blockchain Proof Of Stake Blockchain (Security and 51% stake attack)

[BotDamian]

Hello everyone,

I was thinking about POS Blockchains because it doesn't waste electricity.

So there is a thing like the 51% stake attack, but what I'm thinking about is how do you even validate this?

 

The person who has the biggest stake mines the block, and the description of POS blockchains says that it's a bad idea to "create a custom block" for example adding 100k coins to your wallet.

 

So how do you ensure that the block is valid and how does the 51% stake attack work? Do you become the blockchain boss and anything you say is instantly valid?

[tikker]

13 hours ago, BotDamian said:

So how do you ensure that the block is valid

By having multiple validators agree on that block. An example from Ethereum's PoS implementation:

Quote

Attestation

If a validator isn't chosen to propose a new shard block, they'll have to attest to another validator's proposal and confirm that everything looks as it should. It's the attestation that is recorded in the beacon chain rather than the transaction itself.

At least 128 validators are required to attest to each shard block – this is known as a "committee."

The committee has a time-frame in which to propose and validate a shard block. This is known as a "slot." Only one valid block is created per slot, and there are 32 slots in an "epoch." After each epoch, the committee is disbanded and reformed with different, random participants. This helps keep shards safe from committees of bad actors.

If you add a bad block, for example giving yourself 100k coins, other honest actors will say you are lying and you will lose what you staked to pay for it.

 

13 hours ago, BotDamian said:

how does the 51% stake attack work?

You "simply" own 51% of all the coins.

13 hours ago, BotDamian said:

Do you become the blockchain boss and anything you say is instantly valid?

No you have a higher chance of getting chosen to mine a block. It's also not in your interest to attack the network, since you own the majority of it. It's like if you were to own 80% of all the gold in the world, at which point you are super rich, and would then start to attack, slander and whatnot the gold market to make its price plummet to pennies. Another solution is to ditch the offendors and start anew:

Quote

Theoretically, a majority collusion of validators may take over a proof of stake chain, and start acting maliciously. However, (i) through clever protocol design, their ability to earn extra profits through such manipulation can be limited as much as possible, and more importantly (ii) if they try to prevent new validators from joining, or execute 51% attacks, then the community can simply coordinate a hard fork and delete the offending validators’ deposits. A successful attack may cost $50 million, but the process of cleaning up the consequences will not be that much more onerous than the geth/parity consensus failure of 2016.11.25. Two days later, the blockchain and community are back on track, attackers are $50 million poorer, and the rest of the community is likely richer since the attack will have caused the value of the token to go up due to the ensuing supply crunch. That’s attack/defense asymmetry for you.
 

The above should not be taken to mean that unscheduled hard forks will become a regular occurrence; if desired, the cost of a single 51% attack on proof of stake can certainly be set to be as high as the cost of a permanent 51% attack on proof of work, and the sheer cost and ineffectiveness of an attack should ensure that it is almost never attempted in practice.

https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-philosophy-506585978d51

 

[Eigenvektor]

8 minutes ago, tikker said:

It's like if you were to own 80% of all the gold in the world, at which point you are super rich, and would then start to attack, slander and whatnot the gold market to make its price plummet to pennies.

Which you then use to buy the rest of the gold for pennies and once you own all of the gold you let the market recover.

[tikker]

10 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Which you then use to buy the rest of the gold for pennies and once you own all of the gold you let the market recover.

That is true, but in the case of crypto you'll be attacking the very system you need to transfer and deal with the asset in the first place. Once such an attack comes out, the network will be deemed untrustable and either, as Vitalik mentioned, the network will be ditched for a new one, effectively erasing your possessions from existence, or it will collapse as everybody loses faith in it.

 

It is a real risk, but with the plethora of whale watchers and the general apprehensiveness about 51% stuff, whether it is hashrate or coins, I think it'll be hard to do a stealth attack.

