1) ETH bulls say that Solana is not really decentralized. It achieves scalability by limiting the network to only a handful of validators; why not just use AWS at that point? Why are they wrong?
2) ETH bulls say that security of a proof-of-stake is driven by total coin market cap; the more cap, the more expensive an attack. This makes ETH more secure than Solana. ETH has an unbreakable first mover advantage for this reason, they say.
3) ETH bulls say that ETH plus Polygon (or similar level two solution) is just as scalable as solana, while retaining the above two advantages of ETH. Why is that wrong?
PoS security driven by market cap is like saying that the richer the top 1% is and the more they’ll be incentivized to protect their funds. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it throws out a lot of other factors out the window. For example, who is this top 1% and how much do they care about the crypto.
Honest question: How is that different from proof of work, where those with significant resources (1%, a nation, etc) can spend significantly on mining equipment?
Whatever equipment you buy will lose it's value quickly, in 5+ years, it's probably worthless. And that's ignoring all the money you have to spend on electricity, non-stop and increasingly. In PoW, if miners slow down, they'll become irrelevant.
Even if you manage to acquire a 51% hash rate for example (which is extremely difficult), it'll be very difficult to keep it over a long enough period of time.
PoS is fundamentally broken in my opinion, it literally says "rich gets richer" and wealthy stakers will get higher (absolute) rewards which they don't have any incentive to sell since they didn't spend any energy to get it. That's even ignoring all the custodians which have large quantities of the said crypto, so they can just keep the rewards to themselves or keep a sizeable % of it.
One of the motivations for the DAO hack hardfork btw was that the attacker would hold significant power under a PoS system.
You can participate in mining pools, but realistically speaking unless you have very powerful hardware, you're better off just buying Bitcoin outright.
Same with PoS, you can stake with a pool if you have less than 32eth, but your returns on that are not going to be comparable to what large holders get (same percentage, but very tiny in absolute numbers).
You're arguing that "small" (<$80K) amounts of money aren't worth investing even at a very high APR. This is pretty contrary to most investment advice.
I'm not, even small amounts should be invested of course, I'm just pointing out that rich benefit the most in either scenario.
Also worth pointing out, high APRs aren't guaranteed and the network fees are supposed to be significantly decreased post EIP-1559. Also, for those who don't meet 32 eth threshold, there's good chance they are not even remotely close to that threshold.
The difference is that PoW is permissionless and PoS is permissioned system. Another difference is that in PoS you pay once and get benefits forever, in PoW you must actively choose to spend energy mining. One more difference is that once you become a staker, your power in the system only grows, in PoW anybody can start mining and dilute your power.
PoS is simply worse from every angle and it’s also not cheaper because MR=MC.
PoS is permissioned system because if you want to become a validator you must convince another (potential) validator to give up part of his stake.
> MC in PoS is mainly interest costs
no, it's also costs of fighting (via politics, marketing and hacking) for that initial pre-mined stake.
it's not cheaper than PoW and has worse security properties due to all sorts of attacks - long range, grinding, etc. ultimately it's flawed because unlike in PoW there is no universally objective measure of geniuneness of a chain (the "work" in PoW).
PoS is effectively permissionless given the number of parties that have the stakeable asset and are willing to sell it.
>>no, it's also costs of fighting (via politics, marketing and hacking) for that initial pre-mined stake.
There is no fight if there was a transition from PoW to PoS, and thus no premine, or if the premine was distributed via an open crowdsale, with revenue allocated to a non-profit foundation.
Your analysis makes too many tenuous assumptions to push one side of the debate.
> PoS is effectively permissionless given the number of parties that have the stakeable asset and are willing to sell it.
the market doesn't have enough liquidity for you to gain a meaningful stake and those that organized the pre-mine scam will always remain in control. or they will sell you the stake for exorbitant price and perform a long-range attack against you because they still hold the original keys.
Eth is going through transition and yet it’s the largest pre-mine scam in existence.
Crowd sales are just pre-mines.
Non-profit is just pre-mine beneficiary that people will fight for control over.
And you conveniently ignored all the other problems with PoS: long range and grinding attacks, no ability to reduce power of malicious staker, no universal objective measure for which chain is genuine so you have to rely on third parties, etc.
>>the market doesn't have enough liquidity for you to gain a meaningful stake
This is unsupported. There are billions of dollars worth of ETH sold every day. If you intended to hold what you bought, the liquidity would gradually go down as you took what was bought off the market, but you could certainly acquire a significant share of the stake.
>>Non-profit is just pre-mine beneficiary that people will fight for control over.
That assumes zero altuistic oversight from ETH stakeholders at large deterring attempts to corrupt the grant issuing process, which is not a sensible assumption.
>>And you conveniently ignored all the other problems with PoS
Long-range attack is addressed with dependence on weak subjectivity:
> There are billions of dollars worth of ETH sold every day
not nearly enough to purchase a meaningful stake that could protect you from premine scammers that launched the project. not to mention - you'd be giving up your money for their benefit. double rekt.
> zero altuistic oversight from ETH stakeholders at large deterring attempts to corrupt the grant issuing process, which is not a sensible assumption
ah, nice, a system that simply relies on altruistic motives of premine scammers that will be in control and largest beneficiaries of those staking grants. what could possibly go wrong.
> Long-range attack is addressed with dependence on weak subjectivity: ... The rest of your criticisms have similarly been addressed in state of the art Proof of Stake protocols
it's not addressed, it's just partly waved away and partly obfuscated in a non-solutions like slashing or checkpointing.
pos still doesn't work, pow is the only known decentralized and trustless consensus reaching protocol.
