I know that Proof of Stake is a thing that people are touting to replace Proof of Work, but doesn't that just end up being the already rich making the rules? With Proof of Work you "trust" the people that have wasted the resources to win the hash cracking lottery, but with Proof of Stake you "trust" the people that already have a lot of the coin in question right? The only aspect of it that seems to be an improvement is that at least people aren't hoarding hardware and wasting electricity on this nonsense, but there must be plenty of people just salivating at the chance to abuse a Proof of Stake system in ways I can't think of right now but assuredly exist and haven't been accounted for.
Yes, Proof of Stake is just the vested people pulling up the ladder on everyone else. It's terrible in every way except not as wasteful for the sake of waste.
Except, NFTs aren't mined. So proof of work or proof of stake, they still cost the same amount of energy to process, so long as the chains are the same length/encryption standard.
Right? so what different does it really make?
Well Proof of Stake systems do not require the same amount of processing power as Proof of Work, so a transaction on a Proof of Stake system requires far less electricity and other resources when compared to Proof of Work. The NFTs themselves are not mined, but they do require a transaction to process to be updated just like anything else on a blockchain. At least by my understanding, I know there are some shenanigans with exchanges holding coins in their own wallets and keeping a record of who is supposed to "own" any given coin or fractional coin, which removes the need for a transaction to do anything with your crypto but whoops, now you're trusting a single repository to not screw you.
Are proof of stake transactions less expensive, or just the coin creation? My understanding is the latter.
Transactions happen as part of the coin creation process don't they? Like a coin is minted whenever a block gets added (though this isn't required). I don't actually know how (or if) Proof of Stake adds coins, but I would guess it is similar in that it happens when a block gets added to the chain.
Duh, so I thought you werw purposing PoS blockchain as an alternative to PoW blockchains for implementing NFTs.
Yeah. PoS blockchain are a simple scam where rich early adopters just get richer, without having to do anything. They're less bad for the environment, and don't hurt the GPU market.
I mean, we all dislike crypto currencies, but there is some weird info flying around here.
The whole basis of how crypto works (PoS or PoW) is essentially a coordination problem. Suppose we all agree on how to authenticate real transaction requests (using whatever security measures you want). When it comes time to approve the next block in the ledger, it is trivially easy for everyone doing the authenticating to know what the "true", non cheating, block should be, but there are infinitely (ok not infinite but whatever) different ways to lie.
So the central idea is that you get a bunch of people to put up some collateral (either in terms of some money, aka PoS, or energy spent, aka PoW), and then you ask them all what the next ledger entry should be. Whichever answer has more than 50% agreement, is the official next ledger, and everyone that put up that response gets paid some small amount. Anyone who lied (put up something other than the majority version) gets nothing and loses their collateral. Because coordination is hard to impossible, it's very unlikely that you could get 50% of the people authenticating to lie in the exact same way, the only real option for people is to tell the truth. The more authenticators there are, the harder it is to coordinate, the more secure your block chain is. Too few, and it may be possible to coordinate a 51% attack (you get 51% of all authenticators to lie in the exact same way).
There is no reason why PoS then would have to lead to the rich getting richer. Make the collateral a small amount, and choose the authenticators who get paid at random, and there would be no reason to think that the generated money would favor those with a lot of coins over those with not very many (this is I believe how ethereum works). Obviously you have to be rich enough to have a computer (or many computers) doing random crypto work instead of something useful, but this is no different than PoW. And just like PoW, it is subject to a 51% attack (suppose a rich person bought a shit ton of coins, pretended each small amount was actually a different person, then signed up to be a shit ton of authenticators), but that is again the same risk as PoW.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
I don't know why you need a distributed ledger for NFTs when the original creators are an obvious choice for an authority on which hosted URL is "the original"
I don't know why you need a distributed ledger for NFTs when the original creators are an obvious choice for an authority on which hosted URL is "the original"
I mean, it's not exactly straight forward. Because you don't want each artist creating their own versions of NFTs, making the buyers have to jump through different hoops every time they want to buy one. And it's probably not great to have some sort of market place (a la amazon), where the marketplace creates the NFTs and tries to screw artists over anyway they can. But it definitely feels like there is probably a better way to host them than using cryptocurrency (which is basically how I feel about every application of cryptocurrency).
Jebus314 on
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
There is no reason why PoS then would have to lead to the rich getting richer. Make the collateral a small amount, and choose the authenticators who get paid at random, and there would be no reason to think that the generated money would favor those with a lot of coins over those with not very many
Unless the random was not evenly distributed it would indeed do that Because people with larger stakes can more easily hold onto larger portions of a stake as a percentage.
Its not dissimilar to any investment. Those who can invest a larger portion of their income/wealth will become more wealthy.
There is no reason why PoS then would have to lead to the rich getting richer. Make the collateral a small amount, and choose the authenticators who get paid at random, and there would be no reason to think that the generated money would favor those with a lot of coins over those with not very many
Unless the random was not evenly distributed it would indeed do that Because people with larger stakes can more easily hold onto larger portions of a stake as a percentage.
Its not dissimilar to any investment. Those who can invest a larger portion of their income/wealth will become more wealthy.
I'm a little confused by what you mean when you say the random is not evenly distributed. Of course it is possible to distribute PoS payouts based on percentage of stake held, but that would be silly (and from what I googled in 30 seconds not how ethereum works). The better way would be to require a small collateral (that non rich people could afford), and make payouts completely random. So the only way to cheat the system for rich people, is to create a bunch of authenticator accounts to try and increase their odds. Which is of course possible (although hopefully there is something in the setup to try and prevent this), but doesn't really seem materially different than PoW, in that the real limitation to how much you can get paid is how many different computers you can get to run the code.
Jebus314 on
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
I don't know why you need a distributed ledger for NFTs when the original creators are an obvious choice for an authority on which hosted URL is "the original"
I mean, it's not exactly straight forward. Because you don't want each artist creating their own versions of NFTs, making the buyers have to jump through different hoops every time they want to buy one. And it's probably not great to have some sort of market place (a la amazon), where the marketplace creates the NFTs and tries to screw artists over anyway they can. But it definitely feels like there is probably a better way to host them than using cryptocurrency (which is basically how I feel about every application of cryptocurrency).
I'm saying instead of a distributed ledger the artist has a ledger that can be checked against.
Since all an NFT is is a unique high hash URL that is on the blockchain.
Analysts Suggest 'Silent Crash' May Be Underway As NFT Prices Floors Plummet
What Happened: The hype surrounding the NFT market in February was unparalleled, with the growing interest in the space even out shadowing Bitcoin’s rise above $60,000.
However, that hype seems to be dying out as recent data indicates that the market has been in a continuous downtrend over the past month.
According to NFT marketplace data monitor NonFungible.com, the average daily value of NFTs fell from $19 million to $3 million on Mar 25 – declining by over 85% on average.
Why It Matters: Some market proponents have pointed out that, unlike other markets, the NFT space is highly illiquid in nature, making an impending crash much more difficult to predict.
In liquid markets, sellers adjust prices in real-time, whereas in the NFT space, it may take them weeks or months to realize that there are no buyers for their unique non-fungible collectibles. As a result, markets are much less reactive, and the phenomenon prompted analysts from Egirl capital to dub NFT price corrections as a “silent crash.”
