Also, what a confusing choice of words. A distributed system is BFT (or not BFT) regardless of whether or not the underlying message broadcast medium is synchronous/asynchronous, or reliable/unreliable. The "network conditions" being "stable" have no bearing on the voters' ability to reach agreement -- that's solely a function of whether or not f or fewer votes are malicious out of 3f + 1 votes.
Your second paragraph is false also. Different BFT systems have different assumptions. Some work in asynchronous settings, some work in semi-synchronous settings, etc.
Even if you manage to acquire a 51% hash rate for example (which is extremely difficult), it'll be very difficult to keep it over a long enough period of time.
PoS is fundamentally broken in my opinion, it literally says "rich gets richer" and wealthy stakers will get higher (absolute) rewards which they don't have any incentive to sell since they didn't spend any energy to get it. That's even ignoring all the custodians which have large quantities of the said crypto, so they can just keep the rewards to themselves or keep a sizeable % of it.
One of the motivations for the DAO hack hardfork btw was that the attacker would hold significant power under a PoS system.
Same with PoS, you can stake with a pool if you have less than 32eth, but your returns on that are not going to be comparable to what large holders get (same percentage, but very tiny in absolute numbers).
Also worth pointing out, high APRs aren't guaranteed and the network fees are supposed to be significantly decreased post EIP-1559. Also, for those who don't meet 32 eth threshold, there's good chance they are not even remotely close to that threshold.
As for the 32 ETH threshold, if you don't meet it, you can stake through a pool instead, and even a decentralized pool.
At the same time, because of this, you don’t really get finality in Bitcoin. You get some assurance that your transaction is “confirmed” after a number of block but you’re never really sure. In proof of stake you can have consensus protocols with true finality, meaning that there’ll be no forks for sure if a threshold of participants remained honest.
We cannot an-cap our way to a classless society anyways, people. PoS is unquestionably the lesser evil of the two.
PoS is simply worse from every angle and it’s also not cheaper because MR=MC.
This is a big statement without an argument to back it up.
> PoS is simply worse from every angle and it’s also not cheaper because MR=MC.
The difference is that MC in PoS is mainly interest costs, while in PoW it's energy and hardware.
> MC in PoS is mainly interest costs
no, it's also costs of fighting (via politics, marketing and hacking) for that initial pre-mined stake.
it's not cheaper than PoW and has worse security properties due to all sorts of attacks - long range, grinding, etc. ultimately it's flawed because unlike in PoW there is no universally objective measure of geniuneness of a chain (the "work" in PoW).
>>no, it's also costs of fighting (via politics, marketing and hacking) for that initial pre-mined stake.
There is no fight if there was a transition from PoW to PoS, and thus no premine, or if the premine was distributed via an open crowdsale, with revenue allocated to a non-profit foundation.
Your analysis makes too many tenuous assumptions to push one side of the debate.
the market doesn't have enough liquidity for you to gain a meaningful stake and those that organized the pre-mine scam will always remain in control. or they will sell you the stake for exorbitant price and perform a long-range attack against you because they still hold the original keys.
Eth is going through transition and yet it’s the largest pre-mine scam in existence.
Crowd sales are just pre-mines.
Non-profit is just pre-mine beneficiary that people will fight for control over.
And you conveniently ignored all the other problems with PoS: long range and grinding attacks, no ability to reduce power of malicious staker, no universal objective measure for which chain is genuine so you have to rely on third parties, etc.
This is unsupported. There are billions of dollars worth of ETH sold every day. If you intended to hold what you bought, the liquidity would gradually go down as you took what was bought off the market, but you could certainly acquire a significant share of the stake.
>>Non-profit is just pre-mine beneficiary that people will fight for control over.
That assumes zero altuistic oversight from ETH stakeholders at large deterring attempts to corrupt the grant issuing process, which is not a sensible assumption.
>>And you conveniently ignored all the other problems with PoS
Long-range attack is addressed with dependence on weak subjectivity:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...
The rest of your criticisms have similarly been addressed in state of the art Proof of Stake protocols, in particular for ETH 2.0 PoS.
not nearly enough to purchase a meaningful stake that could protect you from premine scammers that launched the project. not to mention - you'd be giving up your money for their benefit. double rekt.
> zero altuistic oversight from ETH stakeholders at large deterring attempts to corrupt the grant issuing process, which is not a sensible assumption
ah, nice, a system that simply relies on altruistic motives of premine scammers that will be in control and largest beneficiaries of those staking grants. what could possibly go wrong.
> Long-range attack is addressed with dependence on weak subjectivity: ... The rest of your criticisms have similarly been addressed in state of the art Proof of Stake protocols
it's not addressed, it's just partly waved away and partly obfuscated in a non-solutions like slashing or checkpointing.
pos still doesn't work, pow is the only known decentralized and trustless consensus reaching protocol.