[BotDamian]

But if someone added 100k coins to his wallet, the coin price should drop because there are 100k more right?
So lets use BTC coin count for example 21mil

21000000 Volume
$3000 / Coin
21mil * 3k = $63Bil

 

if someone owns already 11mil Coins, meaning he has $33bil adding 100k would give an extra of 300.000.000USD to his wallet.
But he could also have doubled his coins 126bil and then made a lower price, for example if a coin is 3k then he could sell for 2.5k and basically sell to everyone, meaning he would sell as much as possible and yes the stock would go down but it actually goes down if the people offer less $ for a coin, but if they don't realize that there is so many coins for sell.

I've seen people buying 130BTC on Binance like where the freak does that money come from. So it is possible to attack the blockchain but on the other side if he starts spilling so many coins the price will drop and drop and drop.

 

Actually writing this made me think, it's like being Elon Musk and then basically destroying his own company... makes no sense but how the life has proven many times, idiots exist.

 

It's basically burning down your own money lol. But what IF the validators combine their powers and just simply validate a block that's invalid and then share the profit?

[tikker]

On 7/17/2021 at 3:59 AM, BotDamian said:

But if someone added 100k coins to his wallet, the coin price should drop because there are 100k more right?

No, because you cannot simply add 100k coins to your wallet, that's not how it works. The transactions won't add up with even a single coin appearing out of nowhere and the (honest) validators will raise a flag saying "Stop! False transaction here!" and reject it. The blockchain has every valid transaction ever stored on it, so everybody can "open" the ledger and verify that a transaction is legit. If you want to falsify a transcation from say a year ago, you'll have to go back a year, fork off the chain there, and then redo everything of that entire year, then catch up with current affairs and then continue to stay ahead of the honest chain / make sure they see you as the honest chain.

 

It's just like you can't now just say you have $100k more in your bank account. Even if it were to appear magically the bank (and probably law enforcement) would have you explain where that money suddenly came from. If you can't give a believable explanation it'll be confiscated and you may face punishment. In the case of crypto, there is no central "bank" or "law enforcement" that checks if your transactions are valid, validators on the network (which can be anyone) check it and report back and lying validators get punished.

 

Furthermore, more coins in wallets means less coins in circulation. If it is wanted the price will go up not down if more coins are bought.

On 7/17/2021 at 3:59 AM, BotDamian said:

if someone owns already 11mil Coins, meaning he has $33bil adding 100k would give an extra of 300.000.000USD to his wallet.
But he could also have doubled his coins 126bil and then made a lower price, for example if a coin is 3k then he could sell for 2.5k and basically sell to everyone, meaning he would sell as much as possible and yes the stock would go down but it actually goes down if the people offer less $ for a coin, but if they don't realize that there is so many coins for sell.

Not sure what you are trying to say here. If something goes for $3000 you'd be quite dumb to sell for $2500. If you want to tank the market, then indeed you just set a market sell order for all your coins and whatever buy order is open will be fulfilled until your given amount of assets are sold. They could then buy back in hoping the price will rise again, but there is no guarantee. That's a gamble you'll take then.

On 7/17/2021 at 3:59 AM, BotDamian said:

I've seen people buying 130BTC on Binance like where the freak does that money come from. So it is possible to attack the blockchain but on the other side if he starts spilling so many coins the price will drop and drop and drop.

Well 130 BTC even at $60000 is still "only" 7.8 million dollars. That isn't really that much money in the grand scheme of things. I also doubt these are individuals like you and me buying, but rather companies or some other form of corporation.

[BotDamian]

But all the examples that I've seen of PoS the blockchain only shows what was transfered where. But if the blockchain generates coins then how would you make that? You create an extra transaction that just sends coins to stake holders after the block was created?

[tikker]

3 hours ago, BotDamian said:

But all the examples that I've seen of PoS the blockchain only shows what was transfered where.

That's what the blockchain is. It's a (typically public) ledger that contains a record of all transcations ever made.

 

3 hours ago, BotDamian said:

But if the blockchain generates coins then how would you make that? You create an extra transaction that just sends coins to stake holders after the block was created?

