I would say the "Proof of Stake" they're planning to move towards also defies the law of physics.

Intuitively, I think "proof of stake" could violate Gödel's incompleteness theorems. These basically state that no complete system can proof its own correctness. And that's exactly what "proof of stake" tries to do: proof its correctness without external anchor of truth.

Of course, Vitalik Buterin knows that so he resorted to "weak subjectivity", basically saying that if you are not online often enough, you need to trust someone with providing you check points to decide which fork is the "true" one.

Be careful about how you interpret the word "prove" there. Are you sure that the sense of "prove" that applies to that theorem of Gödel corresponds to the sense of "prove" when you are talking about proof of stake?

The proofs of Gödel's theorems work by encoding the axioms and inference rules of the system in a way that can be dealt with within the system, and using that to encode statements like "this statement cannot be proven within the system" within the system.

I am not sure what the analogous thing would be if you were to attempt to carry the proof over. I am not even sure what it would mean to try to do that.

To prove that, there is no proof that can be carried out within proof of stake, that there is no proof of Falsum that can be carried out within proof of stake?

What would that even mean? What would it even mean for proof of stake to prove Falsum?

I am not asserting that proof of stake can work well, but I am not convinced by the line of reasoning that you lay out, with its current level of detail. Perhaps if you went into the details I would find it more convincing.

Just a quick handwavy idea: from falsity you can derive anything, so maybe in this context Falsum would be something that could be used to "prove" the validity of any transaction you want? That said, I'm not an ETH enthusiast and I don't know how you'd express this in that system or if their notion of proof is comparable to "proof" in logic.

Isn't that equivocation on the word "proof"? In the case of "proof of stake," I don't think it's referring to a formal proof of the correctness of the system. It's intended to be a consensus mechanic that the users of the blockchain consider "good enough" to trust. Of course there can always be collusion among parties in a blockchain or other attacks on the blockchain, but "proof of work" (and every "proof of x" mechanic I know of) is intended to be "good enough."

"Proof of stake" does not appear to have anything to do with "proof" in the logical sense. I really, really do not think the incompleteness theorems are at all relevant here. Apologies, but this reads just like every other nonsensical attempt to invoke the incompleteness theorems without a good understanding of what they actually say. (Like, how are you possibly going to get proof of stake to simulate arithmetic?)

Proof of stake is just another way to achieve distributed consensus. Not sure how that’s impossible or violates the laws of physics.

While Hermel certainly appears to have no idea what he's talking about, that doesn't make this reply of yours correct either. In particular, the incompleteness theorems are not physics.

I never made the assertion that Godel’s incomplete theorems are physics. My comment was to point out that if one makes the claim “X is impossible”, the burden of proof lies upon the person making the claim or assertion. Simply making an assertion or premise does not prove nor disprove it.

I do not find your explanation of the objective of PoS convincing. Maybe you are talking about their protocol that is true by construction?

Proof of Stake strategy is to make it where attacks on the blockchain are impossible in the economic sense. Proof of work strategy is making the attack infeasible by making the work required impossibly large.

Now is PoS possible? No idea. That possible fork attack seems like an impossible barrier to overcome. But we will see.

History has shown us that humans don't always act economically or rationally. So nothing is impossible.

In PoS, it is a known assumption that if the majority of nodes act rationally, then so be it. This is an issue that is out of scope.

Humans can be rational or irrational. That is how they are born. So far, we can only make tools and books to prevent irrationality.

Do you think PoS is as safe as PoW when dealing with irrationality?

Yes, there are principled ways to model these things. You can compare the byzantine fault tolerance threshold across PoW and PoS. You can compare the cost of deviating from the Nash equilibrium, and calculate how much an attacker needs to spend to deviate in return for every dollar of damage he causes.

Sorry, but you seem really confused about Godel's theorems. You're going to need to explain why you think it's related to proof of stake at all, besides the use of the word "proof".

To me the logic behind Proof of Stake is more like "so much money is bet on the answer being correct, that we'll assume it is. If the majority is wrong then feel free to permanently leave this chain and start your own". I consider it to be a superior system to Proof of Work in nearly every way.

The problem with that is that you only know that 'so much money' is being bet because you know who owns the money. But you only know who owns the money because that same money was bet earlier by people that you know owned the money because the same money was bet earlier by...

It's completely circular. It's like the Bible trying to proof itself. With no anchor to the physical world, you can't actually ever know

It's not completely circular. For example in casper-ffg if you as a full node log in every 4 months starting from ethereum's genesis block (about 3 years ago), the chain of logic you outlined terminates at the genesis allocation and PoW rewards.

I'm not saying that requiring clients to log in every 4 months is a reasonable security assumption, just showing that hand-waving it as "completely circular" is incorrect. It's more nuanced than that.

How did the node get started in the first place though? Unless you were part of the genesis block yourself, you only believe the history at all because someone told you it was the right place to start.

In full PoS in the model I described you'd need social consensus to determine the allocations in the genesis block. In PoW you need social consensus on the genesis block as well - the PoW algorithm, the initial difficulty and block reward, the difficulty adjustment algorithm, the block reward schedule

> "so much money is bet on the answer being correct, that we'll assume it is"

Good luck with that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail

The one you link is entirely different. zzz

How?

Corporations is controlled by those who own the shares. 1 share 1 vote. But usually only a very very few individuals own majority of the shares. So they have all power what a "too big too fail corporation" can do.

With Ethereum PoS. It is dependent on ETH being distributed to many individuals. If only a few individuals own most of the ETH, then they will then have the power dictate what is the "truth" in the blockchain. Right now, ETH is very well distributed around the whole planet.

As you can see, one is oligarchic, the other is very democratic.

Ethereum is not a Corporation that is designed to make profits. It is non-profit, it's not even a company, it's simply a protocol implemented in Free Software.

