Author: Erik Aronesty 2021-06-01 20:28:45
Published on: 2021-06-01T20:28:45+00:00
The discussion revolves around the Proof of Burn (PoB) consensus algorithm and its advantages over Proof of Stake (PoS). The original post suggests that PoB is better than PoS because your stake in PoS can be stolen, while PoB requires burning coins to acquire power, which cannot be seized. However, the discussion highlights some issues with PoB, such as a lack of definition of the heaviest chain and difficulty adjustment, nothing at burn problem, and trivial attacks by wealthy attackers, which seem similar to PoS. The author of the original concept suggested a well-designed PoB that mimics ASICs as much as possible, with large up-front buy-in events, delay function, block-specific burn, burns linked to specific buy-ins, max-burn = max-buy-in, and max-burn decays over time. Overall, the discussion revolves around the need for a more detailed proposal or technical documentation of PoB to analyze its properties.In a discussion on the security of Proof of Stake (PoS) systems, one participant describes a potential attack that violates the linearity of power among stakers. The attack involves an attacker using the "nothing at stake" problem to try to create multiple forks in the blockchain system, ultimately gaining an extra block over the honest strategy. While the participant suggests collaborative randomness as a potential solution, another participant disagrees, stating that this would only apply to a quorum system where future producers are known. The discussion also touches on the issue of punishment for minting on chains other than the one that eventually wins and the possibility of a 51% attack. Ultimately, the participants agree that the nothing at stake problem presents a significant barrier to the adoption of PoS in decentralized consensus.In a debate regarding Proof of Stake (PoS) systems, the issue of "nothing at stake" attacks was discussed. The attacker in such an attack can gain significant advantage in the number of blocks they create compared to what they "should be able to create," leading to a significant increase in their stake compared to honest nodes in the long term. It was argued that close to 50% stake is not needed for such an attack, and that introducing punishments as part of the protocol solves the problem. However, it was pointed out that this introduces additional complexity which may introduce problems, and also that punishments do not solve the problem but only slightly improve resistance against it. Moreover, achieving optimal conditions where all coins are always part of the stake is theoretical, and in reality, a staker's significance in the system will always increase in time, leading to a system more and more controlled by powerful entities. A quorum-based PoS system was shown to have a vulnerability to DDOS attacks, and until actual solutions to these issues are invented and demonstrated, PoS remains critically insecure. The debate also touched on Proof of Burn (PoB), which involves burning coins to be used at a future particular block height. This was argued to be almost always better than PoS because the "proof" is on-chain and miners have a strong long-term investment in the stability of the chain. PoB also solves problems caused by "energy dependence" which could lead to state monopolies on mining.In a recent email thread, there was a discussion about the security of proof-of-burn and proof-of-stake protocols compared to Bitcoin's proof-of-work system. Erik Aronesty mentioned that he saw no way around the requirement that large amounts of coins should be kept offline for security reasons. Billy Tetrud suggested that proof-of-burn solves this issue since nothing is held online. Another participant in the thread asked how proof-of-burn addresses the "nothing at stake" problem, which occurs when miners have an incentive to mine on every chain in the event of a fork. Proof-of-burn eliminates this incentive because burn investments are always "at stake," and any redaction can result in a loss-of-burn. There was also a discussion about the appropriateness of proof-of-stake for a global settlement layer in a pure digital asset like Bitcoin. The main issue with PoS is that it gives responsibilities to coin holders that they may not want or be able to handle. Large unsophisticated coin holders can store their coins in cold storage without affecting the underlying consensus. The discussion revolves around the use of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) in Bitcoin. The argument against using PoS is that it opens up a new social attack surface and goes against the objective of Bitcoin which is to be a trustless digital cash. Bitcoin is optimized for simplicity and avoiding extraneous responsibilities for the holder of the coin. The comparison was drawn between gold and Bitcoin, with the latter being more inert and beautifully boring than gold. The speaker believes that keeping Bitcoin simple and avoiding bad technical decisions to appease the current political climate is essential for its success.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T20:49:28.140622+00:00