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I used to hold the opinion that all proof-of-work systems were inherently flawed, because in order to protect against an attacker, you have to waste more resour
by yetanotherphd 13y ago
I used to hold the opinion that all proof-of-work systems were inherently flawed, because in order to protect against an attacker, you have to waste more resources than the attacker would have gained.
Now I think that in practice, the amount that the attacker could gain might be quite small compared with the total value of the system.
- betterunix 13y agoIt's not that the attacker does less work than the honest parties. Rather, it is that the honest parties must work at least as hard as the attacker. If the attacker devotes a gigawatt, the honest parties must devote a gigawatt to defense. What I like to say is this: Would you use TLS if that was how it worked?
- sp332 13y agoTLS depends on a central certificate authority to vouch for the identity of the site you're visiting. If you don't have a centralized authority, a web-of-trust model is the best you can do.
- maaku 13y agoYes, I would. It'd be more secure than the CAs we have today. To be clear, each attacker must commit more work than every honest miner combined together.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoI'm not saying proof-of-work is appropriate in all cases. To use a more extreme value, a vault containing gold that was protected by proof of work would be useless, since the work required to open it would have to equal the value of the contents in order to discourage thieves. My point was that in some cases, like bitcoin, it might be possible that the value to the attacker of a successful attack on bitcoin was significant, but still much less than the total worth of bitcoin.