randomran01234

I’ve thought about this a bit more.

You can target the UXTO so that their value in crypto starts back at zero. But because they still have the mining hardware, they still control 51% of the hash power that secures the network. They can just mine from a different address and it won’t be clear who to target until they once again begin to produce majority blocks on the chain. This way they can continually attack the chain and render it useless.

When you burn a PoW miner’s crypto addresses, you aren’t burning their capital and stake, because it’s in the form of mining hardware, not tokens. When you burn a PoS staker’s crypto, you are burning their capital and stake which is in the form of tokens.

Most crypto including Bitcoin is governed off-chain. People come to consensus on a set of rules that allows them to create a public and permissionless BFT ledger. Attacking the ledger then costs millions or billions of dollars. If one dishonest node or a group of colluding actors decide to spend this much to amass majority control of the network, the rest of the network can decide to fork the protocol to burn their staked capital.

The main goal of crypto - the base token and protocol rewards from PoW or PoS - is to secure this network and keep it permissionless and decentralized.

If the 51% is a single staker or small group of colluding stakers attacking the chain, the rest of the users will probably not want to continue using that chain. The users can activate a soft fork, just by changing the rules of the code to burn the attacker’s funds, and running the updated client software. The remaining honest stakers can then continue to follow the head of the non-attacked chain, and the attacker would be the only one left on their chain.

Users and the market decides on the chain, governance in Ethereum is based on social consensus not “one coin one vote.”

Good question, I’d be interested to hear a core dev’s thoughts on this.

Users, developers, other stakers.

It takes time to learn but it isn’t obtuse. It’s extensively documented, with multiple open source clients being built in tandem. Besides, it is not the only PoS system running today.

All fields of engineering are complex to those that have an not studied them.

Their actions would most likely be visible on the network because it is transparent. The community can then decide whether to activate a fork and punish the colluding nodes.

In PoW, if you control 51% of mining the users can defend by switching to another hash algorithm, meaning the attacker needs to re-buy a lot of new hardware. If they’ve anticipated this, and attack again with new hardware, there is not much further defence. In PoS, users can coordinate a soft fork to burn the attackers funds, each time they re-attack the chain, until they eventually run out of capital.

So your main argument is that people are too stupid to understand that Ethereum is not the same as Infura, and so when one goes down you may as well call them both down? Lol.

Lack of education can be fixed. You can even help: instead of spreading poor information, try to educate your readers about the difference between a node as a service and liveness of the blockchain.

Why? PoW can only afford to be attacked twice. It even has a name: “spawn camping.” In proof of stake, this is pretty easy to defend against repeatedly.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

Can you point to any sources? I would like to read about how this will be accepted even if the majority is against inclusion.

Trying to understand how this differs in practice. Anyone delegating to a staking pool is forced into their values. Ethermine recently started blocking OFAC transactions, so does the majority of miners in that pool agree with this? If so, what is the defence against censorship in this scenario except for some to exit the pool and use another that aligns with their values?

It’s the same with staking. If you aren’t solo staking, you are just delegating to a staking pool. And you can withdraw that and deposit it elsewhere if they do not align with your values.

Interesting, so this is a problem if 66% or more decide to reject a transaction. How many blocks are currently signed by solo miners in PoW? Almost all blocks are signed by pools which looks like the PoS committees in practice yo my naive eyes. A miner with 0.1% hash power would probably be a very long delay.

I do agree this is probably the most concerning thing that Tornado Cash sanctions have shown us. Still don’t think the energy cost of PoW is worth it, and would rather see PBS and crList solve this problem.

https://notes.ethereum.org/@fradamt/H1ZqdtrBF

> This was not an issue with the old proof of work scheme.

Censorship of transactions because of OFAC is already happening in PoW mining.

https://twitter.com/takenstheorem/status/1560690035955011585...

How much of this is a real problem?

Same argument can be made for key management. A typical user could use non custodial wallet, but they don’t. But that option exists, for when they become unsatisfied with their centralized wallet custodian, or when they want to change custodians, or when they want to use a multi sig that allows for a mix of custodial and non custodial.

Importantly: the option exists. The option to use non custodial EOA and smart contract wallet, DAI or RAI, Alchemy or a custom node RPC, Kraken or another CEX or DEX, the option is present and is chosen by plenty of users.