One NFT collector who charted the decline in Top Shot sales since the beginning of the year said, “There’s less volume on the $500-$2000 moments than there was in Jan, which is crazy, considering the user base is probably 5-10x. Gives you an idea of the type of “collector” currently on the site.”
According to him, the majority of users who joined around Feb 21 were trying to “catch a ride on the money train” and couldn’t hold their NFTs for more than a few days without selling.
I don't know why you need a distributed ledger for NFTs when the original creators are an obvious choice for an authority on which hosted URL is "the original"
I mean, it's not exactly straight forward. Because you don't want each artist creating their own versions of NFTs, making the buyers have to jump through different hoops every time they want to buy one. And it's probably not great to have some sort of market place (a la amazon), where the marketplace creates the NFTs and tries to screw artists over anyway they can. But it definitely feels like there is probably a better way to host them than using cryptocurrency (which is basically how I feel about every application of cryptocurrency).
I'm saying instead of a distributed ledger the artist has a ledger that can be checked against.
Since all an NFT is is a unique high hash URL that is on the blockchain.
But if you're doing it all from a central authority anyway, what do you need to put it on the blockchain for?
There is no reason why PoS then would have to lead to the rich getting richer. Make the collateral a small amount, and choose the authenticators who get paid at random, and there would be no reason to think that the generated money would favor those with a lot of coins over those with not very many
Unless the random was not evenly distributed it would indeed do that Because people with larger stakes can more easily hold onto larger portions of a stake as a percentage.
Its not dissimilar to any investment. Those who can invest a larger portion of their income/wealth will become more wealthy.
I'm a little confused by what you mean when you say the random is not evenly distributed. Of course it is possible to distribute PoS payouts based on percentage of stake held, but that would be silly (and from what I googled in 30 seconds not how ethereum works). The better way would be to require a small collateral (that non rich people could afford), and make payouts completely random. So the only way to cheat the system for rich people, is to create a bunch of authenticator accounts to try and increase their odds. Which is of course possible (although hopefully there is something in the setup to try and prevent this), but doesn't really seem materially different than PoW, in that the real limitation to how much you can get paid is how many different computers you can get to run the code.
Ok so let’s say I have 20% of the etherium and the rest of the world has 80% in infinitesimal amounts. The 80% are spending what they have more or less and I only spend 1%. If the distribution is random and any one Coin is chosen then there is a 20% chance I get it and a 80% chance the rest gets it. But over the course of pulls I get 20% of pulls because I have 20% of coins.
Because the 80% spend their money and I save my 20% will grow as a result of this “totally random” structure. And everyone else’s will not. And as you accumulate coins the probability that you get more is increased.
Now sure if no one is spending etherium then the distribution stays the same... but that isn’t likely.
Am I supposed to be shocked that the majority of users that joined around Feb 21 were trying to get rich quick? The only surprising thing is that it has been so blatantly exposed so quickly.
There is no reason why PoS then would have to lead to the rich getting richer. Make the collateral a small amount, and choose the authenticators who get paid at random, and there would be no reason to think that the generated money would favor those with a lot of coins over those with not very many
Unless the random was not evenly distributed it would indeed do that Because people with larger stakes can more easily hold onto larger portions of a stake as a percentage.
Its not dissimilar to any investment. Those who can invest a larger portion of their income/wealth will become more wealthy.
I'm a little confused by what you mean when you say the random is not evenly distributed. Of course it is possible to distribute PoS payouts based on percentage of stake held, but that would be silly (and from what I googled in 30 seconds not how ethereum works). The better way would be to require a small collateral (that non rich people could afford), and make payouts completely random. So the only way to cheat the system for rich people, is to create a bunch of authenticator accounts to try and increase their odds. Which is of course possible (although hopefully there is something in the setup to try and prevent this), but doesn't really seem materially different than PoW, in that the real limitation to how much you can get paid is how many different computers you can get to run the code.
Ok so let’s say I have 20% of the etherium and the rest of the world has 80% in infinitesimal amounts. The 80% are spending what they have more or less and I only spend 1%. If the distribution is random and any one Coin is chosen then there is a 20% chance I get it and a 80% chance the rest gets it. But over the course of pulls I get 20% of pulls because I have 20% of coins.
Because the 80% spend their money and I save my 20% will grow as a result of this “totally random” structure. And everyone else’s will not. And as you accumulate coins the probability that you get more is increased.
Now sure if no one is spending etherium then the distribution stays the same... but that isn’t likely.
I don’t think that’s how PoS works. They don’t give the newly minted coins to anyone who owns the currency.
You have to signup to be an authenticator. which means your computer is ready at anytime to examine transaction requests, check to see if they are legitimate, then post what you think the updated ledger would be. As part of that process you put up collateral in the form of some of the currency. If your ledger update agrees with everyone else’s you get put into a random pool to get paid, if your ledger doesn’t agree you lose your collateral.
So the theoretical rich person who owns 20%, gets no benefit from their wealth (in terms of the PoS making them richer). They can signup to be an authenticator, but that pays them the same as anyone else. They could lie and signup to be thousands of authenticators, but that’s not really any different than someone setting up a huge amount of mining computers for PoW.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
The bigger issue with 51% attacks is that if the system is poorly designed, it allows the attacker to rewrite history, making it so that tranactions that might have resulted in the exchange of real goods or services never actually happened. For PoW systems that involves holding back a stack of parallel transactions longer than the one that's being generated by the entire rest of the network, then eventually swooping in and claiming that since their parallel transaction chain is longer it must be the canonical one. For PoS systems, it involves just arbitrarily voting in a set of transactions that don't match the previously canonical ones.
It's easy enough to use sanity checks to detect those sorts of attacks, but actually dealing with them requires some sort of centralized action. If it's left up to the distributed network, the attacker can just force the decision in favor of themselves.
There is no reason why PoS then would have to lead to the rich getting richer. Make the collateral a small amount, and choose the authenticators who get paid at random, and there would be no reason to think that the generated money would favor those with a lot of coins over those with not very many
Unless the random was not evenly distributed it would indeed do that Because people with larger stakes can more easily hold onto larger portions of a stake as a percentage.
Its not dissimilar to any investment. Those who can invest a larger portion of their income/wealth will become more wealthy.
I'm a little confused by what you mean when you say the random is not evenly distributed. Of course it is possible to distribute PoS payouts based on percentage of stake held, but that would be silly (and from what I googled in 30 seconds not how ethereum works). The better way would be to require a small collateral (that non rich people could afford), and make payouts completely random. So the only way to cheat the system for rich people, is to create a bunch of authenticator accounts to try and increase their odds. Which is of course possible (although hopefully there is something in the setup to try and prevent this), but doesn't really seem materially different than PoW, in that the real limitation to how much you can get paid is how many different computers you can get to run the code.
Ok so let’s say I have 20% of the etherium and the rest of the world has 80% in infinitesimal amounts. The 80% are spending what they have more or less and I only spend 1%. If the distribution is random and any one Coin is chosen then there is a 20% chance I get it and a 80% chance the rest gets it. But over the course of pulls I get 20% of pulls because I have 20% of coins.