Basically. In Proof of Work (i.e. mining) style blockchains new coins get created by finding a block. That is what's called the block reward. Currently Bitcoin's block reward is 6.25 BTC and Ethereum's block reward is 2 ETH. In other words, every time a block is mined 6.25 new BTC or 2 new ETH are created by the system and are paid to the miner(s) that found the block (in addition to the transaction fees).

 

In Proof of Stake style blockchains you don't get new coins. To my knowledge Ethereum 2.0 brings new coins into circulation by giving honest validators some interest over their stake.

 

These special transactions are the only ones that are allowed to create coins out of nothing. If anyone else tries and the network is honest enough transactions attempting to create more or spend the same coin multiple times get rejected.

 

The added benefit that Ethereum has is that a ton of coins have already been mined. If you were to start a PoS based one from scratch you could mint a certain number of coins at the start or allow people to simply buy them before the project goes (fully) live. One example of the former is Stellar (XLM). They minted 100 billion coins at the start of the project and that's it. There will never be more:

Quote

The lumen supply

Unlike the tokens of other blockchains, lumens aren’t mined or awarded by the protocol over time. Instead, 100 billion lumens were created when the Stellar network went live, and for the first 5 or so years of Stellar’s existence, the supply of lumens also increased by 1% annually, by design. 

That inflation mechanism was ended by community vote in October 2019. And in November 2019, the overall lumen supply was reduced. Now there are about 50 billion lumens, total, in existence, and no more lumens will be created.

https://www.stellar.org/lumens

 

[Unimportant]

Just some toughts I wanted to add:

1) The entire "proof of work (bitcoin) wastes electricity" thing is overdone, lots of the electricity used by bitcoin mining would've gone to waste anyway because of various reasons. 

2) When comparing the waste of a system, be fair, and compare it to the waste of the competing system. Our current inflation based fiat monetary system encourages massive waste by design.

[Eigenvektor]

4 hours ago, Unimportant said:

1) The entire "proof of work (bitcoin) wastes electricity" thing is overdone, lots of the electricity used by bitcoin mining would've gone to waste anyway because of various reasons. 

The energy used in conjunction with Bitcoin wouldn't have been used if it didn't exist. This is disconnected from energy used by other processes. It makes no sense to say the same energy would've been wasted regardless. The total energy used world wide would've been reduced by whatever has been used by Bitcoin.

 

In any case, "waste" can only be used comparatively. If my GPU requires 100Wh to do a certain amount of work, then that's a simple fact. Calling it a waste only makes sense if you either don't consider whatever I did worthwhile or if you have a GPU that can either do the same amount of work while requiring less energy or do more work while with the same amount of energy.

 

4 hours ago, Unimportant said:

2) When comparing the waste of a system, be fair, and compare it to the waste of the competing system. Our current inflation based fiat monetary system encourages massive waste by design.

What is relevant is energy/transaction (i.e. efficiency), not total energy. Bitcoin uses more energy to achieve less, so it is fair to say it wastes energy compared to other competing systems.

[BotDamian]

5 hours ago, Unimportant said:

Just some toughts I wanted to add:

1) The entire "proof of work (bitcoin) wastes electricity" thing is overdone, lots of the electricity used by bitcoin mining would've gone to waste anyway because of various reasons. 

2) When comparing the waste of a system, be fair, and compare it to the waste of the competing system. Our current inflation based fiat monetary system encourages massive waste by design.

Biggest nonsense I've read in a while.

I assume that you mean that someone would use the GPUs to play games right?

Now a sad thing, Bitcoin miners use ASIC miners that can only be used to hash a specific algorithm, so your whole "it would've gone to waste anyway" is total bs. Because as soon as the complexity increases you can throw all the ASIC miners in the trash bin and get a new one.

 

GPUs in other hand would be sold much less, instead people buying 8 GPUs, they would have bought one GPU running maybe at 100% while gaming for 3h daily instead 8 running at 100% 24/7.

 

People like you are the problem honestly, you barely put any thought into it and spreading fake info and rumors.

 

Bitcoin is trash, it's poop covered in gold.