There is no need for any protection. Proof of stake doesn't enable stakers to attack non-stakers. Nor would stakers have any incentive to.
Moreover, there was absolutely no scam in the premine. It was publicly announced, and the majority of it was distributed via a programmatic crowdsale.
This characterization of yours is simply an emotional attack.
>>you'd be giving up your money for their benefit. double rekt.
Same with any currency. You provide something of value to acquire some currency. This applies to dealing with early adopters of other currencies, early investors in companies, etc.
This is simply a bad-faith criticism of proof-of-stake that is equally applicable to anything else, unless you make the tortured argument that a publicly announced crowdsale and dev grant is somehow a "scam", and therefore there is some distinct quality about buying currency from those who acquired their stake through a premine over acquiring it through some other method.
>>ah, nice, a system that simply relies on altruistic motives of premine scammers
How can any one can take ETH's critics seriously when you make blatantly libelous accusations that participating in an open premine crowd makes someone a scammer.
yes it does. it allows stakers to prevent non-stakers from becoming stakers. all rewards go to stakers. rich get richer even faster.
> there was absolutely no scam in the premine. It was publicly announced, and the majority of it was distributed via a programmatic crowdsale.
public announcement means nothing if participation is permissioned. there was 12% blatant premine and 60% so called "pre-sale", of which undisclosed amount went to scammers that organized it and didn't have to pay anything.
> applies to dealing with early adopters of other currencies
this doesn't apply to BTC which literally anybody could mine without asking approval and permission. ETH is just another scam.
> dev grant is somehow a "scam"
of course it is.
> open premine crowd
well, at least you used the right word to describe it - premine. any crypto premine is a scam by definition. some of those scams just manage to bamboozle enough people to stay afloat longer and get a chance to scam even more.
good job shifting conversation away from discussing PoS flaws into complaining about randoms on internet being rude to scammers.
No it doesn't. As I already explained, there is no practical way holders can collude to force all holders of the currency to not sell. There will always be significant liquidity for any currency that has as wide a distribution of holders that Ethereum does.
>>public announcement means nothing if participation is permissioned.
The crowdsale was not permissioned. It was completely programmatic.
>>there was 12% blatant premine
Which was publicly disclosed compensation for the developers who created Ethereum, as well as an allocation for grants to further develop Ethereum.
>>and 60% so called "pre-sale", of which undisclosed amount went to scammers that organized it and didn't have to pay anything.
This allegation of the pre-sale being a scam is totally unsubstantiated. It's irresponsible character assassination.
>>randoms on internet being rude to scammers.
The credibility of avowed critics of Ethereum, who make totally unsubstantiated allegations of the organizers of Ethereum's crowdsale of being scammers, is relevant to these discussions.
Moreover, your criticism is not relevant to PoS. It's specifically critical of Ethereum, since Ethereum had a premine and crowdsale. PoS doesn't have to have either. So once again, your analysis seems entirely biased and agenda-driven.
PoS is absolutely driven by rich and helps rich get richer faster than everybody else. If I get 10% stake - I get 10% of any future issuance, meaning my stake can never go below 10%, so my power in the system never dilutes even though I literally don’t have to do anything anymore. Miners in PoW have to participate in mining and their power can get diluted by anyone by simply getting more hardware online.
PoS doesn’t work.
There isn’t a cap on validators so you can’t buy up a fixed percentage of the network. More people can always join. You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest(same as mining).
As we reduce the hardware costs and energy usage costs it becomes easier to participate in the network (especially via pools, same as mining but much much cheaper).
Being able to run a validator on a solar powered raspberry pi is a great improvement to making participation in the network accessible. We should see the exact opposite of what you suggest, anyone who wants to participate not having energy or hardware restrictions should make it less Matthew-effect-like.
PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.
PoS is great.
you can during a pre-sale or pre-mine event
> More people can always join
joininng as validator means convincing another validator to reduce their stake (sell it to you), which is a form of permission.
> You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest
you can't be diluted if you don't sell you stake and continue staking. that's just by definition how PoS works.
> PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.
nope, literally none of it is true.
slashing mechanisms only obfuscate the attack, they don't make it more expensive. in fact they reduce security by virtue of piling more and more rules that require more and more code, which inevitably contains bugs.
threats of supply chain attacks are much less scary than threats of long range attacks from hacked / overtaken private keys of early / current validators.
producing more hardware to counter an attack might be expensive and early iterations of hardware can be inefficient, but at least nobody can stop you from producing it. as i've already explained - if somebody gets a stake in pos system, there is nothing you can do to reduce it.
pos simply doesn't work. it's been known a decade before pow and was just never considered seriously because it's not trustless and permissionless.