| >This game of convincing people that your fork is the true fork is exactly what stake-grinding is Stake grinding is something else, in coins like NXT the producer of the next block was set by the seed based on the previous block, so it was possible to bruteforce blocks until you were also the next generator. >The article argues that the act of convincing you is, itself, a form of PoW. He makes a much stronger claim that resources spent on that (+ staking) are equal to revenue. There's an additional assumption in the article: he writes about marginal cost and revenue, but what he actually assumes is a system where average cost is equal to marginal cost, as it is in PoW under perfect competition. It's even equated explicitly in "“Rent” always forces production costs (MC) to always equal sale prices (MR)". He starts from the assumption that PoS uses exactly same resources as PoW and then shows it's true based on the assumption. >Given a choice, and no a priori knowledge, which history of the PoS chain is the true history? What would convince you that one is legitimate, and the other is not? What does 'true' and 'legitimate' mean here? The whole point is to interact with other people, so naturally I'm going to use the same network that people I want to interact with use. Same whether it's PoW or PoS - no real difference between choosing forks from some block height vs choosing networks with completely different genesis blocks and names. Once the network is chosen a node has to follow it. The question of 'how long it's safe to be offline to reproduce the behavior of being online all the time' has a complex answer of percentage of slashed stake if two conflicting histories exist. Currently I think it's about 16% for one month, which is about $2B. >Without no 3rd party way to verify if that actually happened, you could go around trying to bribe people to accept that your subsequent transactions on this fork are the chain's "true" transactions. PoW doesn't change anything here, it's an arbitrary fork like any other. People that ended up with coins from mining can receive coins on your fork too, made with a much smaller mining difficulty. Mining cost is irrelevant because that's destroyed wealth - nobody ends up with it.
The reason it won't happen in reality is because of network effects - even if you have external wealth able to pay enough at once to everyone that has to be paid, no single person wants to be left alone on a new fork - they would all have to move at once. |
This sounds exactly like a special case of the game of convincing people that your fork is the true fork. NXT stakers each have their own preferred forks (i.e. the ones in which they get the most tokens), and are willing to spend energy to make it so their fork is accepted by the network.
> He starts from the assumption that PoS uses exactly same resources as PoW and then shows it's true based on the assumption.
Maybe it's not well-written here, but his argument is that PoS ultimately will require the same energy commitments as PoW through the act of each staker trying to convince both other stakers and newcomers (i.e. with no a priori knowledge of how the chain evolved) that their preferred fork is the fork the network accepts. A PoS chain may not take the same initial resources as a PoW chain, but it will over time.
Source: I've spoken to the author at conferences.
> What does 'true' and 'legitimate' mean here? The whole point is to interact with other people, so naturally I'm going to use the same network that people I want to interact with use.
And how do we know which fork this is, out of all the alternatives? You either have to ask people (i.e. you need a priori knowledge obtained out-of-band), or you need a way to independently but deterministically choose the fork that the economic majority of people use (which is the problem PoW solves).
> PoW doesn't change anything here, it's an arbitrary fork like any other.
Except, this is not what's happening in real life. People follow the canonical chain, and PoW helps them all determine what the canonical chain is without having to ask around.