Because the 80% spend their money and I save my 20% will grow as a result of this “totally random” structure. And everyone else’s will not. And as you accumulate coins the probability that you get more is increased.
Now sure if no one is spending etherium then the distribution stays the same... but that isn’t likely.
I don’t think that’s how PoS works. They don’t give the newly minted coins to anyone who owns the currency.
You have to signup to be an authenticator. which means your computer is ready at anytime to examine transaction requests, check to see if they are legitimate, then post what you think the updated ledger would be. As part of that process you put up collateral in the form of some of the currency. If your ledger update agrees with everyone else’s you get put into a random pool to get paid, if your ledger doesn’t agree you lose your collateral.
So the theoretical rich person who owns 20%, gets no benefit from their wealth (in terms of the PoS making them richer). They can signup to be an authenticator, but that pays them the same as anyone else. They could lie and signup to be thousands of authenticators, but that’s not really any different than someone setting up a huge amount of mining computers for PoW.
You stake a fixed amount and one stake is chosen randomly to get paid. So you can just launch a million different stakes and be a million times more likely than any other individual to get paid
The bigger issue with 51% attacks is that if the system is poorly designed, it allows the attacker to rewrite history, making it so that tranactions that might have resulted in the exchange of real goods or services never actually happened. For PoW systems that involves holding back a stack of parallel transactions longer than the one that's being generated by the entire rest of the network, then eventually swooping in and claiming that since their parallel transaction chain is longer it must be the canonical one. For PoS systems, it involves just arbitrarily voting in a set of transactions that don't match the previously canonical ones.
It's easy enough to use sanity checks to detect those sorts of attacks, but actually dealing with them requires some sort of centralized action. If it's left up to the distributed network, the attacker can just force the decision in favor of themselves.
Only if you can convince 51% of all miners/authenticators to tell the exact same lie. Once you have thousands of people signed up in those positions, it just becomes very unlikely that you could get 51% of them to tell the same lie. And if you try and fail you lose your collateral or all the time/energy spent on solving the proof of work, only to not get anything because you didn’t have enough people telling the same lie.
If it was easy to break they wouldn’t have lasted this long. There are a lot of issues, but fundamentally being broken (easy to manipulate), isn’t one of them.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Am I supposed to be shocked that the majority of users that joined around Feb 21 were trying to get rich quick? The only surprising thing is that it has been so blatantly exposed so quickly.
I'm not super surprised. Bitcoin and the other cryptos are crap, but at least they can, in theory, be exchanged for goods and services. An NFT is nothing more than a receipt for something you didn't have to pay for in the first place. In another few years I wouldn't be shocked if it somehow ends up in the mainstream, but at the moment it's well past the line of what the general public will accept as being worth money.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Am I supposed to be shocked that the majority of users that joined around Feb 21 were trying to get rich quick? The only surprising thing is that it has been so blatantly exposed so quickly.
I'm not super surprised. Bitcoin and the other cryptos are crap, but at least they can, in theory, be exchanged for goods and services. An NFT is nothing more than a receipt for something you didn't have to pay for in the first place. In another few years I wouldn't be shocked if it somehow ends up in the mainstream, but at the moment it's well past the line of what the general public will accept as being worth money.
I mean an NFT is just a certificate of authenticity, but without any real authority to back it up and apparently no incentive for them to even continue existing as at least some already point to invalid addresses. I completely understand digital artists being all for a way to make money from their work, but this ain't it.
NFT's boil down to a need to be unique in a world where everyone is hashing the same memes. I'd use the phrase "snowflake" if that term hadn't been thoroughly ruined by the right.
"I want bragging rights over something that no one else can have." That's all it is. It doesn't matter how useless that thing actually is, the only thing that matters is that it's yours and yours alone.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Am I supposed to be shocked that the majority of users that joined around Feb 21 were trying to get rich quick? The only surprising thing is that it has been so blatantly exposed so quickly.
I'm not super surprised. Bitcoin and the other cryptos are crap, but at least they can, in theory, be exchanged for goods and services. An NFT is nothing more than a receipt for something you didn't have to pay for in the first place. In another few years I wouldn't be shocked if it somehow ends up in the mainstream, but at the moment it's well past the line of what the general public will accept as being worth money.
I mean an NFT is just a certificate of authenticity, but without any real authority to back it up and apparently no incentive for them to even continue existing as at least some already point to invalid addresses. I completely understand digital artists being all for a way to make money from their work, but this ain't it.
Authenticity of what though? I've only seen the tech used for digital items, where authenticity starts to fall apart because the ability to copy/paste really mucks with being able to call something 'the original' or whatever.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
The bigger issue with 51% attacks is that if the system is poorly designed, it allows the attacker to rewrite history, making it so that tranactions that might have resulted in the exchange of real goods or services never actually happened. For PoW systems that involves holding back a stack of parallel transactions longer than the one that's being generated by the entire rest of the network, then eventually swooping in and claiming that since their parallel transaction chain is longer it must be the canonical one. For PoS systems, it involves just arbitrarily voting in a set of transactions that don't match the previously canonical ones.
It's easy enough to use sanity checks to detect those sorts of attacks, but actually dealing with them requires some sort of centralized action. If it's left up to the distributed network, the attacker can just force the decision in favor of themselves.
Only if you can convince 51% of all miners/authenticators to tell the exact same lie. Once you have thousands of people signed up in those positions, it just becomes very unlikely that you could get 51% of them to tell the same lie. And if you try and fail you lose your collateral or all the time/energy spent on solving the proof of work, only to not get anything because you didn’t have enough people telling the same lie.
If it was easy to break they wouldn’t have lasted this long. There are a lot of issues, but fundamentally being broken (easy to manipulate), isn’t one of them.
Taking a vote of all the miners/authenticators requires a central authority. Which means it's pointless for the purposes of maintaining a ledger, because the central authority might as well just be the one releasing the canonical chain updates.
You can't have a vote if nobody knows how many people are voting, nobody's in charge of finding out, and anybody can pretend to be any number of people.
Proof of Work has lasted this long because a 51% attack requires you to have, you know, 51% of the processing power, so that you can (eventually) spin up a longer, fake chain that you can use to invalidate the shorter, real chain. The people who have 51% of the processing power have no particular interest in doing so (especially since it would undermine the value of the coins they already have) so it doesn't happen.
Garthor on
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Am I supposed to be shocked that the majority of users that joined around Feb 21 were trying to get rich quick? The only surprising thing is that it has been so blatantly exposed so quickly.
I'm not super surprised. Bitcoin and the other cryptos are crap, but at least they can, in theory, be exchanged for goods and services. An NFT is nothing more than a receipt for something you didn't have to pay for in the first place. In another few years I wouldn't be shocked if it somehow ends up in the mainstream, but at the moment it's well past the line of what the general public will accept as being worth money.
I mean an NFT is just a certificate of authenticity, but without any real authority to back it up and apparently no incentive for them to even continue existing as at least some already point to invalid addresses. I completely understand digital artists being all for a way to make money from their work, but this ain't it.
