[DINKDINK]

Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos has existed for more than 30 years. If it were easy or simple to issue a money with distributed signing, it'd have been done before Bitcoin's PoW<->Difficulty Adjustment<->Fixed Money Issuance novel art was published.

Ethereum has been "about to release PoS" for almost 6 years now and all of the initial critiques (By issuing X units of value, you incentivize ~<X units of energy to be expended) Summarized here: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

If the curious reader is interested in reading more about the scope of fraud that the ethereum protocol has fueled read the post here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201214170136if_/https://www.re...

Why link to the archive.org copy and not the original? Ethereum people got mod access to the subreddit and deleted everything pointing out the fraud.

[nootropicat]

>https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

By the logic of that article asymmetric cryptography doesn't, because the value equal to what's protected by the key is magically wasted somewhere. Of course, that isn't true, because it's not possible to break asymmetric cryptography by brute force with expenditure equal to whatever is protected. Same applies to PoS.

It's maliciously created nonsense, which is most visible when he slyly equates locked tokens to wasted glucose. Wasted glucose is _real_ energy, while locked tokens are inherently worthless patterns of bits. Locking them is just a _trick_ to convince people to cooperate with each other - a game theory setting where everyone finds it most beneficial to cooperate. The whole point of the economy is to manipulate real resources - various forms of matter and energy [1] and locking tokens is just a different way of social organization. "Liquidity" (of digital tokens) isn't a real resource. "Money" isn't a real resource. If there's less _real_ energy wasted, the new social organization system is more efficient. That's the objective metric underneath it all, and clearly PoS is a more efficient way of organizing massive human cooperation than PoW.

[1] theoretically matter is a different form of energy, but at the current technological level they are separate inputs to the human economy, except for nuclear power

[jude-]

> By the logic of that article asymmetric cryptography doesn't, because the value equal to what's protected by the key is magically wasted somewhere. Of course, that isn't true, because it's not possible to break asymmetric cryptography by brute force with expenditure equal to whatever is protected. Same applies to PoS.

Not quite. He's arguing that MC = MR implies that PoS is really PoW through obscure means. There's more to securing PoS than asymmetric cryptography -- namely, you have to convince everyone that your keys (and the coins attached to them) are legitimate, and not the next guy's keys and coins on a fork. Convincing people of this isn't a cost-free task, especially if there's wealth to be accumulated through convincing more and more people that your coins are legitimate, and everyone else's conflicting coins on different forks are not.

This game of convincing people that your fork is the true fork is exactly what stake-grinding is. Given a choice, and no a priori knowledge, which history of the PoS chain is the true history? What would convince you that one is legitimate, and the other is not? The article argues that the act of convincing you is, itself, a form of PoW. After all, without PoW, looking at the chainstate isn't convincing -- if you have staked coins today, you could easily create a fork of the chain history where everyone else stopped spending except for you. Without no 3rd party way to verify if that actually happened, you could go around trying to bribe people to accept that your subsequent transactions on this fork are the chain's "true" transactions. There's many tactics for doing this -- you could go on Twitter and spam everyone; you could organize events and rallies; you could even take malicious actions and disable your rivals. You and everyone trying to do the same thing would be in competition to convince everyone else that your fork is the "true" fork. But regardless of the tactics, all of them require expenditures on your part in the forms of time, energy, health, stress, etc. Hence the "PoW by obscurity" argument. But at the end of the day, you'd be unwise spend any more than you'd expect to receive in return because of MC = MR.

Here's a concrete example. The reason you can tell that there's a lot more belief that ETH is the true Ethereum fork, and not ETC, is because ETH has a much higher PoW score than ETC. Miners can choose between ETH and ETC to mine, and they mine the one whose tokens are worth more. ETH is worth more because more people value it. Therefore, PoW is a proxy measurement of the social consensus -- more people believe in ETH than ETC.

If ETH were PoS at the time of the split, it would be a lot less obvious from the chainstate which one people would choose to use. Both chains' participants would try to make it look like their chains had more users by some other means. But the point in the article is that those "other means" are not only costly actions, but also the marginal cost each fork can afford for these actions is, in equilibrium, equal to their respective marginal revenues.

[eloff]

Paxos solves a different consensus problem than PoW or PoS.

The former is for when you control and trust all nodes in your network. The latter is for the more difficult problem of consensus when you don't trust the nodes - otherwise known as the Byzantine Generals problem in distributed systems research.

[Vervious]

Pretty sure Paxos is easily extended to the byzantine setting with digital signatures (i.e. Byzantine Paxos has also been around forever). Also PBFT has been around since the 1980s.

Only distinction is classical consensus is permissioned whereas blockchains are typically permissionless.

[xtracto]

Exactly. And paxos is not the best algorithm at it. There is Raft which is an alternative that is easier to understand.

[moralestapia]

I went through that as it was happening.

Vitalik Buterin & co. have no integrity.

Most people should be aware about how they defrauded everybody with the DAO and subsequent fork of Ethereum. But, of course, it has been conveniently sweeped under the rug.

[vvillena]

In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork.

Switching consensus to a different set of rules is entirely within the scope of a PoW system, and it's based on the same mechanism that gives legitimacy to the rest of the blockchain. The original Bitcoin paper explains this perfectly, so I won't replicate it here.

[programmarchy]

Creating a fork is not a fraud. That was and is always a possibility, people were free to disagree, and Ethereum Classic represents that disagreement. If you went through that, then you would have ETH and ETC, and a choice of what to use, develop, mine, etc.

[short]

can you be more specific? on blockchains, differences of opinion are always solved with forks - and users follow the chain they agree with which makes it the most valuable chain.

[sktrdie]

Didn’t he just donate a billion to India?

[Matthias1]

> Without mining, less electricity is used in mining, and less silicon is used in mining chips. Are these resources available for extra production? Yes. However, these “non-wasted” resources are offset by other resources which are “wasted”.

This would seem to be the main argument of that second article you posted summarizing the economics around PoS. The idea is that if you’re backing your crypto with itself (like in a PoS), the value that is locked in the staking system could be doing something else. (This is a very real point in that it doesn’t help decentralization—the same people that would stake their coin could spend that money mining Bitcoin.)

But it doesn’t seem to address any points in the conversation around the ethics of using electricity as a basis for proof of work.

[fredfoobar]

Electricity is the best form of energy to use as the basis for Proof of Work, because there is no pre-requisite on how to generate the required electricity.

compare: electric cars vs ice cars, electric cars can also end up consuming "dirty" electricity from coal fired plants, but that's an option vs. ice cars.

[jkhdigital]

What is ethically wrong with using electricity? Or have you skipped a few steps in your argument?

[elif]

"about to release" nothing

We use Eth 2.0 since December. Staking is even available with insurance on coinbase.

If you keep your copy pasta up to date, your FUD will be more believable.

[kordlessagain]

Energy usage and price are related. Should be interesting.

[kolinko]

Paxos requires multiple parties to vote on what’s the correct result. The killer issue there is that it doesn’t solve a sybil attack - you either need a central authority in Paxos that chooses which machines run it, or you will end up with an attacker setting up a million machines in a cloud and overvoting everyone.

[gnramires]

I think it's hypocritical to call this fraud: this contract itself was exploited for a loophole; if you declare it valid as allowed by the protocol, then simply changing the protocol (which is what was done temporarily) is also valid and according to the working of the system. I think it was within the spirit of the system to work this way.

[jude-]

The same people who loudly proclaimed "Code is Law" also wrote The DAO. Therefore, any action the code takes is legitimate.