1/ What is handwaving & sloppy thinking is ignoring subtle but important differences between PoW & PoS. Such as the *degree of social consensus required* - in terms of both magnitude & frequency.https://twitter.com/killerstorm/status/1044522585663447040 …
2/ …or relative security strength under sync & semi-sync settings.https://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/1040663728042082304 …
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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”.
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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.
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5/ Many PoW proponents are self-critical of PoW, but also realize that PoW is the best we’ve got.
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6/ RE: upgrade process, is there room for improvement? Probably. Is some sort of an alert system for upgrades worthwhile? Maybe. Maybe not.
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7/ The idea of an alert system isn’t new. Satoshi himself wrote about the possibility of “fraud proofs” in the white paper.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 …
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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.
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End of conversation
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