Hacker News Reader

Comment by ftlio | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com