[Unimportant]

13 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

What is relevant is energy/transaction (i.e. efficiency), not total energy. Bitcoin uses more energy to achieve less, so it is fair to say it wastes energy compared to other competing systems.

 

12 hours ago, BotDamian said:

People like you are the problem honestly, you barely put any thought into it and spreading fake info and rumors.

I'm not going to debate this. Those with an open mind and curiosity can research this on their own and see how far the rabbit hole takes them.

 

I'm talking about much deeper issues then you seem able to grasp. Like how an inflation based monetary system requires endless growth or else it collapses.

So while you're stuck calculating how much watts are spent for a transaction, I'm talking about how a monetary system can shape an entire society towards being either frugal or towards debt based wasteful spending.

 

There's also a couple hundreds of million people on this planet that are financially oppressed and have no access to a banking system that are being uplifted by bitcoin who would like a word with you. But who cares about them, right? 

[Unimportant]

13 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

The total energy used world wide would've been reduced by whatever has been used by Bitcoin.

 

12 hours ago, BotDamian said:

I assume that you mean that someone would use the GPUs to play games right?

No, I'm literally talking about energy that would otherwise been wasted, such as hydro or wind power that is generating more energy then is consumed locally. That water is still going to fall and that wind is still going to blow, weather you use that energy or not. It's those things bitcoin miners flock to because it's cheap energy, and mining can easily be moved towards the energy source.

 

Quote

In the case of green-energy solutions such as wind farms and solar, it is often very difficult to store or even sell that energy if the supply outweighs demand.

...

Simply put, countries that attract cryptocurrency miners with cheap electricity can do so because the supply greatly outstrips the demand. Cryptocurrency mining plays an important role in normalizing international energy markets by consuming power that would otherwise go to waste.

(source: https://thenextweb.com/news/bitcoin-drives-energy-innovation)

[wanderingfool2]

7 hours ago, Unimportant said:

No, I'm literally talking about energy that would otherwise been wasted, such as hydro or wind power that is generating more energy then is consumed locally. That water is still going to fall and that wind is still going to blow, weather you use that energy or not. It's those things bitcoin miners flock to because it's cheap energy, and mining can easily be moved towards the energy source.

Except you have things like Iran which faces blackouts (to the point they had to ban mining).

 

The other problem is that other systems end up having to also buy energy (sometimes for higher rates), during peak times and mining during that time just means you have to buy more energy and more often (because that "wasted" energy was being used as a buffer).  It also doesn't address currently what is happening like in California where their hydro power is at risk due to drought (so more energy usage just exasperates the problem).

 

Ultimately, Proof Of Stake should be more efficient than POW; but POW in terms of bitcoin is just stupid (not all crypto is stupid with POW)...just bitcoin there is a fixed amount of transactions that is ever requiring more computing power...thus it's terribly inefficient for it's task

[tikker]

22 hours ago, BotDamian said:

GPUs in other hand would be sold much less, instead people buying 8 GPUs, they would have bought one GPU running maybe at 100% while gaming for 3h daily instead 8 running at 100% 24/7.

 

People like you are the problem honestly, you barely put any thought into it and spreading fake info and rumors.

 

Bitcoin is trash, it's poop covered in gold.

People spouting this fake info and rumour nonsense are also part of the problem. Yes miners contribute to the shortage, but we have no evidence saying they are the major cause behind it. Bitcoin is hardly trash either. Trash isn't worth $30k per unit. Yes, Bitcoin's (and proof of work's) growing energy consumption is a big problem. It's fine to have an issue with that, many people do including crypto enthusiasts, but if that's your argument then gaming is equally trash.

 

[BotDamian]

12 hours ago, Unimportant said:

 

I'm not going to debate this. Those with an open mind and curiosity can research this on their own and see how far the rabbit hole takes them.

 

I'm talking about much deeper issues then you seem able to grasp. Like how an inflation based monetary system requires endless growth or else it collapses.

So while you're stuck calculating how much watts are spent for a transaction, I'm talking about how a monetary system can shape an entire society towards being either frugal or towards debt based wasteful spending.

