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This is a really thorough and understandable explanation. Helped me fill in lots of gaps I had. One thought it does raise in my mind, though - this is complica
by andy_xor_andrew 4y ago
This is a really thorough and understandable explanation. Helped me fill in lots of gaps I had.
One thought it does raise in my mind, though - this is complicated.
Bitcoin is simple. The rules are simple. Simple is really good when it comes to securing a currency.
This, in comparison... I mean, oof. I get the high-level "proof of stake" idea, which (in my mind) has a similar mental complexity to Bitcoin's. But all the algorithms that need to work to support it... it introduces the idea in my mind that somewhere in one of those algorithms is a small oversight. Even if that's not the case, the thought is there.
My opinions on proof-of-stake hasn't changed (seems much better than PoW in real-world use for so many reasons) but it does seem to erode the beautiful simplicity of proof-of-work.
- krupan 4y agoThe complication is a huge red flag for me. Enormous. Red. Flag. What are we missing in all that complexity? What perverse incentives and unintended consequences are hiding in all that? Also, you can't even unstake your eth. The developers promise it's coming soon, but right now, you can't.
- tromp 4y agoSadly, there are very blockchains that focus on simplicity. Most seem to think that more features is better.
- krupan 4y agoHow many do we need? Bitcoin works great
- matheusmoreira 4y agoBitcoin is obsolete by now. Monero is everything it was supposed to be.
- wmf 4y agoBut Zcash is everything Monero was supposed to be. ;-)
- tromp 4y agoMonero just makes different trade-offs [1], mostly more privacy at the cost of more bloat [2]. [1] https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html [2] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart
- throwaway2214 4y agothis line of thinking is quite difficult to get by in the modern world, same applies to vaccines, or to your car, or to the food you eat the browser you use, etc, in fact if you randomly look in your room right now it is very likely that you will be shocked (e.g. the complexity of the HDMI cable)
- krupan 4y agoMy HDMI cable is not asking me to trust it with my hard earned money ;-) Vaccines and cars and everything else you hint at have been around a long time and the trade-offs are pretty well understood. Proof of stake (and it's various implementations) have a long way to go before they reach that status
- baby 4y agoIMO complication is due to lack of good explanations and lack of understanding of the subject. Bitcoin’s PoW is complicated, the idea is simple but in practice you run into many insecurities (forks, confirmation time, lack of verifiable light client, rule of more work vs longest chain, 51% attacks and how to bootstrap a new chain, centralization of miners, etc.) On the other hand the hotstuff protocol is much more easy to grasp IMO (check my explanation in the book Real-World Cryptography) PS: oh and also Bitcoin proof of security seems like a nightmare. It’s nice to create protocols that look simple but if you can’t prove their security it’s a bit dumb :) on the other hand the safety proof of hotstuff is quite comprehensive : https://www.davidwong.fr/lbft_safety/ https://www.davidwong.fr/lbft_safety/
- krupan 4y agoBitcoin's proof of work is not that complicated, even though you threw out some words that are peripherally related to it. Nice try though. I had to look up hotstuff proof of stake. As far as I can tell that's not what Ethereum (the coin we are discussing here) uses? Not sure where you are going with this.
- baby 4y agoHotstuff is the state of the art BFT. Bitcoin is not complicated until you try to implement it yourself and prove it.
- leashless 4y agoThe Avalanche PoS mechanism is a lot more straight forwards. I prefer its aesthetics.
- lekevicius 4y agoI’m curious! What are its trade-offs?
- tylersmith 4y agoThe primary one is that in the presence of byzantine faults it goes for consistency over availability, however the Avalanche ecosystem generally prefers that choice.
- tromp 4y ago> Bitcoin is simple. The rules are simple. Compared to the likes of Ethereum, Bitcoin is super simple. Compared to others, it's still somewhat complicated. While the use of PoW for consensus is super simple (most cumulative difficulty wins), Bitcoin script is a huge source of complexity in itself, with tons of warts. As it turns out, you don't need script to do payments, multi-signatures, atomic swaps, discreet log contracts, bidirectional payment channels etc., i.e. nearly all of the functionality that script is used for. All those can be done with so-called script-less scripts [1], which is mostly creative use of Schnorr signatures. Bitcoin's emission is not that simple either with the reward halvings every 4 years. A fixed block subsidy (i.e. pure linear emission) is not only simpler, but arguably fairer too, avoiding a concentration of wealth on early miners/adopters, and leaving later generations more than mere crumbs. [1] https://suredbits.com/schnorr-applications-scriptless-scripts/ https://suredbits.com/schnorr-applications-scriptless-script...