Is there any evidence that almost 100% of transactions use Infura? There are several other popular nodes as a service since the cited 2018 article was written: Alchemy, Quicknode, Moralis. Anybody running a full node, including home stakers, can point to their own RPC endpoint.

When one of the popular nodes as a service goes down, many dApps and users will need to change their endpoint to another. I think the author might be overstating the concern of this centralization.

The solution to RPC centralization is well known: light clients. It is on the developers roadmap but obviously they are prioritizing proof of stake and scalability.

He does not need to sell his anti-Amazon book on Amazon, it is laughably hypocritical and goes against his entire message in his Twitter announcement:

> it's an action-oriented look at how tech and entertainment monopolies steal creators' incomes, with detailed, shovel-ready plans to unrig creative labor markets and pay artists

Let’s just agree to disagree though.

Sorry but “he has to sell his anti-Amazon book on Amazon” is delusional, cognitive dissonance in action.

You can pre-order his anti-Amazon book on Amazon. You don’t need to sell your book on Amazon just to live in a capitalist society. To me this is hypocrisy, but I guess not everybody agrees.

https://www.amazon.ca/Chokepoint-Capitalism-Content-Captured...

As I said in another comment:

> You can pre-order the book on Amazon. It’s like a PETA selling furs to support their anti-fur campaign.

You can pre-order the book on Amazon. It’s like a PETA selling furs to support their anti-fur campaign.

Feels a bit odd to rail against tech companies extracting dollars from artists, and then use Amazon, Kickstarter and PayPal as a sales mechanism. Could be worse I guess.

Edit: included Amazon as he is also selling his product through it.

https://www.amazon.ca/Chokepoint-Capitalism-Content-Captured...

It's very possible that an EVM-compatible L2 eventually captures this space, or a subset of it.

Harder to imagine any L1 blockchain ever being able to reach the throughput needed without dramatic trade-offs in decentralization, censorship-resistance and security. At that point you might wonder how it would be any different than a centralized Visa or Mastercard network.

“free speech” = “protected by first amendment”

Do you disagree with the widespread reporting on the outcome of this case?

https://www.britannica.com/event/Bernstein-vs-the-US-Departm...

> Bernstein v. the U.S. Department of State, landmark legal decision (1996) that set two important precedents in the field of digital technology. First, it ruled that U.S. government regulations that barred the export of encryption software were unconstitutionally restrictive; second, it declared that software source code can be a form of protected free speech.

and

https://casetext.com/case/bernstein-v-united-states-dept-of-...

> The district court found that the Source Code was speech protected by the First Amendment, see Bernstein v. Department of State, 922 F. Supp. 1426 (N.D. Cal. 1996) ("Bernstein I")

US sanctioning an Ethereum contract address and unrelated source control providers deleting user accounts and repositories is a good example of chilling effect in action. The individual developers are not in scope of the sanctions, and are not sanctioned entities. Not even the source code or its many individual repositories are directly sanctioned, but chilling effect is leading hosting services to erase it all as a precaution.

https://harvardlawreview.org/2020/02/the-establishment-claus...

GitHub can do whatever it likes as a private company. But there are laws that protect against chilling effects:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

The bigger problem is whether republishing the source code would make you a target of the sanctions. If a user republishes the source code on Ethereum, pirate bay, Gitlab, or another host then it is reasonable to assume their actions might be interpreted as “supporting the Tornado Cash project” which makes them a target of the sanctions. If a user modifies the code and republishes it probably will fall under same risks.

Bernstein v United States:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...

The debate is pretty settled that code and language should be protected by 1st amendment as free speech. Based on this precedent, we should not be cheering on the barring of the open source project and it’s developers.

It is less clear if the execution and use of code should be free speech, and how to regulate code and language when the sole goal is illicit. Like anarchist cookbook, 3D printed guns. But to argue this, you will have to argue the sole goal of Tornado Cash is to aid in illicit behavior. There are many licit users of the protocol, like with Tor, who just want to seek privacy in their online communication.

The issue comes down to whether sending and receiving private keys in an encrypted way over the internet should be protected or not.

Sad and troubling that so many people hearing this will equate privacy with evil and illegal behavior. This is why I am pointing out Tor, because there are many licit users of it.