 

There's also a couple hundreds of million people on this planet that are financially oppressed and have no access to a banking system that are being uplifted by bitcoin who would like a word with you. But who cares about them, right? 

Bro stay on the topic ok? We are talking about Mining and wasting electricity. PoS can be also used for payments without needing a powerplant of a whole country.

 

I'm sure I can grasp and have grasped way more than you.

 

Or we can move from coal to hydro instead wasting it on crypto.

 

2 hours ago, tikker said:

People spouting this fake info and rumour nonsense are also part of the problem. Yes miners contribute to the shortage, but we have no evidence saying they are the major cause behind it. Bitcoin is hardly trash either. Trash isn't worth $30k per unit. Yes, Bitcoin's (and proof of work's) growing energy consumption is a big problem. It's fine to have an issue with that, many people do including crypto enthusiasts, but if that's your argument then gaming is equally trash.

 

Hehe, if I tell you that this gold covered poop is solid gold would you pay 30k for then to realize it's just poop covered in gold?

 

I guess you don't understand the value of crypto. Bitcoin is a storage of value like gold, but to keep up the "value" while wasting insanely amount of energy is just .

 

If BTC would move to PoS and it would basically kill the energy waste THEN it would be more valuable. Now it's only valuable because kids are Mining it and selling on exchanges. Buy bread with bitcoin and I will believe it's worth something. I'm not salty that I don't own BTC, I have some ETH because I can actually buy stuff with it. Even tho ETH isn't also good but they want to use POS.

 

But when BTC moves to PoS it loses value, because then you don't need hangars full of ASIC miners to earn few BTC. So the price goes down. Would make more sense to make a 1:1 exchange for fiat money. So 1 Euro = 1 coin, no risk of loosing money and people would just buy it same like you pay fees to Paypal and trust them, you would buy coins and use that instead.

[tikker]

41 minutes ago, BotDamian said:

Or we can move from coal to hydro instead wasting it on crypto

Because mining crypto is what stops the entire world from moving to renewables.

  

41 minutes ago, BotDamian said:

I'm sure I can grasp and have grasped way more than you.

I guess you don't understand the value of crypto. Bitcoin is a storage of value like gold, but to keep up the "value" while wasting insanely amount of energy is just

Right, I don't understand the value of something I'm interested and invested in. Arrogant much? You accuse us of not knowing what we are talking about yet you are the one asking for explanations and coming up with just creating thousands of coins out of nowhere. I'm getting the feeling you don't understand what you are dealing wtih. Bitcoin is also not a store of value. No crypto is. It's a highly volatile speculative asset. There is no guarantee it's worth the same tomorrow. There's a reason why especially for crypto people warn you to not invest what you can't afford to lose.

41 minutes ago, BotDamian said:

If BTC would move to PoS and it would basically kill the energy waste THEN it would be more valuable. Now it's only valuable because kids are Mining it and selling on exchanges. Buy bread with bitcoin and I will believe it's worth something. I'm not salty that I don't own BTC, I have some ETH because I can actually buy stuff with it. Even tho ETH isn't also good but they want to use POS.

Proof of work is such an integral and fundamental part of Bitcoin, I think it's safe to say Bitcoin will never move to PoS. I can still spend it though. A national delivery service here accepts, so your food checkbox is ticked. PC parts I can also buy with a variety of crypto already. Bitcoin's value comes from being first (for all intent and purpose) and rare.

41 minutes ago, BotDamian said:

Would make more sense to make a 1:1 exchange for fiat money. So 1 Euro = 1 coin, no risk of loosing money and people would just buy it same like you pay fees to Paypal and trust them, you would buy coins and use that instead.

Those have existed for a long time already and are called stablecoins. They are made to be track the dollar. Their only purpose is to have a fiat equivalent on-hand in crypto and to (temporarily) store earnings. They make no sense to use in our daily lives instead of your normal fiat currency. Moreover since they live on the blockchains as tokens you'll be paying in e.g. BTC or ETH to transfer your fiat-equivalent, making it make even less sense than just using that fiat directly. Various governments are investigating their respective digital currencies which will probably end up being this. A German bank even launched a Euro stablecoin on the Stellar network last year. If you are after payments then use a coin and network that was designed to be used for payments such as Nano and Stellar.