Authenticity of what though? I've only seen the tech used for digital items, where authenticity starts to fall apart because the ability to copy/paste really mucks with being able to call something 'the original' or whatever.
NFT's boil down to a need to be unique in a world where everyone is hashing the same memes. I'd use the phrase "snowflake" if that term hadn't been thoroughly ruined by the right.
"I want bragging rights over something that no one else can have." That's all it is. It doesn't matter how useless that thing actually is, the only thing that matters is that it's yours and yours alone.
I mean sure.
Except it's not.
It's not yours and yours alone.
To a comical degree.
Everyone else is still free to reference it. Hell, everyone else is still free to actively use it. And the thing that was purchased, which generally appears to be nothing more than a URL, can be taken down shortly after the sale with no repercussions at all.
Like the only thing buying an NFT for a meme (or anything really) gets you is bragging rights that you paid money for an NFT. Not the meme. Not the idea behind the meme. Just the NFT.
Your mention of snowflake seems apt but I think perhaps not in the way you meant it.
Buying an NFT doesn't make someone a snowflake in the sense that they own something original and thus they are somehow one of a kind.
Instead it appears to be like buying a literal snowflake. In that it can and will vanish at a moments notice leaving the buyer with absolutely nothing.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Snowflakes are unique at least. This doesn't even have that going for it. It's the most ludicrously, obviously, nothingness of a 'product' that I've ever seen.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
The bigger issue with 51% attacks is that if the system is poorly designed, it allows the attacker to rewrite history, making it so that tranactions that might have resulted in the exchange of real goods or services never actually happened. For PoW systems that involves holding back a stack of parallel transactions longer than the one that's being generated by the entire rest of the network, then eventually swooping in and claiming that since their parallel transaction chain is longer it must be the canonical one. For PoS systems, it involves just arbitrarily voting in a set of transactions that don't match the previously canonical ones.
It's easy enough to use sanity checks to detect those sorts of attacks, but actually dealing with them requires some sort of centralized action. If it's left up to the distributed network, the attacker can just force the decision in favor of themselves.
Only if you can convince 51% of all miners/authenticators to tell the exact same lie. Once you have thousands of people signed up in those positions, it just becomes very unlikely that you could get 51% of them to tell the same lie. And if you try and fail you lose your collateral or all the time/energy spent on solving the proof of work, only to not get anything because you didn’t have enough people telling the same lie.
If it was easy to break they wouldn’t have lasted this long. There are a lot of issues, but fundamentally being broken (easy to manipulate), isn’t one of them.
Taking a vote of all the miners/authenticators requires a central authority. Which means it's pointless for the purposes of maintaining a ledger, because the central authority might as well just be the one releasing the canonical chain updates.
You can't have a vote if nobody knows how many people are voting, nobody's in charge of finding out, and anybody can pretend to be any number of people.
Proof of Work has lasted this long because a 51% attack requires you to have, you know, 51% of the processing power, so that you can (eventually) spin up a longer, fake chain that you can use to invalidate the shorter, real chain. The people who have 51% of the processing power have no particular interest in doing so (especially since it would undermine the value of the coins they already have) so it doesn't happen.
I mean, it requires a central authority only in the sense that someone has to write the original code. Once everyone agrees on the code though, no governing body is required. All authenticator computers run the code, which allows them to communicate together (like sending their update ledger version for a vote). The code running on everyone's computer receives all other votes and tallies them, and declares a winner, which all other computers either agree or disagree with. Once 51% of the computers are agreeing then you have a new updated ledger, which the authenticating computers can distribute. I'm sure there are some mistakes in there, but PoS and PoW are no different in the details of how the distributed authentication works, except for what is the required condition for being allowed to start the actual authentication work. PoW requires you to solve some kind of problem, PoS requires you to put some currency in escrow basically.
As people completely unfamiliar with the code we can speculate on ways it could be defeated (someone could sign up to be a million authenticators and execute a 51% attack!), but my guess is the actual code writers have thought about that and created a solution to prevent it, otherwise the currency would be completely worthless (even in the age of wild speculation).
Bitcoin has had thieves stealing shit basically from it's inception. I guarantee if there was some simple way of cheating the ledger, it would have been exploited by now.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
NFT's boil down to a need to be unique in a world where everyone is hashing the same memes. I'd use the phrase "snowflake" if that term hadn't been thoroughly ruined by the right.
"I want bragging rights over something that no one else can have." That's all it is. It doesn't matter how useless that thing actually is, the only thing that matters is that it's yours and yours alone.
I basically agree with this, but I also think that this isn't a trivial thing. People are weird. That feeling of having "bragging rights" or whatever may be worth something. In fact, it may be worth enough to support artists that otherwise have a difficult time getting paid for their work (which is easily copy-able).
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
NFT's boil down to a need to be unique in a world where everyone is hashing the same memes. I'd use the phrase "snowflake" if that term hadn't been thoroughly ruined by the right.
"I want bragging rights over something that no one else can have." That's all it is. It doesn't matter how useless that thing actually is, the only thing that matters is that it's yours and yours alone.
I basically agree with this, but I also think that this isn't a trivial thing. People are weird. That feeling of having "bragging rights" or whatever may be worth something. In fact, it may be worth enough to support artists that otherwise have a difficult time getting paid for their work (which is easily copy-able).
The problem is that it isn't just an artist who can make an NFT of their work.
The bigger issue with 51% attacks is that if the system is poorly designed, it allows the attacker to rewrite history, making it so that tranactions that might have resulted in the exchange of real goods or services never actually happened. For PoW systems that involves holding back a stack of parallel transactions longer than the one that's being generated by the entire rest of the network, then eventually swooping in and claiming that since their parallel transaction chain is longer it must be the canonical one. For PoS systems, it involves just arbitrarily voting in a set of transactions that don't match the previously canonical ones.
It's easy enough to use sanity checks to detect those sorts of attacks, but actually dealing with them requires some sort of centralized action. If it's left up to the distributed network, the attacker can just force the decision in favor of themselves.
Only if you can convince 51% of all miners/authenticators to tell the exact same lie. Once you have thousands of people signed up in those positions, it just becomes very unlikely that you could get 51% of them to tell the same lie. And if you try and fail you lose your collateral or all the time/energy spent on solving the proof of work, only to not get anything because you didn’t have enough people telling the same lie.
If it was easy to break they wouldn’t have lasted this long. There are a lot of issues, but fundamentally being broken (easy to manipulate), isn’t one of them.
Taking a vote of all the miners/authenticators requires a central authority. Which means it's pointless for the purposes of maintaining a ledger, because the central authority might as well just be the one releasing the canonical chain updates.
You can't have a vote if nobody knows how many people are voting, nobody's in charge of finding out, and anybody can pretend to be any number of people.
Proof of Work has lasted this long because a 51% attack requires you to have, you know, 51% of the processing power, so that you can (eventually) spin up a longer, fake chain that you can use to invalidate the shorter, real chain. The people who have 51% of the processing power have no particular interest in doing so (especially since it would undermine the value of the coins they already have) so it doesn't happen.
