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Comment by michaelwww | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that's a good one. He goes on to say"Of course, if Bitcoin actually gets attacked, I do expect that the political will to switch to at least hybrid proof of stake will quickly appear, but I expect that to be a painful transition."

which I thought was funny because he's tweaking them a little by saying they're eventually going to have to accept PoS anyway

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Considering he thought Bitcoin block space was too scarce, and now not scarce enough, and considered people running their own nodes a “weird mountain man fantasy”, but has now built a political topology that depends on something like Bitcoin’s UASF and thus on people running their own nodes, I wouldn’t trust his predictions much.

The attack surface of Ethereum’s PoS is pretty huge, and derivative staking already has a runaway accumulation problem. Bitcoin’s entire critique of money is based on not being something like Proof of Stake.

Where could I educate myself on the vulnerabilities of PoS? It seems like for PoW, the vulnerability comes from variability of computing power of miners - if miners capacity dips for a few hours because of external events, attacker can use that opportunity and bring online a lot of resources to do a 51% attack.

Doesn't a PoS attack require 51% of coin ownership? How would an attacker obtain that without being massively rich to begin with?

A few are here: https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/

There’s also the overall economic argument that Proof of Work is actually just the least obscure version of anything else: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

Overall I’d just argue that because PoS doesn’t involve external resources to create blocks, the cost of producing a block won’t be well understood and thus there will be opportunities for rent extraction - which we’re already seeing with Lido staking.

Great article, thanks!

>>Considering he thought Bitcoin block space was too scarce, and now not scarce enough,

He never said that. He said there isn't enough fee revenue. Fee revenue can increase as blockchain space becomes less scarce, and more bytes are sold to transaction generators.

>>that depends on something like Bitcoin’s UASF and thus on people running their own nodes, I wouldn’t trust his predictions much

An Ethereum based UASF by no means requires every one running their own nodes. It just requires people recognizing - via either an upgrade to their own node, or choosing a third party node that has upgraded to pull data from - the chain that slashes the coins of those who are executing 51% attacks.

If so, that won't be the Bitcoin my node will switch to. You can't force the network to do what you want. UASF and the many forks before, during, and after the fork wars have proven this.

Hey, you would be free to fork of to your own little chain that nobody uses. You can always do that.

But if the whole system is at risk due to attacks, I expect that you will be a bit lonely on that chain

I would just not do anything and continue on the original chain. Yes, if most of the world moves to the other chain, that fork will be Bitcoin for the rest of the world. The issue is if my time preference is low enough to await/speculate on the demise of the chain due to the issues I've identified and made me not switch.

Pretty sure node runners would prefer a UASF to hybrid PoS or at least a different PoW algo over constant 51% attacks.

I love Bitcoin, but you have to be able to consider hypotheticals like this. Similarly... a tail emission should be on the table. Mentioning it used to be totally third rail [0], but these days folks like Peter Todd are speaking up.

[0] - https://twitter.com/mhluongo/status/1092559017178734594?t=i2...

Consistent 51% attacks rely on Bitcoin already being more-or-less worthless. If it is, then yes, the cost of terrorizing the network will be low. The same follows based on Vitalik’s argument for why PoS is supposedly too expensive to attack.

The difference is if you want to terrorize Bitcoin, you need to find energy and compute at relatively low cost compared to everyone still on the network. With Ethereum, you just need to acquire ETH.

Attacking bitcoin uses energy but does not degrade the computer or the energy infrastructure required to do the attack. Attacking PoS ethereum degrades the resource you use to attack.

When bitcoin was created there weren't hashpower markets where you could attack a chain without ever having invested in it and then move on the next minute, your hardware investment still earning you money. I think satoshi thought there would only be one chain and the game theory with many is different.

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