2/ (a) Minimizing trust & social attack surface is the most important goal in Bitcoin. PoW plays a big role in fulfilling this goal. PoS is inferior in every ways in this regard.
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3/ (b) All software has bugs. When we say Bitcoin software should be treated as nuclear-reactor software, it doesn’t mean there will be ZERO bugs. Just orders of magnitude safer.https://medium.com/@hugonguyen/proof-of-stake-the-wrong-engineering-mindset-15e641ab65a2 …
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4/ You can simultaneously believe in (a) & (b). There’s no contradiction here. Engineering is both about the minimization of catastrophic failures, AND still expect a reasonable rate of failures.
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5/ Such is the unfortunate nature of software. Software abstractions are great but often times they are constrained by human’s inability to reason with absolute precision & comprehensiveness, unlike a machine.
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6/ Human intellect is analog, while “perfect" software requires digital precision. I learned this lesson the hard way from 10+ years of writing software. I've seen many amazing & super intelligent programmers, I've seen no programmers that don't make (serious) mistakes.
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7/ CVE-2018-17144 is evidence that shit will hit the fans *despite how good of a dev team you have*. I can bet hands-down that for every serious bug Bitcoin Core has, there are numerous equally serious bugs in your centralized and/or PoS shitcoins.
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8/ PoS problems are apparent to many without even writing a single line of code
That is another job of good engineers: to point out errors way before shit gets implemented.
Engineers who correctly conclude PoS is inferior will potentially save you millions down the line.Show this thread -
9/ CVE-2018-17144 also reaffirms my belief that the Bitcoin protocol should ossify quickly. We *might* not even get to integrate Privacy, but that’s the price we have to pay if we want to not jeopardize this soon-to-be trillion-dollar foundation. The stake is already too high.
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I think we still have time for some improvements. And we need to remain agile to upgrades for when PoW or signatures require changes.
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Agree that we probably have some time for new features/improvements, but the window is closing quickly. As for high-priority fixes, some might still be necessary. But even there the threshold for change will need to be raised a lot higher IMO.
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e.g. for PoW changes there needs to be substantial evidence that a/ current one is thoroughly broken AND b/ the new scheme will not suffer from the same flaw or simply swap one flaw for another.
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Agreed. Also, when it's common knowledge that something is a bug or a threat, I predict that network-wide changes will be easier to implement, even in a state of maturity.
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Example: If half the network is using version x.2 and the other half x.1 and there is an exploit of a version x.2 to partition the network, it will be easy to move nodes and miners to x.1 (similar to 2013).
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OTOH, if there is a global financial crisis in 2054 and part of the network decides to increase issuance to calm the crisis, it is very unlikely the other part will agree!! That will be an unsolvable crisis that will lead to a split.
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