I mean, it requires a central authority only in the sense that someone has to write the original code. Once everyone agrees on the code though, no governing body is required. All authenticator computers run the code, which allows them to communicate together (like sending their update ledger version for a vote). The code running on everyone's computer receives all other votes and tallies them, and declares a winner, which all other computers either agree or disagree with. Once 51% of the computers are agreeing then you have a new updated ledger, which the authenticating computers can distribute. I'm sure there are some mistakes in there, but PoS and PoW are no different in the details of how the distributed authentication works, except for what is the required condition for being allowed to start the actual authentication work. PoW requires you to solve some kind of problem, PoS requires you to put some currency in escrow basically.
As people completely unfamiliar with the code we can speculate on ways it could be defeated (someone could sign up to be a million authenticators and execute a 51% attack!), but my guess is the actual code writers have thought about that and created a solution to prevent it, otherwise the currency would be completely worthless (even in the age of wild speculation).
Bitcoin has had thieves stealing shit basically from it's inception. I guarantee if there was some simple way of cheating the ledger, it would have been exploited by now.
Yes. They have come up with a solution to the million fake authenticators problem. The solution is a central authority. Ethereum's plan is to run a certain number of "trusted nodes" which are the final authority on which ledger is correct. Ethereum, therefore, controls the whole system. Either nobody's clever enough to come up with something else, nobody wants to come up with something else, or it's literally impossible to solve the problem aside from the money-burning Proof of Work approach. My money's on the third.
Like, the problem here is that you have a node say "hey I want to help authenticate" and then they get one million responses saying "here's the ledger" and one million responses saying "here's the ledge (also this one is different)" and there's no way for the new node to verify, on its own, which one is the correct ledger. Proof of Work establishes something similar to majority rule by just saying "the ledger with more work put into it is the correct one" but that's the solution that inevitably leads to insane out-of-control spiraling of wasted resources.
Again, there is a simple way of cheating the Bitcoin ledger. It's the 51% attack (though technically through the magic of Maths you can do it with like... 36% or something). However, doing so would do substantial damage to Bitcoin, and since it requires a huge investment into Bitcoin, it's sort of self-defeating without some sort of colossal payout, which currently isn't there. If the US switched all currency to Bitcoin you bet your ass that China would nationalize their domestic Coin Farms and fuck that shit into the ground.
The bigger issue with 51% attacks is that if the system is poorly designed, it allows the attacker to rewrite history, making it so that tranactions that might have resulted in the exchange of real goods or services never actually happened. For PoW systems that involves holding back a stack of parallel transactions longer than the one that's being generated by the entire rest of the network, then eventually swooping in and claiming that since their parallel transaction chain is longer it must be the canonical one. For PoS systems, it involves just arbitrarily voting in a set of transactions that don't match the previously canonical ones.
It's easy enough to use sanity checks to detect those sorts of attacks, but actually dealing with them requires some sort of centralized action. If it's left up to the distributed network, the attacker can just force the decision in favor of themselves.
Only if you can convince 51% of all miners/authenticators to tell the exact same lie. Once you have thousands of people signed up in those positions, it just becomes very unlikely that you could get 51% of them to tell the same lie. And if you try and fail you lose your collateral or all the time/energy spent on solving the proof of work, only to not get anything because you didn’t have enough people telling the same lie.
If it was easy to break they wouldn’t have lasted this long. There are a lot of issues, but fundamentally being broken (easy to manipulate), isn’t one of them.
Taking a vote of all the miners/authenticators requires a central authority. Which means it's pointless for the purposes of maintaining a ledger, because the central authority might as well just be the one releasing the canonical chain updates.
You can't have a vote if nobody knows how many people are voting, nobody's in charge of finding out, and anybody can pretend to be any number of people.
Proof of Work has lasted this long because a 51% attack requires you to have, you know, 51% of the processing power, so that you can (eventually) spin up a longer, fake chain that you can use to invalidate the shorter, real chain. The people who have 51% of the processing power have no particular interest in doing so (especially since it would undermine the value of the coins they already have) so it doesn't happen.
I mean, it requires a central authority only in the sense that someone has to write the original code. Once everyone agrees on the code though, no governing body is required. All authenticator computers run the code, which allows them to communicate together (like sending their update ledger version for a vote). The code running on everyone's computer receives all other votes and tallies them, and declares a winner, which all other computers either agree or disagree with. Once 51% of the computers are agreeing then you have a new updated ledger, which the authenticating computers can distribute. I'm sure there are some mistakes in there, but PoS and PoW are no different in the details of how the distributed authentication works, except for what is the required condition for being allowed to start the actual authentication work. PoW requires you to solve some kind of problem, PoS requires you to put some currency in escrow basically.
As people completely unfamiliar with the code we can speculate on ways it could be defeated (someone could sign up to be a million authenticators and execute a 51% attack!), but my guess is the actual code writers have thought about that and created a solution to prevent it, otherwise the currency would be completely worthless (even in the age of wild speculation).
Bitcoin has had thieves stealing shit basically from it's inception. I guarantee if there was some simple way of cheating the ledger, it would have been exploited by now.
Yes. They have come up with a solution to the million fake authenticators problem. The solution is a central authority. Ethereum's plan is to run a certain number of "trusted nodes" which are the final authority on which ledger is correct. Ethereum, therefore, controls the whole system. Either nobody's clever enough to come up with something else, nobody wants to come up with something else, or it's literally impossible to solve the problem aside from the money-burning Proof of Work approach. My money's on the third.
Like, the problem here is that you have a node say "hey I want to help authenticate" and then they get one million responses saying "here's the ledger" and one million responses saying "here's the ledge (also this one is different)" and there's no way for the new node to verify, on its own, which one is the correct ledger. Proof of Work establishes something similar to majority rule by just saying "the ledger with more work put into it is the correct one" but that's the solution that inevitably leads to insane out-of-control spiraling of wasted resources.
Again, there is a simple way of cheating the Bitcoin ledger. It's the 51% attack (though technically through the magic of Maths you can do it with like... 36% or something). However, doing so would do substantial damage to Bitcoin, and since it requires a huge investment into Bitcoin, it's sort of self-defeating without some sort of colossal payout, which currently isn't there. If the US switched all currency to Bitcoin you bet your ass that China would nationalize their domestic Coin Farms and fuck that shit into the ground.
I mean, I am not a programmer, so you could totally be right. But the way I've heard it described sounds different than what you are saying. I've never heard of Proof of Work saying that the amount of work you do sets your priority as an authenticator. What I have read is that there is some threshold amount of work you have to do to be considered a legit authenticator (and this threshold value scales as more people try to be an authenticator), and then there is just a simple majority vote by all authenticators who pass that bar. Hence 51% attack (51% of people who pass the bar agree to lie and submit a fake ledger). Rather than something like my one computer did more work than all other computers combined so I am now the sole authority.
I have no idea about ethereum and how they are proposing to do PoS, but if they are just setting up trusted notes, that indeed sounds very dumb.
edit - also I think your examples are significantly downplaying the coordination issue. If I'm an authenticator node, and I get 1 million submissions of the same ledger (which also agrees with what I think the next ledger should be), and 1 million different versions (all unique, or maybe some overlapping but many different), then it really isn't that hard for me to decide which one is right.
Jebus314 on
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
I was looking at NFT auction sites just to get a better sense of what that world looks like and found a pretty magical rabbit hole.
