
    Not only economic incentives, but contracts as well. Contracts are promises between individuals that are enforced by a third party, namely the judicial system. This way we don't have trust that everybody will do what they say they'll do, but instead we only have to trust that any promises made (in the form of a contract) will be enforced, if needed, to by the judicial system. Crypto goes beyond that. Crypto doesn't want to have to trust the judicial system even, and therefore contracts are out of the question. So it can only rely on incentives.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      Wait lol what? You said if I were to use contract then don't use crypto? I'm saying if crypto relies on economic incentive, then what's decentralization have to do with that?
      - lottin 4y ago
        I don't understand the question.
        RC_ITR 4y ago
        >The whole point of crypto is to create a market where a service is provided without relying on a contractual agreement between the provider and the consumer. If you don't have a problem using contractual agreements, then you're better off without using crypto. What does this have to do with decentralization?

Karunamon 4y ago

Because those thousands of random people are deeply incentivized to keep the network running, while being mathematically prohibited from doing anything untoward with data you send their way. The "trust" in this case is more about whether you believe the blockchain will be running and usable. The incentives and distributed nature of the system make for a very strong guarantee with more nines than any 1 provider in the world can reasonably promise or deliver.

RC_ITR 4y ago
I agree the block-chain structure and cryptography are cool, but why do 1000 people need to be deeply incentivized instead of 1?
- Karunamon 4y ago
  The same reason half the internet falls over when AWS us-east1 does: single points of failure suck. And this is a level of resiliency you automatically get by virtue of being on a public blockchain being used for other things.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    >The same reason half the internet falls over when AWS us-east1 So your argument is that the internet would be better if instead of the cloud, we had a bunch of tiny datacenters dispersed around the world? Didn't we do that for like the first 20 years of the Internet (you know, when it was a way way worse experience)? And couldn't a centralized operator do that anyway? Don't you remember how unreliable bittorrent peers were? You want to go back to that?