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That 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 expe

That 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 ago
My (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 ago
  Doesn'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.
  - hanniabu 4y ago
    The validators choose which to support. If you think one will fail, you will be selling off the forked eth, bridging it over, and buying more eth on the chain you want to support
DennisP 4y ago
If you don't change the chain id, then every staker has to choose which fork to use. Voting on both automatically destroys their stake. If you do change the chain id, then by definition your chain is the new and different one, because it has a different id.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  In order to automatically destroy the stake, I presume a majority of stake holders need to agree though? And if people think the stakeholders aren’t acknowledging it, they can just do another fork? Hrm…
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    Any block proposer can submit a whistleblower report. There is a pretty significant bounty if you discover a slashable offence, so there is strong incentive to include these in any proposed blocks. https://eth2book.info/bellatrix/part2/incentives/slashing/ https://eth2book.info/bellatrix/part2/incentives/slashing/
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      But you still need a majority to acknowledge the report > Slashing is triggered by the evidence of the offence being included in a beacon chain block. Once the evidence is confirmed by the network, the offending validator (or validators) is slashed. It is a powerless mechanic if the majority of validates don’t want to play along.
      - 493579620678 4y ago
        There may be other solutions or defence mechanisms, but one solution would be to fork again and remove the Ether those validators have staked from your chain as part of your fork. A chain is defined by a set of rules that everyone on the chain agrees to abide by. Braking the rules damages the economic utility of the chain, so the Ether on the chain where the validators colluded to break the rules would be worth less, as a result of their actions. The validators are locked on that chain (as they can't prevent a fork from excluding them), so they have a strong incentive against harming the chain. Ethereum is not majoritarian. I don't have to abide by the will of the majority. I only need to come to a consensus about the rules and state of the chain with the people with whom I want to share the chain. PoS makes it much easier to escape a malicious majority compared to PoW where the hashing power majority can follow the minority anywhere unless the minority is willing to switch to a different hashing algorithm. Even then, the majority could sell their mining equipment and buy new equipment that will work on the new chain on the same terms as that chain's honest minority can. With PoS, the malicious majority would need to buy new Ether from the honest minority who can then just fork again after having made a profit on the attack, and can continue to do that until the malicious majority runs out of resources or realizes that they cannot censor a fork in Ethereum's PoS system.
rvba 4y ago
Arent they prepaeing to do the same thing as the "bitcoin" and "bitcoin cash" forks? Basically a dispute that allowed to sell the same bitcoin twice? Here you potentially have a way to sell the same eth tokens few times. Revolutionary!
- 493579620678 4y ago
  With Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (and Ethereum and Ethereum Classic), it's no different from a demerger from the perspective of a company shareholder. You own a greater number of shares because the company has split in two, but they are not the same shares. They are shares in different companies that have the same origin but will go in different directions. Same with those currencies. The current version of Ethereum works a bit differently, as explained elsewhere in this comment section.
mattdesl 4y ago
Are you referring to the “nothing at stake” problem? Ethereum’s PoS is designed to protect against validators signing transactions across multiple forks of the same network. The Gasper “finality” and “fork choice” rules ensure that one chain is always selected by the validator set to be the “real” canonical chain for the network. What might eventually happen is that some % of the validators exit Ethereum mainnet and enter their deposit into an another blockchain, perhaps giving it a different name and set of features and tradeoffs. More details: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/591 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/591 https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/01/introducing-casper-friendly-ghost https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/01/introducing-casper-frie...
- Legogris 4y ago
  I think they're referring more to a scenario like a contention in which chain constitutes ETH Mainnet in the first place. Like fork split like the following: 45% of validators sign on fork A 45% of validators sign on fork B 10% of validators sign both A and B (coincidentally such that they get evenly slashed between the two) That is, there question of what "Ethereum Mainnet" is will not be clear-cut and depending on who you ask.
  - Galanwe 4y ago
    This seems like a false problem. The state you are describing is not stable, as validators have an incentive 1) to validate, instead of just sitting doing nothing 2) to choose the chain with the most likely chance of being the next main, otherwise they will be slashed As soon as even the slightiest imbalance appears between the two forks, it will bias validators to choose one against the other and thus exponentially make it the preferred fork.
    - Legogris 4y ago
      That's assuming validators are economically rational actors and that external incentives don't outweigh enclosed ones.
493579620678 4y ago
That's a good thing. Cryptocurrencies are supposed to operate by consent, and that includes the ability to separate when consent for a ruleset can no longer be maintained. One of the main problems with PoW is that those who support the stronger fork can attack those who support the weaker fork if they are willing to expend the resources. Ethereum's PoS solves that and ensures that every user has an equal technical ability to withdraw their consent and take their money to a chain with rules they support. The key is in the fact that violating the rules on Ethereum's PoS causes you to lose Ether, which means you eventually lose all your Ether and can no longer sabotage the chain. This is in contrast with PoW systems, where your mining hardware doesn't deteriorate any faster just because you are mining empty or invalid blocks, so you can do that forever and effectively shut down a chain that is small enough relative to your computer power. The only defence a PoW fork has against such an attack is to switch to a different algorithm that is less compatible to the attacker's hardware, but that harms non-attacking miners just as much. PoW has an element of "might make right" while PoS is completely consensual.
yunohn 4y ago
The thing is, we don’t need to worry about hypothetical scenarios and mathematical edge cases. If anything happens, the fork anointed by Vitalik will prevail. Otherwise, ETH is doomed. Quite simple, really…
- stickfigure 4y ago
  Presumably we desire a currency system that will outlast Vitalik.

