Eh, I tried unfortunately and it's not the same. Especially with video processing, my older Macbook Pro heats up very quickly when using Firefox vs Chrome.
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I wouldn't say PoS security has to be driven by the rich, but by whoever is staking, which people could be staking small like lets say 1 ETH total. The security is derived simply by the threat of having your staked ETH (however much) slashed away.
Nothing is slashed if attacker doesn’t publish the alternative chain until they have successful attack.
PoS is absolutely driven by rich and helps rich get richer faster than everybody else. If I get 10% stake - I get 10% of any future issuance, meaning my stake can never go below 10%, so my power in the system never dilutes even though I literally don’t have to do anything anymore. Miners in PoW have to participate in mining and their power can get diluted by anyone by simply getting more hardware online.
There isn’t a cap on validators so you can’t buy up a fixed percentage of the network. More people can always join. You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest(same as mining).
As we reduce the hardware costs and energy usage costs it becomes easier to participate in the network (especially via pools, same as mining but much much cheaper).
Being able to run a validator on a solar powered raspberry pi is a great improvement to making participation in the network accessible.
We should see the exact opposite of what you suggest, anyone who wants to participate not having energy or hardware restrictions should make it less Matthew-effect-like.
PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.
> There isn’t a cap on validators so you can’t buy up a fixed percentage of the network
you can during a pre-sale or pre-mine event
> More people can always join
joininng as validator means convincing another validator to reduce their stake (sell it to you), which is a form of permission.
> You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest
you can't be diluted if you don't sell you stake and continue staking. that's just by definition how PoS works.
> PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.
nope, literally none of it is true.
slashing mechanisms only obfuscate the attack, they don't make it more expensive. in fact they reduce security by virtue of piling more and more rules that require more and more code, which inevitably contains bugs.
threats of supply chain attacks are much less scary than threats of long range attacks from hacked / overtaken private keys of early / current validators.
producing more hardware to counter an attack might be expensive and early iterations of hardware can be inefficient, but at least nobody can stop you from producing it. as i've already explained - if somebody gets a stake in pos system, there is nothing you can do to reduce it.
pos simply doesn't work. it's been known a decade before pow and was just never considered seriously because it's not trustless and permissionless.
I'd further add on to say PoS has the benefit of being able to eliminate bad actors unilaterally. You can't stop anyone from attacking a PoW chain over and over again. Attacking a PoS chain is much riskier as the attacker's stakes are held on chain and are at the mercy of the community who uses the network.
If the community forks to void an attacker's coins, that creates a very bad precedent. It already happened with the dao hack (which was pretty bad to begin with), but if it keeps happening, why would you trust that blockchain.
Why does the attacker need to hold or buy any coins? All the attacker has to do to wreck havoc is prevent quorum from being reached. This can be done by knocking validators offline (which is a slashable penalty), or hacking validators and making them slash themselves, or hacking an exchange or two in order to amass control of 33% or more of the voting power.
If hacking billions of dollars of cryptocurrency was actually easy, plenty of people who are not rich right now would be very very rich. Alternatively, if PoS chains are vulnerable because you can hack exchanges and use their coins to attack, then PoW chains are vulnerable because you can hack exchanges, sell the proceeds to buy ASICs (or just buy the ASIC company), and use those ASICs to attack the PoW network.
Hacking billions of dollars of cryptocurrency is NOT easy, and it gets harder with every passing month, because validators and hodlers have billions of dollars of incentive to protect themselves.
Which is easier to pull off, once you have control of the stolen coins?
* Use them to vote for two chain histories, and thereby get the victims slashed?
* Launder the stolen coins, buy an ASIC fab, churn out ASICs, plug them into the power grid, and use them to continuously and sustainably attack a PoW chain for eternity, all while not getting caught?
In case it's not obvious, the first one can be done the second the compromise takes place. The second one takes years.
> Hacking billions of dollars of cryptocurrency is NOT easy, and it gets harder with every passing month, because validators and hodlers have billions of dollars of incentive to protect themselves.
Why should a hodler bet that over 2/3 of the chain's validators will never, ever be compromised? Money doesn't buy invulnerability, and an attacker only has to succeed once at breaking quorum to break the chain.
> if PoS chains are vulnerable because you can hack exchanges and use their coins to attack, then PoW chains are vulnerable because you can hack exchanges, sell the proceeds to buy ASICs (or just buy the ASIC company), and use those ASICs to attack the PoW network.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but being offline is not a slashable penalty. You would slowly lose ETH and eventually be ejected, but not slashed like a malicious validator would be.
Maybe I'm applying the term "slashing" too broadly. I've historically used it to describe the act of having your tokens taken away for bad behavior (either all at once, or incrementally). Is there a more-specific term for describing the process by which an offline validator loses their ETH over time?
The point is it mitigates the on-chain attack surface which is still prevalent on PoW. Off-chain attacks are still possible for all consensus mechanism.
What on-chain attack surface? The only way to permanently knock a PoW chain offline is to consistently out-mine everyone else. In PoS, once you lose BFT quorum (1/3 of all votes), it's game over.
No distributed system is guaranteed to make forward progress if over 1/3 of its voting nodes is faulty, full stop. Once an adaptive adversary controls more than 1/3 of the voting power, they can forever delay the remaining 2/3 of the voting nodes from reaching consensus. Hell, they'd even be able to delay votes from other nodes to slash their stolen stash.
From this, I can conclude at least one of the following:
Yup and accordingly PoS devs have explicitly stated this incentivizes stakers to be spread out, and not only on infrastructure but software, as there are multiple client implementations.
Here is the tracking by Ernst & Young (court-appointed) providing all the public information about these developments. The latest report on 1 March 2019 mentions nothing about a cracked laptop.
There's nothing wrong with the article. The March Report merely says they were able to recover the cold storage wallets and discovered they were empty; it doesn't go into how they got access to those wallets since that isn't relevant to the report.
Per the company and prior news reporting, those cold storage wallets discussed in the March Report were only stored on the owner's laptop, which was previously inaccessible due to various security mechanisms. (Reports suggested that the laptop was "locked" but did not indicate whether it was boot-locked or locked via the Windows mechanisms.) The fact that they were able to access those wallets means they "cracked" the security measures on that laptop.
>The fact that they were able to access those wallets means they "cracked" the security measures on that laptop
Incorrect. Experts were able to trace funds back to the cold storage wallets addresses using analysis. But the private keys have not been located and no, the laptop has not been "cracked".
Yup: "The Monitor has commenced a preliminary review of the transactional activity of the
Identified Bitcoin Cold Wallets utilizing public blockchain records. This analysis..."
i thought it's interesting how a third party, reddit, is used in such an official way. the other two channels to be posted on are E&Ys website and quadriga website
Firefox's history bar is still superior though