11/ a- Ledger security is energy. This manifests in electricity cost in PoW mining.
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22/ The idea is that if you misbehave, you pay a heavy penalty. PoS people hope this threat will deter bad actors from attacking. However, this has a fatal flaw.
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23/ Threat of punishment works in real life, because in real life, there is only one version of reality.
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24/ This does not translate to a distributed ledger. Each fork of a ledger is an alternate version of reality.
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25/ Punishing bad actors in your version of reality works only if attackers choose to remain in your reality.
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26/ But they don’t have to. By rewriting history, an attacker can wipe the slate clean. In an attacker’s version of reality, she’s the honest actor.
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27/ PoS can only punish bad actors *after the fact*. By the time you get to punish somebody, it might already be too late.
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28/ This is drastically different from PoW mining. In PoW mining, attackers have to pay upfront cost in order to mine a single block. In order to attack, you have to pay first. Period.
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29/ Whether an attacker has to pay the cost *upfront* or *after-the-fact*, makes a huge difference. The difference is billions of dollars in security.
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30/ PoS might be mildly interesting without being as secure as PoW. But I don’t really see the point. If you compromise on ledger security, you compromise on what makes blockchains special in the first place.
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31/ PoS weaker security is also evidenced by its need to require a lot more “social consensus” (which is just a fancy word for manual human intervention) than PoW.
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32/PoS plans to rely on “making it the user's responsibility to authenticate the latest state out of band. They can do this by asking their friends, block explorers, businesses that they interact with, etc. for a recent block hash in the chain that they see as the canonical one.”
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33/ Vitalik’s beloved defense against this type of weakness is that PoW also require social consensus. Well, DUH. *All man-made systems require some degree of social consensus*, there is no exception.
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34/ The political system, the transportation system, the banking system, the dollar, Bitcoin, etc. All these systems require buy-in from humans collectively as a group, in order for them to work. Man-made systems would break down immediately without social consensus.
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35/ To argue that since PoW needs social consensus, it’s OK for PoS to need social consensus, is a downright stupid argument. What matters is not whether you need social consensus, but *how much*?
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36/ The less social consensus / human intervention a system needs, the stronger & more secure it is. The goal is to move as much as possible to *machine consensus*- to eliminate human biases & errors.
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37/ PoW makes machine-level consensus a trivial problem. When there is a fork, a machine just has to pick the one with the most accumulated PoW. Yes, Bitcoin still needs some social consensus to get the system up & running. But after that, it’s mostly on auto-pilot.
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38/ In contrast, in PoS you would continuously need social consensus in order to resolve forks. The reliance on social consensus is magnitudes bigger than PoW.
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39/ In conclusion, there is just no comparison between PoW & PoS. It’s like a NBA team vs a highschool team.
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40/ PoW is a system designed to withstand the worst, PoS involves obfuscated setups in order to hide its fatal weaknesses. One is a resilient platform for the future, the other is a toy.
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42/ Continued debate with Vitalikhttps://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/952712190808608768 …
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44/ A deep dive into PoW & extending the energy argumenthttps://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/957091071745433601 …
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End of conversation
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