[Unimportant]

9 hours ago, BotDamian said:

I'm sure I can grasp and have grasped way more than you.

Clearly you haven't. Your refusal or inability to think outside the box is obvious, you're solely focused on the energy usage by the mining, any and all side-effects be damned.

 

I know people in Turkey who recently bought a new car. Not because the old one was worn or defective, heck, it wasn't even that old. But because of the 10%+ inflation rate over there you need to spend your money on something, anything, because if you hang on for it for a while it's value is gone...

 

So their decision to save (and don't think saving money, but think saving what that money represents: commodities, labour, energy) is diverted into wasteful spending, replacing a perfectly fine car, because of monetary concerns.

 

This is happening all over the world, to a more or lesser degree, negative real interest rates are practically everywhere, discouraging savings and encouraging wasteful spending, often even on credit.

 

This is wasteful by definition because, normally, one buys what one needs and wants first and then saves what is left over. So if people are pushed towards spending over saving they're literally buying stuff they neither really want nor need.

 

This is a fundamental requirement of a fiat monetary system: endless growth (only nominal if need be) is required to service the debts, contraction cannot be allowed to happen. If humanity suddenly would be happy with only consuming half of what it is consuming now (which would be awesome for the environment) governments and central bankers would be tripping over each other with new programs to stoke spending and inflation, because any nominal contraction can not be allowed.

 

The waste caused by this dwarfs whatever mining uses. Bitcoin is a attempt at fixing this. Weather it'll work or not, or even survive no one knows, but we should give it a chance. It's only 10 years old and exceeded the wildest expectations.

 

Then I'm not even talking about the energy usage of millions of bankers around the world in their skyscrapers, offices, and everything around it. Again, because the perverse effects of a fiat money system throughout an entire economy dwarf narrow minded thinking like this.

 

You nor anyone else can know what is superior : PoW or PoS, that is for the market and participants to decide. What if there is some fatal flaw or side effect to PoS that has not come to light yet?

 

I hope that I've peaked some of the more open minded and curious people's interest enough with this to go do their own research. That's all I can hope for so I won't respond here any further. There's no hope for those with a closed mind anyway.

[BotDamian]

Very interesting how hard you're trying to convince people to invest their savings into Bitcoin. You keep saying I'm close minded, I don't think we know each other so keep your thoughts to my personality to yourself please.

 

I'm more open minded than you ever will be, I'm not trying to convince people to think the same way I do, but you do exactly that. Everyone who doesn't share the same thought as you is close minded.

 

Crypto is amazing, that's a fact, wasting the power equivalent to a small country to run crypto is not amazing, it's awful. I live in the EU and we actually are saving electricity compared to other countries, we are efficient.

 

I invested in ETH because it's actually valuable in my eyes, you can buy web3 hosting services, domains, NTFs, in-game items and more. People like you probably invested money into BTC and are trying now to convince everyone that BTC is the real thing and it's amazing. It has flaws like everything.

 

PoW needs 51% hash power to be attacked, then you mine your own blocks.

 

PoS needs 51% but that doesn't mean that your block will be validated and you might lose your whole stake.

[tikker]

Saying

On 7/26/2021 at 6:25 AM, BotDamian said:

You keep saying I'm close minded, I don't think we know each other so keep your thoughts to my personality to yourself please.

and then proceed to say

On 7/26/2021 at 6:25 AM, BotDamian said:

I'm more open minded than you ever will be, I'm not trying to convince people to think the same way I do, but you do exactly that. Everyone who doesn't share the same thought as you is close minded.

Is a bit going against your own word no?

 

In any case, I don't really see anyone in this thread trying to convince others to invest in Bitcoin. It's just a discussion about energy usage and PoW vs PoS.