Allow me to hyperbole this a bit. If we go back to 2008, this is like saying - "there is so much money bet on subprime loan being correct, that we'll assume it is". And it worked for sometime before it dint.

Possible. Progress will be made by sharpening that intuition into a mathematical proof or clean toy model exhibiting the failure, not by arguing from analogy.

I dunno. Proof of Stake is simply codifying an old rule of economics: The rich get richer. You prove your stake and get more Ether out of the deal. A "Dividend" if you will.

I don't think its very good for the cryptocoin community, but hey, I'm up to see the grand experiment unfold.

I feel like proof of work reduces to proof of stake because the rich get richer, there's just an intermediate step of buying miners with your dividend.

PoW is generally even less balanced than PoS, because poor people can't afford to take advantage of economies of scale with ultra-efficient mining farms. Meanwhile everyone will get the same % return in PoS.

Both are "rich get richer" schemes in the grand scheme of things, except that Bitcoin PoW started out as a completely open network which anyone could start mining from, so technically it's our own fault that we didn't realize the potential of Bitcoin in the early days and jumped onto Bitcoin. Otherwise we would be all billionaires. So I don't think it's the same. Just because you can label two things "Rich get Richer", doesn't mean they have precisely the same quality of "rich get richer scheme". Bitcoin PoW is completely capitalistic where people who mined to get their bitcoins deserve their wealth--they "worked" for their coins. So in Bitcoin it is true that "the rich get richer", but also "poor can get richer" too, as long as they started out mining early. This is not the case for PoS systems where bootstrapping PoS requires external capital, so this one is truly "Rich get Richer" in a sense that ONLY the rich can get richer.

That said, talking about this "fairness" is totally missing the point. As I mentioned, in the grand scheme of things it's all "rich get richer" and that's how capitalism works. The truly important question is how immutable an stable the ledger is, because that's what makes these blockchain projects meaningful.

If you ask anyone who has a thorough understanding of these technologies they would say PoW is superior to PoS in this sense. And Yes, this includes even the guys who are working on PoS blockchains. The only reason people bother with PoS is because PoW is having a hard time scaling and many people think maybe there may not even be an ultimate solution just with PoW.

... there's the other small detail of the appalling electricity consumption of PoW. Blockchains with PoS are more appealing to people who care about the rest of the world.

Congrats you've just repeated myself. Look for the part where I said PoW doesn't scale.

You probably didn't even read my comment. Because it wasn't about whether PoW or PoS is more efficient.

That’s a rude way to say “thanks for clarifying, I agree with you.”

“doesn’t scale” usually refers to technical difficulty with throughput. If you meant that Bitcoin et al cause massive environmental damage, you sure didn’t say it clearly.

I suggest that you would get a lot of mileage out of improving your writing skills first before trying to flame people. As it is, you’re just playing yourself.

PoW is theoretically better in this regard.

I mean, in theory the market should push the profit down to a minimum, forcing the miners to spend their revenues in order to keep mining.

It is however extremely more inclusive. Everyone in the world right now has very good chance to join. Unlike traditional capitalism where it can do lots of things to keep others from joining, keep many dependent on their salaries just to survive.

It won't be perfect. But it is definitely tons better than the current capitalism.

Another very important feature here is the ability to easily fork. So if we need to fix something, it can easily be done (no need to wait for an organized citizen revolution)(although this is probably better attributed to the idea of Free Software).

No better than the stock market in this regards. Except the stock market explicitly hands out profits from the biggest and riches companies, and our tax system is designed to give more of those profits to poor people.

A low-income person getting into Ethereum today has no hope to ever get as much ethereum as anyone else in the early adopters.

Hell, a low-income person was too busy trying to buy food today and/or pay off credit card debt to even think about investing into Ethereum, the Stock Market, Bonds, or other securities.

Pretty sure getting into Ethereum is easier and fairer than getting into Stock Market.

If you wanted to be an early investor of facebook and you are a pleb, then you're out of luck. And you should have a big capital to join.

If you wanted to be an early adopter of Ethereum, then you only need an internet connection and a computer. You invest put practically any amount, so any pleb can join.

There's also a law that requires you to be big capitalist before you can do early big investments right?

Pretty sure this is better than stock market.

> Pretty sure getting into Ethereum is easier and fairer than getting into Stock Market.

Robinhood offers free trades on anything in the Stock Market. Literally free, you can't beat that.

> There's also a law that requires you to be big capitalist before you can do early big investments right?

That's not the stock market. That's venture capitalism. The stock market is literally open to everybody with an internet connection from a variety of well trusted sources (RobinHood, E-trade, TD Ameritrade, Vanguard, etc. etc.) and a variety of pricing schemes. ($0 for Robinhood, although it seems like their execution is not as good. You get what you pay for afterall)

Furthermore: the stock market is regulated. The National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) system in the USA ensures that everyone in the USA pays relatively consistent prices, or at least more-consistent than BTC / ETH. Unlike ETH or BTC, no one is going to steal your money Mt. Gox style as the SEC is a strict watchdog.

You get no assurances with Eth or BTC. Coinbase has different prices than Bitfinex. And some of these exchanges look like they're running scams (ie: Bitfinex's support of Tethercoin).

I think more "plebs" have been burned by Mt. Gox and other such failures in the cryptocoin marketplace. Its a hugely unregulated, and highly risky market. Cryptocoins are just not mature enough for mainstream speculation yet.

Ok, I stand corrected. It was Venture capitalism I had in mind.

I wanna note though, regarding crypto exchanges. One does not need to use them to invest. Use your own wallet. Use decentralized exchange if you don't wanna risk using centralized exchange.

In what way?

You have to at least give him credit, he didn't use a car metaphor.