First, I saw an auction for a 24x24 block of virtual land in The Sandbox. The last sale price was a few million dollars. The description said that if I won the auction, I should contact the generic support email for the game to tell them I have an NFT for land ownership and they’d be able to help me.
So, ok, let’s check out The Sandbox. Looks pretty Minecraft-like, uses voxels for some reason, and is somehow a blockchain based game that uses Ethereum. Weird I never heard of it but there’s a lot of these weird social games now.
Then I saw two things almost simultaneously:
1. The “Beta .4b” banner at the top of the page, and;
2. An invite link to a game jam for The Sandbox.
“Surely not,” you’d say, and be wrong.
By working on The Sandbox as a developer (using what look to be full-on dev tools, albeit simplified), you can earn virtual land. In The Sandbox.
Or you can pay millions for virtual land in The Sandbox, and hope it is eventually an actual game in which people will want to pay millions of dollars for virtual land.
So, real millionaires can buy NFTs to verify ownership of land in a game that only exists enough to be worked by virtual code-serfs who hope to one day create a virtual world where they own land and land has value.
I was looking at NFT auction sites just to get a better sense of what that world looks like and found a pretty magical rabbit hole.
First, I saw an auction for a 24x24 block of virtual land in The Sandbox. The last sale price was a few million dollars. The description said that if I won the auction, I should contact the generic support email for the game to tell them I have an NFT for land ownership and they’d be able to help me.
So, ok, let’s check out The Sandbox. Looks pretty Minecraft-like, uses voxels for some reason, and is somehow a blockchain based game that uses Ethereum. Weird I never heard of it but there’s a lot of these weird social games now.
Then I saw two things almost simultaneously:
1. The “Beta .4b” banner at the top of the page, and;
2. An invite link to a game jam for The Sandbox.
“Surely not,” you’d say, and be wrong.
By working on The Sandbox as a developer (using what look to be full-on dev tools, albeit simplified), you can earn virtual land. In The Sandbox.
Or you can pay millions for virtual land in The Sandbox, and hope it is eventually an actual game in which people will want to pay millions of dollars for virtual land.
So, real millionaires can buy NFTs to verify ownership of land in a game that only exists enough to be worked by virtual code-serfs who hope to one day create a virtual world where they own land and land has value.
*chef’s kiss*
I... But... How...
Some people are idiots and think Cyberpunk is a goal, rather than a dire warning of things to come.
A friend was telling me this morning that I should totally check out and stream some of these new NFT games because I sometime stream weird stuff. I'm kind of scared to look that deeply into the face of madness. Nobody else is streaming it for a reason.
It’s 51% of the work. 1 person doing 10% of the work is indistinguishable from 10 doing 1% each.
So the same for proof of stake. If you have more stake you have more proof
More stake according to whom. That's the problem. With Proof of Work, you have an absolutely clear verification of which chain has the most work done on it: it's the one that contains the most wasted energy (shown via solutions to bullshit math problems). With Proof of Stake, if the proof is stake, then what stops a node from saying "I have one quintillion coins, as proven by these records I am providing".
edit - also I think your examples are significantly downplaying the coordination issue. If I'm an authenticator node, and I get 1 million submissions of the same ledger (which also agrees with what I think the next ledger should be), and 1 million different versions (all unique, or maybe some overlapping but many different), then it really isn't that hard for me to decide which one is right.
But those 1 million versions won't be different. They are 1 million sockpuppets created by the same person, all saying "this is the true ledger." If your solution to this is "well everyone else should be creating a million sockpuppets too, in order to drown out the scammer" then congratulations, you've devolved into a really weird Proof of Work system, where the work being done is "how many fake nodes can you create?"
Because you must have coins in the prior ledger in order to have a proof of stake.
Whose prior ledger? The prior ledger of the node connecting? There is none, they've just connected to the network, and have no knowledge. The ledgers of the nodes offering their (differing) blockchains? They both are saying they have the coins, why wouldn't they? One is lying, but how would you figure out which?
You can't solve that without some independently verifiable method of correctness (this is what the longest chain serves), or a central authority (this is what Ethereum proposes).
Because you must have coins in the prior ledger in order to have a proof of stake.
Whose prior ledger? The prior ledger of the node connecting? There is none, they've just connected to the network, and have no knowledge. The ledgers of the nodes offering their (differing) blockchains? They both are saying they have the coins, why wouldn't they? One is lying, but how would you figure out which?
You can't solve that without some independently verifiable method of correctness (this is what the longest chain serves), or a central authority (this is what Ethereum proposes).
Well if you make up a new ledger you cannot change the old coins... that would just be the same as making a new coin.
Because you must have coins in the prior ledger in order to have a proof of stake.
Whose prior ledger? The prior ledger of the node connecting? There is none, they've just connected to the network, and have no knowledge. The ledgers of the nodes offering their (differing) blockchains? They both are saying they have the coins, why wouldn't they? One is lying, but how would you figure out which?
You can't solve that without some independently verifiable method of correctness (this is what the longest chain serves), or a central authority (this is what Ethereum proposes).
Well if you make up a new ledger you cannot change the old coins... that would just be the same as making a new coin.
And what's stopping an attacker from just flat out doing that without some sort of centralized authority? It'd be incredibly obvious that it happened, of course, but how could it be stopped?
Because you must have coins in the prior ledger in order to have a proof of stake.
Whose prior ledger? The prior ledger of the node connecting? There is none, they've just connected to the network, and have no knowledge. The ledgers of the nodes offering their (differing) blockchains? They both are saying they have the coins, why wouldn't they? One is lying, but how would you figure out which?
You can't solve that without some independently verifiable method of correctness (this is what the longest chain serves), or a central authority (this is what Ethereum proposes).
Well if you make up a new ledger you cannot change the old coins... that would just be the same as making a new coin.
And what's stopping an attacker from just flat out doing that without some sort of centralized authority? It'd be incredibly obvious that it happened, of course, but how could it be stopped?
Well... its like... Why would it matter? Its like printing a bunch of monopoly money and saying you're a millionaire. Uhhh sure, but that doesn't mean anyone will accept it. Or that you've suddenly captured everyone elses money.
I am not saying that proof of stake is good. But its not so easy to fool as to just say you have all the stake.
More stake according to whom. That's the problem. With Proof of Work, you have an absolutely clear verification of which chain has the most work done on it: it's the one that contains the most wasted energy (shown via solutions to bullshit math problems).
This isn’t entirely true - verification is based on the longest valid chain, not wasted energy.
While in the long term the protocol autocorrects to favour more work, in the short term it's perfectly possible to produce a longer chain based on pure luck and have the protocol reject a shorter chain which has wasted more energy.
There's no way of telling if any given solution was generated by a room full of overclocked gpus running the whole time, or in 5 seconds by an old granny who installed a mining client on a 10 year old machine to see what the fuss was about.
Think of it like a Vegas casino. In the long run the house always wins, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of documented cases of people with 100+ successful craps rolls in a row.
Edit: rephrased last sentence to emphasise the point.
Because you must have coins in the prior ledger in order to have a proof of stake.