On 7/26/2021 at 6:25 AM, BotDamian said:

Crypto is amazing, that's a fact, wasting the power equivalent to a small country to run crypto is not amazing, it's awful. I live in the EU and we actually are saving electricity compared to other countries, we are efficient.

Nobody is argueing the massive energy usage is a good thing. Saving electricity compared to other countries is kind of an empty statement. What does "saving energy" even mean.

On 7/26/2021 at 6:25 AM, BotDamian said:

I invested in ETH because it's actually valuable in my eyes, you can buy web3 hosting services, domains, NTFs, in-game items and more. People like you probably invested money into BTC and are trying now to convince everyone that BTC is the real thing and it's amazing. It has flaws like everything.

"People like you have probably invested money into ETH and are trying now to convince everyone that ETH is the real thing and it's amazing. It has flaws like everything."

I can turn the same argument against you. ETH is not perfect. It's nice, can do a bunch of things, but it has its own flaws. It's still slow compared to the faster networks out there and it's still expensive as fuck to do anything on the network. It costs like €5 just to transfer funds. You'll be easily paying dozens of euros doing anything else, and easily €100+ if you want to do things like NFTs.

 

Bitcoin has investment value. You can agree or disagree with what it is and does, but denying its (potential) value is unwise.

On 7/26/2021 at 6:25 AM, BotDamian said:

PoW needs 51% hash power to be attacked, then you mine your own blocks.
 

PoS needs 51% but that doesn't mean that your block will be validated and you might lose your whole stake.

Not sure what you try to say here, these are just arbitrary statments. The entire point of a 51% attack so to avoid getting caught when frauding.

 

An attack on PoS is just as bad as one on PoW. For PoW the idea is that it's too expensive to maintain one, which it currently is. For PoS the idea is that it's too expensive and nonsensical to obtain more than half of the supply. You are attacking your own investment in the case of PoS as buying up that much crypto will make it more expensive, so in the end you effectively spend much more than 51% to obtain 51%. In fact you can mess with the network at only 33% already.

 

A 51% attack realistically won't happen for Bitcoin or Ethereum anymore. Look at e.g. https://www.crypto51.app/ to see estimates of what a 51% attack would cost: millions per hour for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

On 7/25/2021 at 8:33 AM, Unimportant said:

You nor anyone else can know what is superior : PoW or PoS, that is for the market and participants to decide. What if there is some fatal flaw or side effect to PoS that has not come to light yet?

I don't think there is any fatal flaw to PoS, but it is certainly much harder to implement properly.

[BotDamian]

23 hours ago, tikker said:

Saying

and then proceed to say

Is a bit going against your own word no?

No it's not, the difference is, that I'm not trying to defend crypto and making excuses why it's a waste of energy. The reason why I call YOU close minded is not because we don't share the same opinion or you like BTC and I don't. It's because you're making arguments that it's ok to waste such amount of energy that crypto does.

Because something that uses more energy than a whole country and takes 5bucks and few seconds to make one simple transaction, is just a waste. But this isn't strictly a Bitcoin problem but a PoW problem.

 

  

23 hours ago, tikker said:

Nobody is argueing the massive energy usage is a good thing. Saving electricity compared to other countries is kind of an empty statement. What does "saving energy" even mean.

If you don't understand "saving" then for you this word doesn't exist, you can replace it with "storing" or "not wasting".

 

  

23 hours ago, tikker said:

"People like you have probably invested money into ETH and are trying now to convince everyone that ETH is the real thing and it's amazing. It has flaws like everything."

I can turn the same argument against you. ETH is not perfect. It's nice, can do a bunch of things, but it has its own flaws. It's still slow compared to the faster networks out there and it's still expensive as fuck to do anything on the network. It costs like €5 just to transfer funds. You'll be easily paying dozens of euros doing anything else, and easily €100+ if you want to do things like NFTs.

Don't invest in ETH, there you go. I actually use ETH to pay for things and not to invest. https://fleek.co for example.

 

  

23 hours ago, tikker said:

I don't think there is any fatal flaw to PoS, but it is certainly much harder to implement properly.

