[gus_massa]

I think it's worse. If you ask AWS for 1000 distributed machines, you can run 1000 different calculations and then somehow aggregate the results.

In the Ethereum network, if you ask for a calculation then all the miners must do it, and then all the validators must do it. So you acually have a repeated calculation, not a distributed calculation.

The only distributed part was calculating the next block with POW, but IIRC they switched to POS.

[wanderingbort]

I agree it’s worse on any measure that can reduced to “distributed computation”.

But that’s not what it’s doing. Not really. The only distributed computation is the one establishing trust that there has been no Byzantine failure of consensus.

Everything else is non-distributed non-parallel computation within a framework that statistically guarantees faithful and accurate processing.

It’s a competitor to trusted computing. One specifically designed against the single entity root of trust that underpins intels offering eg.

[edit: fixed some typos]

[ilyt]

That kinda doesn't matter when the amount of compute is trivially reproduced by '90's CPUs

You can just have a bunch of notes and vote out bad results. You can say "how do you know that 20 different machines you run that do not have hardware backdoor but how do you know software running ethereum is not backdoored ? There is no protection for the compute engine being backdoored, just the fact you'd need to get that backdoored software to most nodes.

[wanderingbort]

In order to convince one honest node you’d have to backdoor every node they talk to.

Multiple independent implementations co-exist on the network including many private implementations.

Perhaps the best defense is the vigilance of the community as they regularly build consensus around the head blocks hash which is hard to forge if the ledger contains any material impacts of an exploit.

Trivial detection of malicious acts is the feature.

It’s true it’s not perfect but your analysis trivializes the effort to compromise even one honest node.

[ilyt]

Or you can get your raspberry pi, some desktop from the 90s and random used laptop and get 1000x the "secure computing power" that couldn't be reasonably hardware-backdoored too.

Crypto for compute is entirely useless use case.

[barbariangrunge]

This thread is the only rational, technically informed discussion of crypto I’ve ever read. Both sides being polite to each other while making technical or philosophical arguments

[latchkey]

1. ETH switched off PoW to PoS, last year.

2. When ETH was PoW, miners were not doing any calculations. It was simply building a hash for a block template that a pool provided.