Whose prior ledger? The prior ledger of the node connecting? There is none, they've just connected to the network, and have no knowledge. The ledgers of the nodes offering their (differing) blockchains? They both are saying they have the coins, why wouldn't they? One is lying, but how would you figure out which?
You can't solve that without some independently verifiable method of correctness (this is what the longest chain serves), or a central authority (this is what Ethereum proposes).
Well if you make up a new ledger you cannot change the old coins... that would just be the same as making a new coin.
And what's stopping an attacker from just flat out doing that without some sort of centralized authority? It'd be incredibly obvious that it happened, of course, but how could it be stopped?
Well... its like... Why would it matter? Its like printing a bunch of monopoly money and saying you're a millionaire. Uhhh sure, but that doesn't mean anyone will accept it. Or that you've suddenly captured everyone elses money.
I am not saying that proof of stake is good. But its not so easy to fool as to just say you have all the stake.
There's a problem with the monopoly money metaphor, because you're participating in a system based on monopoly money, where even if nobody accepts your enforced ledger, they have no recourse against it.
Posts
I mean, we all dislike crypto currencies, but there is some weird info flying around here.
The whole basis of how crypto works (PoS or PoW) is essentially a coordination problem. Suppose we all agree on how to authenticate real transaction requests (using whatever security measures you want). When it comes time to approve the next block in the ledger, it is trivially easy for everyone doing the authenticating to know what the "true", non cheating, block should be, but there are infinitely (ok not infinite but whatever) different ways to lie.
So the central idea is that you get a bunch of people to put up some collateral (either in terms of some money, aka PoS, or energy spent, aka PoW), and then you ask them all what the next ledger entry should be. Whichever answer has more than 50% agreement, is the official next ledger, and everyone that put up that response gets paid some small amount. Anyone who lied (put up something other than the majority version) gets nothing and loses their collateral. Because coordination is hard to impossible, it's very unlikely that you could get 50% of the people authenticating to lie in the exact same way, the only real option for people is to tell the truth. The more authenticators there are, the harder it is to coordinate, the more secure your block chain is. Too few, and it may be possible to coordinate a 51% attack (you get 51% of all authenticators to lie in the exact same way).
There is no reason why PoS then would have to lead to the rich getting richer. Make the collateral a small amount, and choose the authenticators who get paid at random, and there would be no reason to think that the generated money would favor those with a lot of coins over those with not very many (this is I believe how ethereum works). Obviously you have to be rich enough to have a computer (or many computers) doing random crypto work instead of something useful, but this is no different than PoW. And just like PoW, it is subject to a 51% attack (suppose a rich person bought a shit ton of coins, pretended each small amount was actually a different person, then signed up to be a shit ton of authenticators), but that is again the same risk as PoW.
I mean, it's not exactly straight forward. Because you don't want each artist creating their own versions of NFTs, making the buyers have to jump through different hoops every time they want to buy one. And it's probably not great to have some sort of market place (a la amazon), where the marketplace creates the NFTs and tries to screw artists over anyway they can. But it definitely feels like there is probably a better way to host them than using cryptocurrency (which is basically how I feel about every application of cryptocurrency).
Unless the random was not evenly distributed it would indeed do that Because people with larger stakes can more easily hold onto larger portions of a stake as a percentage.
Its not dissimilar to any investment. Those who can invest a larger portion of their income/wealth will become more wealthy.
I'm a little confused by what you mean when you say the random is not evenly distributed. Of course it is possible to distribute PoS payouts based on percentage of stake held, but that would be silly (and from what I googled in 30 seconds not how ethereum works). The better way would be to require a small collateral (that non rich people could afford), and make payouts completely random. So the only way to cheat the system for rich people, is to create a bunch of authenticator accounts to try and increase their odds. Which is of course possible (although hopefully there is something in the setup to try and prevent this), but doesn't really seem materially different than PoW, in that the real limitation to how much you can get paid is how many different computers you can get to run the code.
I'm saying instead of a distributed ledger the artist has a ledger that can be checked against.
Since all an NFT is is a unique high hash URL that is on the blockchain.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysts-suggest-silent-crash-may-111059901.html
But if you're doing it all from a central authority anyway, what do you need to put it on the blockchain for?
Ok so let’s say I have 20% of the etherium and the rest of the world has 80% in infinitesimal amounts. The 80% are spending what they have more or less and I only spend 1%. If the distribution is random and any one Coin is chosen then there is a 20% chance I get it and a 80% chance the rest gets it. But over the course of pulls I get 20% of pulls because I have 20% of coins.
Because the 80% spend their money and I save my 20% will grow as a result of this “totally random” structure. And everyone else’s will not. And as you accumulate coins the probability that you get more is increased.
Now sure if no one is spending etherium then the distribution stays the same... but that isn’t likely.
I don’t think that’s how PoS works. They don’t give the newly minted coins to anyone who owns the currency.
You have to signup to be an authenticator. which means your computer is ready at anytime to examine transaction requests, check to see if they are legitimate, then post what you think the updated ledger would be. As part of that process you put up collateral in the form of some of the currency. If your ledger update agrees with everyone else’s you get put into a random pool to get paid, if your ledger doesn’t agree you lose your collateral.
So the theoretical rich person who owns 20%, gets no benefit from their wealth (in terms of the PoS making them richer). They can signup to be an authenticator, but that pays them the same as anyone else. They could lie and signup to be thousands of authenticators, but that’s not really any different than someone setting up a huge amount of mining computers for PoW.
It's easy enough to use sanity checks to detect those sorts of attacks, but actually dealing with them requires some sort of centralized action. If it's left up to the distributed network, the attacker can just force the decision in favor of themselves.
You stake a fixed amount and one stake is chosen randomly to get paid. So you can just launch a million different stakes and be a million times more likely than any other individual to get paid
Only if you can convince 51% of all miners/authenticators to tell the exact same lie. Once you have thousands of people signed up in those positions, it just becomes very unlikely that you could get 51% of them to tell the same lie. And if you try and fail you lose your collateral or all the time/energy spent on solving the proof of work, only to not get anything because you didn’t have enough people telling the same lie.
If it was easy to break they wouldn’t have lasted this long. There are a lot of issues, but fundamentally being broken (easy to manipulate), isn’t one of them.
I'm not super surprised. Bitcoin and the other cryptos are crap, but at least they can, in theory, be exchanged for goods and services. An NFT is nothing more than a receipt for something you didn't have to pay for in the first place. In another few years I wouldn't be shocked if it somehow ends up in the mainstream, but at the moment it's well past the line of what the general public will accept as being worth money.
I mean an NFT is just a certificate of authenticity, but without any real authority to back it up and apparently no incentive for them to even continue existing as at least some already point to invalid addresses. I completely understand digital artists being all for a way to make money from their work, but this ain't it.
"I want bragging rights over something that no one else can have." That's all it is. It doesn't matter how useless that thing actually is, the only thing that matters is that it's yours and yours alone.
Authenticity of what though? I've only seen the tech used for digital items, where authenticity starts to fall apart because the ability to copy/paste really mucks with being able to call something 'the original' or whatever.
Taking a vote of all the miners/authenticators requires a central authority. Which means it's pointless for the purposes of maintaining a ledger, because the central authority might as well just be the one releasing the canonical chain updates.
