1/ Analogies are tricky. When used appropriately, they reduce complex ideas into familiar concepts so that they are easier to understand. Otoh, bad analogies oversimplify things to the point that they lose all touch with reality & confuse more than help.https://twitter.com/TusharJain_/status/972145928902758400 …
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9/ Once we understand Proof-of-Work, it’s easy to see that what Proof-of-Stake proponents call “finality” or “immutability” is simply an illusion. A PoS ledger is immutable to the degree that some people in the group say that it is immutable.
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10/ In order to maintain the illusion of immutability, a member has to maintain contact with this group at all time. This is apparent in assumption #3 in the original Ouroboros paper, and the "weak subjectivity" concept Vitalik talked about in Casper- which is a BS terminology.
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11/ When a member of such a group gets detached from the group (maybe for reasons beyond his control), he risks breaking this illusion, each & every time.
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12/ When a temporarily detached member joins back in, he has no way to determine which PoS chain is the canonical chain, unless he has a trusted 3rd party. A PoS system cannot be truly permission-less.
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13/ No matter how many layers of obscurity & bullshit you sprinkle on top, PoS can never overcome this fatal weakness.
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14/ IMO the mistake PoS researchers often make, is to look at Bitcoin as a purely distributed system problem. But Bitcoin is more than that.
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15/ Bitcoin is a distributed system *with physical properties*. You can emulate the distributed components (leader election, randomness, hashing, etc.), but you can’t cheaply emulate physical properties.
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16/ Looking at Bitcoin purely through the lens of distributed system research is like a caveman seeing a stethoscope for the first time & conclude it’s useless for fixing people. Or a medieval man seeing a radio & think it’s a worthless piece of brick.
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17/ The old mental models are usually insufficient to fully understand the significance of new technology.
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18/ It’s kinda sad to see so much time & effort being spent on these PoS systems, that are to me an obvious dead-end. So much ado about nothing.
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Isn't this an analogy in and of itself, not reasoning from first principals? Still torn on PoW vs PoS, but treating bitcoin like a distributed system rather than analogous to a physical material seems more logical to me
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IMO not quite. Immutability has never been a concept in distributed systems or computer science. To understand immutability, we have to look at the physical world & the realm of hard physics (first principle).
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Concept of immutability existed in computer science, just in a more narrow sense. But the whole point of first principal reasoning is to build axioms, and its hard for me to see how the abstract concept of scarcity has to be tied to the large activation barrier for atomic fusion
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If you're referring to immutable variables in computer science, then yes it's defined in a very narrow sense & has little application outside of the programming environment. Whereas PoW immutability transcends the digital world.https://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/957092528209117185 …
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Yeah fair enough, I guess the extension of the idea to the extent were discussing fundamentally changes it. I guess I'm still stuck on the fence, I never find the physics analogies to be compelling, but PoW is proven and PoS isn't. Will be interesting to see what happens
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