2/ …or relative security strength under sync & semi-sync settings.https://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/1040663728042082304 …
-
-
Show this thread
-
3/ A lot of terminology in this space are unfortunately imprecise. When we talk of “immutability”, “decentralization”, “trustlessness”, we don’t really mean them in the binary yes/no sense, but it’s often over a spectrum. A better term than “trustless” is “trust-minimized”.
Show this thread -
4/ No one handwaves away the problem of trust & decentralization in PoW - that’s a baseless claim. I’ve found that Bitcoiners are often the most paranoid when it comes to the threat of centralization, mining centralization in particular.
Show this thread -
5/ Many PoW proponents are self-critical of PoW, but also realize that PoW is the best we’ve got.
Show this thread -
6/ RE: upgrade process, is there room for improvement? Probably. Is some sort of an alert system for upgrades worthwhile? Maybe. Maybe not.
Show this thread -
7/ The idea of an alert system isn’t new. Satoshi himself wrote about the possibility of “fraud proofs” in the white paper.
Show this thread -
8/ Fraud-proofs & upgrade-alerts can be classified under the same umbrella. Both are alert systems, although the type of alert message differs. Any alert system will face similar challenges as fraud proofs.
Show this thread -
9/ Fraud proofs as initially envisioned by Satoshi turn out to be extremely difficult & might actually be impractical. Intuitively it makes sense, since alerts reintroduce the problem of distributed consensus. Not a trivial problem to solve without PoW.
Show this thread -
10/ You need to be extremely careful in designing alert systems because alerts themselves can become security holes. E.g. alerts can be abused to spam/DDOS nodes, or to create conflicting views of the network.
Show this thread -
11/ The current system, as imperfect as it is, is not all that bad. Worst comes to worst, users can either: (a) verify the source code themselves & build from source, or (b) choose to ignore upgrades
Show this thread -
12/ Sure, most users don’t know how to read code, but what’s most important is economically important nodes like exchanges & wallets. They can & SHOULD verify every protocol changes. They are incentivized to do so because if things fuck up, they would sustain the most damage.
Show this thread -
13/ As for the rest of the users, yes they will have to trust someone for upgrades. But upgrades don’t happen too frequently to begin with, and the trust issue is another reason to strongly advocate for earlier-rather-later protocol ossification.
Show this thread -
14/ > It seems that pro-PoW people just gave up on analyzing the system, they just say "It works because nobody have broken it yet” Another baseless claim. Bitcoin security is a very active area of research. We've merely scratched the surface. Seehttps://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/1027667455773212673 …
Show this thread -
15/ What PoW proponents are saying is that PoW is the most secure system both in theory & practice, with a 10-year track record. Can PoW fail? Sure. Can PoS succeed where PoW might fail? Absolutely freaking not.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
My whole point is that difference between PoW and PoS is indeed subtle and matter of degrees. While most PoW proponents are like "PoS is obviously broken, PoW is the only way". If we can get to the point where we can talk about trade-offs, I'll be happy with it.
-
I agree with the 1st part, disagree with the 2nd part :-) To me & to many, PoS is indeed obviously broken. It's reinventing a decades-old wheel & a dead end. If PoS were truly viable, we shouldn't have to wait until today to have uncensorable money.
-
I'm not sure how much you know about PoS. There are many different approaches, some quite intricate and subtle, and typically it requires separate issuance phase, which can be done using PoW.
-
PoS protocols all share the same fundamental flaws although the way they choose to obfuscate the problems vary. It boils down to 2 main variants: either checkpointing or outright reliance on chain freeze/social consensus. See my linked tweets.https://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/1021832568314843136?s=21 …
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
@threader_app thanks for compiling this -
Hey, read this thread from
@hugohanoi here:https://threader.app/thread/1044805398488920065 …
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