You can't have a vote if nobody knows how many people are voting, nobody's in charge of finding out, and anybody can pretend to be any number of people.
Proof of Work has lasted this long because a 51% attack requires you to have, you know, 51% of the processing power, so that you can (eventually) spin up a longer, fake chain that you can use to invalidate the shorter, real chain. The people who have 51% of the processing power have no particular interest in doing so (especially since it would undermine the value of the coins they already have) so it doesn't happen.
Yes, that is a problem.
I mean sure.
Except it's not.
It's not yours and yours alone.
To a comical degree.
Everyone else is still free to reference it. Hell, everyone else is still free to actively use it. And the thing that was purchased, which generally appears to be nothing more than a URL, can be taken down shortly after the sale with no repercussions at all.
Like the only thing buying an NFT for a meme (or anything really) gets you is bragging rights that you paid money for an NFT. Not the meme. Not the idea behind the meme. Just the NFT.
Your mention of snowflake seems apt but I think perhaps not in the way you meant it.
Buying an NFT doesn't make someone a snowflake in the sense that they own something original and thus they are somehow one of a kind.
Instead it appears to be like buying a literal snowflake. In that it can and will vanish at a moments notice leaving the buyer with absolutely nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
I mean, it requires a central authority only in the sense that someone has to write the original code. Once everyone agrees on the code though, no governing body is required. All authenticator computers run the code, which allows them to communicate together (like sending their update ledger version for a vote). The code running on everyone's computer receives all other votes and tallies them, and declares a winner, which all other computers either agree or disagree with. Once 51% of the computers are agreeing then you have a new updated ledger, which the authenticating computers can distribute. I'm sure there are some mistakes in there, but PoS and PoW are no different in the details of how the distributed authentication works, except for what is the required condition for being allowed to start the actual authentication work. PoW requires you to solve some kind of problem, PoS requires you to put some currency in escrow basically.
As people completely unfamiliar with the code we can speculate on ways it could be defeated (someone could sign up to be a million authenticators and execute a 51% attack!), but my guess is the actual code writers have thought about that and created a solution to prevent it, otherwise the currency would be completely worthless (even in the age of wild speculation).
Bitcoin has had thieves stealing shit basically from it's inception. I guarantee if there was some simple way of cheating the ledger, it would have been exploited by now.
I basically agree with this, but I also think that this isn't a trivial thing. People are weird. That feeling of having "bragging rights" or whatever may be worth something. In fact, it may be worth enough to support artists that otherwise have a difficult time getting paid for their work (which is easily copy-able).
The problem is that it isn't just an artist who can make an NFT of their work.
Yes. They have come up with a solution to the million fake authenticators problem. The solution is a central authority. Ethereum's plan is to run a certain number of "trusted nodes" which are the final authority on which ledger is correct. Ethereum, therefore, controls the whole system. Either nobody's clever enough to come up with something else, nobody wants to come up with something else, or it's literally impossible to solve the problem aside from the money-burning Proof of Work approach. My money's on the third.
Like, the problem here is that you have a node say "hey I want to help authenticate" and then they get one million responses saying "here's the ledger" and one million responses saying "here's the ledge (also this one is different)" and there's no way for the new node to verify, on its own, which one is the correct ledger. Proof of Work establishes something similar to majority rule by just saying "the ledger with more work put into it is the correct one" but that's the solution that inevitably leads to insane out-of-control spiraling of wasted resources.
Again, there is a simple way of cheating the Bitcoin ledger. It's the 51% attack (though technically through the magic of Maths you can do it with like... 36% or something). However, doing so would do substantial damage to Bitcoin, and since it requires a huge investment into Bitcoin, it's sort of self-defeating without some sort of colossal payout, which currently isn't there. If the US switched all currency to Bitcoin you bet your ass that China would nationalize their domestic Coin Farms and fuck that shit into the ground.
I mean, I am not a programmer, so you could totally be right. But the way I've heard it described sounds different than what you are saying. I've never heard of Proof of Work saying that the amount of work you do sets your priority as an authenticator. What I have read is that there is some threshold amount of work you have to do to be considered a legit authenticator (and this threshold value scales as more people try to be an authenticator), and then there is just a simple majority vote by all authenticators who pass that bar. Hence 51% attack (51% of people who pass the bar agree to lie and submit a fake ledger). Rather than something like my one computer did more work than all other computers combined so I am now the sole authority.
I have no idea about ethereum and how they are proposing to do PoS, but if they are just setting up trusted notes, that indeed sounds very dumb.
edit - also I think your examples are significantly downplaying the coordination issue. If I'm an authenticator node, and I get 1 million submissions of the same ledger (which also agrees with what I think the next ledger should be), and 1 million different versions (all unique, or maybe some overlapping but many different), then it really isn't that hard for me to decide which one is right.
So the same for proof of stake. If you have more stake you have more proof
I... But... How...
Some people are idiots and think Cyberpunk is a goal, rather than a dire warning of things to come.
More stake according to whom. That's the problem. With Proof of Work, you have an absolutely clear verification of which chain has the most work done on it: it's the one that contains the most wasted energy (shown via solutions to bullshit math problems). With Proof of Stake, if the proof is stake, then what stops a node from saying "I have one quintillion coins, as proven by these records I am providing".
But those 1 million versions won't be different. They are 1 million sockpuppets created by the same person, all saying "this is the true ledger." If your solution to this is "well everyone else should be creating a million sockpuppets too, in order to drown out the scammer" then congratulations, you've devolved into a really weird Proof of Work system, where the work being done is "how many fake nodes can you create?"
Whose prior ledger? The prior ledger of the node connecting? There is none, they've just connected to the network, and have no knowledge. The ledgers of the nodes offering their (differing) blockchains? They both are saying they have the coins, why wouldn't they? One is lying, but how would you figure out which?
You can't solve that without some independently verifiable method of correctness (this is what the longest chain serves), or a central authority (this is what Ethereum proposes).
Well if you make up a new ledger you cannot change the old coins... that would just be the same as making a new coin.
And what's stopping an attacker from just flat out doing that without some sort of centralized authority? It'd be incredibly obvious that it happened, of course, but how could it be stopped?
Well... its like... Why would it matter? Its like printing a bunch of monopoly money and saying you're a millionaire. Uhhh sure, but that doesn't mean anyone will accept it. Or that you've suddenly captured everyone elses money.
I am not saying that proof of stake is good. But its not so easy to fool as to just say you have all the stake.
While in the long term the protocol autocorrects to favour more work, in the short term it's perfectly possible to produce a longer chain based on pure luck and have the protocol reject a shorter chain which has wasted more energy.
There's no way of telling if any given solution was generated by a room full of overclocked gpus running the whole time, or in 5 seconds by an old granny who installed a mining client on a 10 year old machine to see what the fuss was about.
Think of it like a Vegas casino. In the long run the house always wins, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of documented cases of people with 100+ successful craps rolls in a row.
Edit: rephrased last sentence to emphasise the point.
There's a problem with the monopoly money metaphor, because you're participating in a system based on monopoly money, where even if nobody accepts your enforced ledger, they have no recourse against it.