- nkuttler 4y ago> A fixed block subsidy (i.e. pure linear emission) is not only simpler, but arguably fairer too, avoiding a concentration of wealth on early miners/adopters, and leaving later generations more than mere crumbs Yet Ethereum had a premine of around 60M, roughly half of all existing coins today. Later emission seems negligible regarding fairness.
- tromp 4y agoPure linear emission implies starting from zero. I agree coins with pre-mines limit fairness from the outset. In terms of fairness of coin distribution, 100% PoS < Ethereum < Bitcoin < Pure Linear Emission. PoS effectively ends the distribution of new coins, with everybody able to stake to just preserve their share of the pie.
- DennisP 4y agoIf your goal is to passively hold coins without losing share, Ethereum is the best option I know of. With both PoS and PoW, a holder loses share when the total coin supply increases. On Ethereum at least, this is less of a problem with staking than mining, because staking is less costly so there's a tenth as much issuance. However, with sufficient usage, the ETH supply actually shrinks, because a portion of fee revenue is burned. This means non-staking holders actually increase their share. You can see how that's going here: https://ultrasound.money/ https://ultrasound.money/
- gukov 4y agoBitcoin is Notepad, Ethereum is becoming MS Word.
- jrm4 4y agoYup. I've always said that Bitcoin is the grey brick cellphone or the Model T; the famous proof-of-concept that nonetheless ends up getting overtaken by better tech.
- eldenwrong 4y agoDon't buy bitcoin, buy my shitcoin Its faster! Its new! Its more advanced!
- baby 4y agoYou realize that your comment is spam here right?
- louloulou 4y agoBitcoin is a money, Ethereum is becoming a Rube Goldberg machine to obfuscate the fact that it was issued as a security - where the issuers were paid WITH MONEY.
- jrm4 4y agoThis seems like it would be extremely simple for tech folks to understand. Strikes me as strongly analogous as to why each of us doesn't run our own email server? Which is, when email was first invented, may have not seemed like a bad idea, but in terms of scale something like federation works better?
- stickfigure 4y agoThat complexity distracts you from the fact that proof-of-stake is self-referential and is not resilient to the kind of hard fork that Ethereum has already experienced. Someday there will be another doctrinal conflict with a near 50/50 split in the community. Probably for the same reason - some DAO hack too massive to ignore. In a proof-of-work world, we can evaluate the health of each fork by measuring the scarce physical resources allocated to each. In a proof-of-stake world, each fork can have a valid voting majority of stakers. There's no actually-scarce resource to split, so no external mechanism to decide which fork is the "real" one. I wouldn't bet a potential future world monetary system on this scheme.
- splintercell 4y ago> In a proof-of-stake world, each fork can have a valid voting majority of stakers. There's no actually-scarce resource to split, so no external mechanism to decide which fork is the "real" one. So what really happened when a PoS chain forked? Justin Sun learned the hard way.
- bibabaloo 4y agoMy (maybe naive) understanding is that proof of stake is actually better here, no? Stakers would need to commit to one particular fork and accept that their stake (in ETH) would be lost/slashed in all other forks. In contrast, in PoW, there's nothing stopping miners from creating a hostile fork that is economically advantageous to them (despite maybe being "worse" overall) and then flipping back to the original chain if their fork doesn't work out. Their hash power can't be slashed in the same way stakers ETH can be in PoS.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _Algernon_ 4y agoDoesn't a fork in both cases continue with the existing chain? In PoW that means that mining power has to be allocated between the two chains, thus constituting a vote for legitimacy. In PoS each party keeps their stake in both new chains and can vote in both of them. There is no need to pick a lane.
- baby 4y agoIn the case of Bitcoin simple actually doesn’t mean more secure (since bitcoin forks constantly). Simple protocols take time to land, and are often digestions of much more complicated protocols. We’ve seen that with TLS being simplified into Noise, or the sponge function for hash functions. If you look at the history of consensus protocols they are getting simpler and simpler as well, arguably hotstuff and streamlet and all the hotstuff variants are simpler and simpler to understand.
- williamscales 4y agoDAO hack? Ah, the incident where someone read the contract carefully and got completely screwed. It's bizarre to me that people wrote a contract that says one can take the money in certain circumstances, but then completely refused to abide by that. I really feel bad for the person who figured out how to get the money but then was denied by insecure bullies. What an absolute joke.