Author: Gareth Williams 2014-04-26 23:44:13
Published on: 2014-04-26T23:44:13+00:00
There has been a discussion about using fraud proofs to ensure that no one publishes proof that someone signed a competing block. This idea was proposed as a mechanism for eliminating checkpoints and is on topic and of concern to many. However, there are problems with replacing proof-of-work mining with proof-of-stake "mining" because nothing is actually at stake. With proof-of-stake, one can sign as many different forks as they wish, creating double-spends at will in the worst case or grinding blocks until they find one that names them as the signer in the best case. It appears to be a fundamental issue with proof-of-stake in that it must leverage an existing mechanism for enforced scarcity like proof-of-work to work in a consensus algorithm.In April 2014, Stephen Reed proposed creating a Bitcoin branch that provides a sandboxed testbed for researching the best PoS implementations. He conducted a poll on bitcointalk, which suggested some minority support for Bitcoin Proof-of-Stake. His goal was to develop, test, and document PoS while exploring its vulnerabilities and fixing them in a transparent fashion. Some people, including Mark Friedenbach, have proposed protocols that involve some sort of proof of stake mechanism. But, replacing proof-of-work mining with proof-of-stake "mining" encountered problems related to the fact that with proof-of-stake nothing was actually at stake.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T21:18:50.372398+00:00