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 ago

My (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 ago
Doesn'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.
- hanniabu 4y ago
  The validators choose which to support. If you think one will fail, you will be selling off the forked eth, bridging it over, and buying more eth on the chain you want to support

DennisP 4y ago

If you don't change the chain id, then every staker has to choose which fork to use. Voting on both automatically destroys their stake. If you do change the chain id, then by definition your chain is the new and different one, because it has a different id.

oneoff786 4y ago
In order to automatically destroy the stake, I presume a majority of stake holders need to agree though? And if people think the stakeholders aren’t acknowledging it, they can just do another fork? Hrm…
- mattdesl 4y ago
  Any block proposer can submit a whistleblower report. There is a pretty significant bounty if you discover a slashable offence, so there is strong incentive to include these in any proposed blocks. https://eth2book.info/bellatrix/part2/incentives/slashing/ https://eth2book.info/bellatrix/part2/incentives/slashing/
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    But you still need a majority to acknowledge the report > Slashing is triggered by the evidence of the offence being included in a beacon chain block. Once the evidence is confirmed by the network, the offending validator (or validators) is slashed. It is a powerless mechanic if the majority of validates don’t want to play along.
    - 493579620678 4y ago
      There may be other solutions or defence mechanisms, but one solution would be to fork again and remove the Ether those validators have staked from your chain as part of your fork. A chain is defined by a set of rules that everyone on the chain agrees to abide by. Braking the rules damages the economic utility of the chain, so the Ether on the chain where the validators colluded to break the rules would be worth less, as a result of their actions. The validators are locked on that chain (as they can't prevent a fork from excluding them), so they have a strong incentive against harming the chain. Ethereum is not majoritarian. I don't have to abide by the will of the majority. I only need to come to a consensus about the rules and state of the chain with the people with whom I want to share the chain. PoS makes it much easier to escape a malicious majority compared to PoW where the hashing power majority can follow the minority anywhere unless the minority is willing to switch to a different hashing algorithm. Even then, the majority could sell their mining equipment and buy new equipment that will work on the new chain on the same terms as that chain's honest minority can. With PoS, the malicious majority would need to buy new Ether from the honest minority who can then just fork again after having made a profit on the attack, and can continue to do that until the malicious majority runs out of resources or realizes that they cannot censor a fork in Ethereum's PoS system.

rvba 4y ago

Arent they prepaeing to do the same thing as the "bitcoin" and "bitcoin cash" forks? Basically a dispute that allowed to sell the same bitcoin twice? Here you potentially have a way to sell the same eth tokens few times. Revolutionary!

493579620678 4y ago
With Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (and Ethereum and Ethereum Classic), it's no different from a demerger from the perspective of a company shareholder. You own a greater number of shares because the company has split in two, but they are not the same shares. They are shares in different companies that have the same origin but will go in different directions. Same with those currencies. The current version of Ethereum works a bit differently, as explained elsewhere in this comment section.

mattdesl 4y ago

Are you referring to the “nothing at stake” problem? Ethereum’s PoS is designed to protect against validators signing transactions across multiple forks of the same network. The Gasper “finality” and “fork choice” rules ensure that one chain is always selected by the validator set to be the “real” canonical chain for the network. What might eventually happen is that some % of the validators exit Ethereum mainnet and enter their deposit into an another blockchain, perhaps giving it a different name and set of features and tradeoffs. More details: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/591 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/591 https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/01/introducing-casper-friendly-ghost https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/01/introducing-casper-frie...

Legogris 4y ago
I think they're referring more to a scenario like a contention in which chain constitutes ETH Mainnet in the first place. Like fork split like the following: 45% of validators sign on fork A 45% of validators sign on fork B 10% of validators sign both A and B (coincidentally such that they get evenly slashed between the two) That is, there question of what "Ethereum Mainnet" is will not be clear-cut and depending on who you ask.
- Galanwe 4y ago
  This seems like a false problem. The state you are describing is not stable, as validators have an incentive 1) to validate, instead of just sitting doing nothing 2) to choose the chain with the most likely chance of being the next main, otherwise they will be slashed As soon as even the slightiest imbalance appears between the two forks, it will bias validators to choose one against the other and thus exponentially make it the preferred fork.
  - Legogris 4y ago
    That's assuming validators are economically rational actors and that external incentives don't outweigh enclosed ones.

493579620678 4y ago

That's a good thing. Cryptocurrencies are supposed to operate by consent, and that includes the ability to separate when consent for a ruleset can no longer be maintained. One of the main problems with PoW is that those who support the stronger fork can attack those who support the weaker fork if they are willing to expend the resources. Ethereum's PoS solves that and ensures that every user has an equal technical ability to withdraw their consent and take their money to a chain with rules they support. The key is in the fact that violating the rules on Ethereum's PoS causes you to lose Ether, which means you eventually lose all your Ether and can no longer sabotage the chain. This is in contrast with PoW systems, where your mining hardware doesn't deteriorate any faster just because you are mining empty or invalid blocks, so you can do that forever and effectively shut down a chain that is small enough relative to your computer power. The only defence a PoW fork has against such an attack is to switch to a different algorithm that is less compatible to the attacker's hardware, but that harms non-attacking miners just as much. PoW has an element of "might make right" while PoS is completely consensual.

yunohn 4y ago

The thing is, we don’t need to worry about hypothetical scenarios and mathematical edge cases. If anything happens, the fork anointed by Vitalik will prevail. Otherwise, ETH is doomed. Quite simple, really…

stickfigure 4y ago
Presumably we desire a currency system that will outlast Vitalik.