about 40% in:
"Because of all the arguments above, we can safely conclude that this threat of an attacker building up a fork from arbitrarily long range is unfortunately fundamental, and in all non-degenerate implementations the issue is fatal to a proof of stake algorithm’s success in the proof of work security model. However, we can get around this fundamental barrier with a slight, but nevertheless fundamental, change in the security model." —Vitalik Buterin, saying the quiet part out loud
Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having masters, whatever floats your boat.
I skimmed it. It made no serious arguments. If it had a serious argument, it would have exploited one of the many existing proof of stake systems.
> Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having masters, whatever floats your boat.
You mean...exactly like PoW mining?
Miners do not set the rules, they are merely a service that provides immutability to a ledger, with a nuclear option that will bankrupt all the billions they have invested, should they misbehave.
Large stakers can rent-seek and extract your wealth, PoS is the same system we have now, plus some code.
You are quite literally being exploited right this minute, by the same methods outlined in the article.
Stakers do not set the rules any more than do large mining pools.
> Large stakers can rent-seek and extract your wealth, PoS is the same system we have now, plus some code.
You know MEV is a thing in PoW too, right?
Their contribution is what makes the currency work.
They are some of the main profiteers from the currency.
You can't do a fork or rule change without enough miners going along (I mean you can but it would not have much value).
So in practice have all the governing/decision making power (as a group not a single person).
Sure they might not come up with changes, but they do decide weather any change do take effect in the end.
Same for PoW.
Crypto currency weather PoW or PoS boils down to "give the few rich all the power while giving the many less rich a illusion of security".
In PoW it just slightly tweaks "richness of money" into "richness of computation resources (which you get through money)".
This difference has complicated effects like:
- benefits anyone with cheap electricity (i.e. either places with no environmental protection, government support in some way, or the few places with cheap clean power)
- benefits anyone with good connections to chip factories
- the investment needed for gaining power being less bound to the currency itself but computation power instead
all bitcoin miners could be owned by one person and you would have no way of knowing....
>it's effectively centralised
so your argument is not that it is not possible to have security AND decentralisation with POS, but that it currently is not the case, right?
Sure, it's entirely possible that BTC is also centralised and controlled by wales. I was merely suggesting that the reason PoS systems haven't been hacked (much) yet is because the validators are controlled by project owners, so they are really centralised payment systems in disguise.
There's a difference though: buying initial stake in PoS may be similar to buying an ASIC in PoW, but mining a chain has a real cost (electricity) in PoW. In PoS there's no cost to mining, so validators have an incentive to stake all possible forks. There's no way to have consensus on the correct chain, because real resources haven't gone into building one up.
Ok. Go break one of the many existing systems that operates using proof of stake then. If you've done this, you should be leading your article with it. If you haven't, you shouldn't be speaking.
Proof of stake is not some theoretical thing being proposed in the abstract. Many systems operate on it as we speak.