Yes and no, BTC is basically the "brute force" of crypto, very raw, not much thought put into it. Just an example of a good blockchain (not that i support everything they do) Filecoin or Graph. Filecoin has it's own flaws being the people running it and Graph is just cool. A miner can't validate his own stuff, others do that. And Graph is PoS I guess.

[tikker]

40 minutes ago, BotDamian said:

If you don't understand "saving" then for you this word doesn't exist, you can replace it with "storing" or "not wasting".

Your horse is getting a little high. I know what saving means. What I'm saying is your statment of "we are saving energy compared to other countries" is a meaningless statement. You can say Botswana uses less energy than Russia. That doesn't make Botswana better or more efficient if you don't consider how that energy is produced and Russia being massively bigger. If you say your country's energy is 75% from renewable sources then that is saying something.

43 minutes ago, BotDamian said:

Don't invest in ETH, there you go. I actually use ETH to pay for things and not to invest. https://fleek.co for example.

Not my point. I was pointing out that you were sounding exactly like what you were accusing the other person of. I don't care what others do with their ETH. Use it, stake it, invest in it; do what serves you best. ETH has also not been a poor investment in the slightest. I'm just showing that this elitist behaviour gets you nowhere as it's not anymore "the real thing" than that Bitcoin is.

48 minutes ago, BotDamian said:

Yes and no, BTC is basically the "brute force" of crypto, very raw, not much thought put into it.

A ton of thought has been put into it. It is a brute force method, that does not mean there is no thought behind it. You are looking at this through rose-tinted hindsight glasses, trying to apply knowledge abaout blockchain technology we have gathered over the years in the context of its conception where we knew nothing. There are good reasons why we have started with proof of work. It's a good concept and it's much easier to implement than proof of stake. Look at Ethereum's attempts to see how "easy" it is to come up with something else or to switch.

[wanderingfool2]

On 7/27/2021 at 2:23 AM, tikker said:

A 51% attack realistically won't happen for Bitcoin or Ethereum anymore. Look at e.g. https://www.crypto51.app/ to see estimates of what a 51% attack would cost: millions per hour for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

That is true, as long as no one figures out a way to break sha256...if that happens then a 51% attack could be feasible (but unlikely to be used as it's more profitable to hide the knowledge and use it to gain bitcoin at a steady interval...so you can gain millions on millions with virtually no resources)

[tikker]

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

That is true, as long as no one figures out a way to break sha256...if that happens then a 51% attack could be feasible (but unlikely to be used as it's more profitable to hide the knowledge and use it to gain bitcoin at a steady interval...so you can gain millions on millions with virtually no resources)

The funny thing is that from a crypto perspective this would fall in the same nonsensical category as a 51% attack on a PoS blockchain. If you want to get rich then as you say you'll keep it quiet as otherwise you attack your own investment. I would also imaginge this to be caught quickly if you don't pace yourself, because if you go too big the hashrate would then increase massively and suddenly you'd be the only one still mining (profitably). That would raise some eyebrows.

[wanderingfool2]

7 hours ago, tikker said:

The funny thing is that from a crypto perspective this would fall in the same nonsensical category as a 51% attack on a PoS blockchain. If you want to get rich then as you say you'll keep it quiet as otherwise you attack your own investment. I would also imaginge this to be caught quickly if you don't pace yourself, because if you go too big the hashrate would then increase massively and suddenly you'd be the only one still mining (profitably). That would raise some eyebrows.

Yes, in general when crypto became a thing the incentive to actually perform a 51% attack on larger currencies dropped (it could still make sense to do a 51% on an up-and-coming crypto that isn't valued as much if you were wanting to have a different one gain a foothold...but overall I think it would be less likely).

 

My wording was poor last night, but yes what you said was similar to my though processes.  There is little incentive to attack like this.  If someone were to figure out sha256 even solving a few blocks a day wouldn't bring up too much suspicion (and you wouldn't solve it instantly, you would solve it at roughly the 5 min mark)...one could probably net over a million dollars a day without raising suspicion.