5 ms·

Proof of work is slow, wasteful, and provides no benefits to the proposed problem (chain of custody tracking). Proof of stake makes no sense for this use case

Proof of work is slow, wasteful, and provides no benefits to the proposed problem (chain of custody tracking). Proof of stake makes no sense for this use case because there's nothing to stake. "Proof of Authority" is effectively just a centralized DB.

CuriousCosmic 4y ago
Agreed on PoW (with the exception of Proofs of Useful Work where it is still slow but not outright wasteful). Proof of Stake makes sense here not because you are implementing your own PoS system. Instead you are using an existing system and checkpointing onto it. This changes trust assumptions (now trusting the network to operate properly) and isn't the solution for all projects. Proof of Authority also makes sense and isn't just a centralised DB. Instead it is giving trusted members of the community some fraction of the total authority and requiring a majority of the members to agree on the state for the system to progress. This is similar to but still distinct from distributed database consensus algorithms like Raft or Paxos. The primary distinction is that Raft & Paxos assume that all authenticated participants are fully trusted/non-malicious. Byzantine Paxos (and Byzantine Raft as proposed in some research papers) begin to address this by attempting to achieve Byzantine Fault Tolerance but they each make different trade-offs. Even then however they tend to lack the flexibility that some types of PoA can have in allocating trust (think of PoA as PoS where the stake is units of trust allocated to each authority). What it comes down to IMHO is that while blockchains are clearly a terrible solution when you definitively trust an organization to operate in good faith, they are still better than a lot of the alternatives when everyone doesn't fully trust any one participating org but they do collectively trust all parties to be mutually distrustful.

CuriousCosmic 4y ago

Agreed on PoW (with the exception of Proofs of Useful Work where it is still slow but not outright wasteful). Proof of Stake makes sense here not because you are implementing your own PoS system. Instead you are using an existing system and checkpointing onto it. This changes trust assumptions (now trusting the network to operate properly) and isn't the solution for all projects. Proof of Authority also makes sense and isn't just a centralised DB. Instead it is giving trusted members of the community some fraction of the total authority and requiring a majority of the members to agree on the state for the system to progress. This is similar to but still distinct from distributed database consensus algorithms like Raft or Paxos. The primary distinction is that Raft & Paxos assume that all authenticated participants are fully trusted/non-malicious. Byzantine Paxos (and Byzantine Raft as proposed in some research papers) begin to address this by attempting to achieve Byzantine Fault Tolerance but they each make different trade-offs. Even then however they tend to lack the flexibility that some types of PoA can have in allocating trust (think of PoA as PoS where the stake is units of trust allocated to each authority). What it comes down to IMHO is that while blockchains are clearly a terrible solution when you definitively trust an organization to operate in good faith, they are still better than a lot of the alternatives when everyone doesn't fully trust any one participating org but they do collectively trust all parties to be mutually distrustful.