[nivexous]

Proof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense (without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.

[r32a_]

Also once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51%

With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker by just throwing more hashing power at bitcoin

[collincusce]

2/3rds is required for a full 51%-style attack in PoS.

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs#wh...

There's a lot of misinformation regarding PoS. Vlad Zamfir has spoken a lot on cartel attacks and how they're mitigated, but the biggest, and I mean bigger than biggest, argument against all of these attacks is that it's always detectable by honest nodes shy of 2/3rds attack and it defaces the value of the coin itself to attack at that volume.

[solveit]

You can always buy them out. But honestly, a 51% attack seems like a much less likely way for ethereum to fail compared to it just not living up to the hype.

[nivexous]

A buyer requires a seller. Who's to say they would?

[rocqua]

Buisness plan: Get a 51% stake in Ether, and hold big users hostage?

[solveit]

That works until the big users hard fork and take away your ether on their fork. It's pretty much a failsafe that always works at the cost of possibly destroying all trust in the network.

[yifanl]

Giving everyone a nuclear button is an interesting solution.

[bouncycastle]

> Also once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51%

You could do a hard-fork and slash their stake. In PoW, you can't do this.

> With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker

Not in the case of "selfish mining attack", where you may never know that an attack is happening until it's too late, you'll have little chance in defending with hashpower since the attackers will have a significant head start...

[nivexous]

> You could do a hard-fork and slash their stake. In PoW, you can't do this.

So ... theft?

[aey]

Theft of what exactly? Each fork is as valid as any other fork, the challenge is in agreement.

[bouncycastle]

You should really be careful with how you play with definitions, as that will lead down to a slippery slope. Remember that time when someone managed to generate 184 billion bitcoin? With your reasoning, we can now say that the succeeding hard-fork to 'fix' the issue by slashing the bitcoins was theft.

[keymone]

> Remember that time when someone managed to generate 184 billion bitcoin?

you're being intellectually dishonest or even outright manipulative here.

there were never 184 billion coins created on bitcoin chain, there was a bug in validation logic of bitcoin client that made it follow the chain that was invalid.

are you seriously trying to compare that to stealing coins from somebody on a valid chain?

really?

[ChaosEnergy]

> are you seriously trying to compare that to stealing coins from somebody on a valid chain?

They're not stealing coins from someone on a valid chain, they are forking away to another chain and slashing the user's stake. The user will still have all their coins on "their" chain and it's up to everyone else to decide which chain is "the right one". If the 51% user is truly malicious, the majority of network participants will move away to the new chain, rendering the 51% user's tokens (near) worthless.

[bouncycastle]

Now you've really tangled yourself in a big web.

[darawk]

And why is this a problem? Sure, they can change it arbitrarily to their benefit, but they only benefit if the value of their holdings is high. If they do something that people don't like, that value will fall. So they are strongly constrained by behaving in such a way that they do not make the users of Ethereum unhappy.

[bigiain]

One only needs to look at modern democratic politics to have _serious serious_ doubts about that argument...

It won't surprise me at all if a PoS blockchain ends up looking just like a two party political system, where every now and then you get to choose which fork/party has the least objectionable outcome for you, but where both choices leave you worse off than you started...

[darawk]

Except that in this case, if you think you have better ideas, you can code up your own fork, and try to drum up support for it. The open source ecosystem works far better than the political system, I find.

[jacobush]

Like now, you can drum up support for your own new party.

[darawk]

Yes, but in the case of the US government at least, there are structural reasons why the two party system is a stable equilibrium. Those structural reasons do not exist for cryptocurrencies. The most important of which is that there can be only one president of the US government, only so many senators, judges, etc... There can be infinitely many concurrently competing forks of Ethereum.

You and I can go fork Ethereum right now and now just tell people it's great, but show them it's great. It's like if we could fork the US government, refactor all the policies and let it run to demonstrate how good it is, and then people can come on board. You can't do that in politics, but you can absolutely do it in crypto.

[jacobush]

Half the point of a cryptocurrency is the network effect - so I don't see how your argument holds, at all.

It is not clear at all that a small political experiment will scale to a super power. It is equally unclear that a small crypto currency experiment will scale.

This is without even touching on how easy, or difficult to it is rally support for a new system. Quite difficult, I'd say.

[nivexous]

Network effects are too powerful. If they’re smart, they’ll make small changes over a long time, only ever upsetting a minority at once, and so the users stay. That’s Facebook to me, other things to other people.

[bouncycastle]

That tends to happen in PoW actually. Example: Last year, Monero forked and changed the protocol by changing the PoW algorithm. Effectively shutting off a significant section of the miners. Miners had no defence - it was a major blow to them. Same thing happened in Sia. There's been discussion with changing the PoW of Bitcoin as well.

[rocqua]

This was a change meant to block ASIC mining and encourage GPU mining.

Whilst this is great for decentralization, I've read interesting arguments in favor of ASIC mining. People who buy ASICs are committed to a coin. This leads to a stable base of mining. Meanwhile, GPU miners tend to mine whatever is the most profitable at any given time. This leads to large fluctuations in mining rates.

The Ether switch to POS has some people worried, as it might free up a lot of GPU power, which might overwhelm other GPU based POW systems.

Then again, any argument regarding mining algorithms is filled by people who have biases to the tune of 100 000$ of hardware investments.

[nivexous]

You're making a different point. Yeah miners can get screwed in a PoW change, but the chain's fundamental properties are not at risk. Users have assets on both chains in a fork and if one chain does something terrible (or even just different) the market will reflect. With PoS, the majority remain the majority ... unless you support mob theft, a bad precedent I would say.

[bouncycastle]

Nope, if an attacker does something bad (eg. a group forms a 51% cartel and starts censoring transactions), then they can be forked out and their stake slashed in the fork that doesn't censor the transactions. I really do not see a problem here? It's even better security than PoW, because once the attackers have their stake slashed, they can't attack anymore. With PoW, the miners can keep on doing a 51% attack even after the fork, indefinitely.

PoS is way more secure.

[adrianN]

...if you trust a minority to decide who is an attacker and who isn't.

[dekz]

It's pretty clear when you validate the transactions

[rbreve]

Sure but if they change it in a negative way they lose because they own the mayority. That's why to be able to change anything you have to have a huge stake, it's like having skin in the game.