>>not nearly enough to purchase a meaningful stake that could protect you from premine scammers that launched the project. not to mention - you'd be giving up your money for their benefit. double rekt.
There is no need for any protection. Proof of stake doesn't enable stakers to attack non-stakers. Nor would stakers have any incentive to.
Moreover, there was absolutely no scam in the premine. It was publicly announced, and the majority of it was distributed via a programmatic crowdsale.
This characterization of yours is simply an emotional attack.
>>you'd be giving up your money for their benefit. double rekt.
Same with any currency. You provide something of value to acquire some currency. This applies to dealing with early adopters of other currencies, early investors in companies, etc.
This is simply a bad-faith criticism of proof-of-stake that is equally applicable to anything else, unless you make the tortured argument that a publicly announced crowdsale and dev grant is somehow a "scam", and therefore there is some distinct quality about buying currency from those who acquired their stake through a premine over acquiring it through some other method.
>>ah, nice, a system that simply relies on altruistic motives of premine scammers
How can any one can take ETH's critics seriously when you make blatantly libelous accusations that participating in an open premine crowd makes someone a scammer.
> Proof of stake doesn't enable stakers to attack non-stakers
yes it does. it allows stakers to prevent non-stakers from becoming stakers. all rewards go to stakers. rich get richer even faster.
> there was absolutely no scam in the premine. It was publicly announced, and the majority of it was distributed via a programmatic crowdsale.
public announcement means nothing if participation is permissioned. there was 12% blatant premine and 60% so called "pre-sale", of which undisclosed amount went to scammers that organized it and didn't have to pay anything.
> applies to dealing with early adopters of other currencies
this doesn't apply to BTC which literally anybody could mine without asking approval and permission. ETH is just another scam.
> dev grant is somehow a "scam"
of course it is.
> open premine crowd
well, at least you used the right word to describe it - premine. any crypto premine is a scam by definition. some of those scams just manage to bamboozle enough people to stay afloat longer and get a chance to scam even more.
good job shifting conversation away from discussing PoS flaws into complaining about randoms on internet being rude to scammers.
>>yes it does. it allows stakers to prevent non-stakers from becoming stakers. all rewards go to stakers. rich get richer even faster.
No it doesn't. As I already explained, there is no practical way holders can collude to force all holders of the currency to not sell. There will always be significant liquidity for any currency that has as wide a distribution of holders that Ethereum does.
>>public announcement means nothing if participation is permissioned.
The crowdsale was not permissioned. It was completely programmatic.
>>there was 12% blatant premine
Which was publicly disclosed compensation for the developers who created Ethereum, as well as an allocation for grants to further develop Ethereum.
>>and 60% so called "pre-sale", of which undisclosed amount went to scammers that organized it and didn't have to pay anything.
This allegation of the pre-sale being a scam is totally unsubstantiated. It's irresponsible character assassination.
>>randoms on internet being rude to scammers.
The credibility of avowed critics of Ethereum, who make totally unsubstantiated allegations of the organizers of Ethereum's crowdsale of being scammers, is relevant to these discussions.
Moreover, your criticism is not relevant to PoS. It's specifically critical of Ethereum, since Ethereum had a premine and crowdsale. PoS doesn't have to have either. So once again, your analysis seems entirely biased and agenda-driven.
Basically in proof of work you have no idea who is participating at any moment. For example, the NSA could be running a blockchain in parallel and if they have more power create a fork. With proof of stake you are always aware of the participants in the system and a fork will only happen it the richest decide to fork. But why would they? In Bitcoin the most powerful miner might have no bitcoin and no incentive to keep the network safe.
At the same time, because of this, you don’t really get finality in Bitcoin. You get some assurance that your transaction is “confirmed” after a number of block but you’re never really sure. In proof of stake you can have consensus protocols with true finality, meaning that there’ll be no forks for sure if a threshold of participants remained honest.
My understanding is, proof of stake is not more secure than proof of work. Reason for PoS are efficiency, speed of transaction, lower gas fees, less environmental impact, etc. (Of course there can be secure PoS, insecure PoS, secure PoW, insecure PoW…)
Polygon basically checkpoints a spreadsheet onto the eth chain on an interval, but there is no way to guarantee that there weren't any shenanigans between the checkpoints. This is a big improvement over say BSC which does no such thing, but it isn't the security of a true eth L2. Real L2's can prove that their output to L1 is legitimate either through zero knowledge cryptographic proofs (loopring, zksync) or through a game theory fraud check (optimism, arbitrum).
PoS is more secure in general, also PoS and BFT-based cryptocurrencies in periods of network partitions will rather come to a stop instead of allowing safety to be violated (double spending).
Once they stop, they don't start again without external intervention (so you're back to The DAO when it comes to which validators are not Byzantine). PoS is a bet that 1/3 of the staked tokens never, ever fall into the hands of Byzantine actors -- not by purchase, not by theft, and not by DeFi smart contract hacks. That's not a bet I would take.
And how, exactly, will the "network conditions stabilize" if over 1/3 of the votes are malicious, and thus able to prevent the honest voters from ever agreeing on anything ever again? Are you betting that the attacker will just get bored and walk away?
Also, what a confusing choice of words. A distributed system is BFT (or not BFT) regardless of whether or not the underlying message broadcast medium is synchronous/asynchronous, or reliable/unreliable. The "network conditions" being "stable" have no bearing on the voters' ability to reach agreement -- that's solely a function of whether or not f or fewer votes are malicious out of 3f + 1 votes.
I was talking about network conditions, not a threshold of malicious participants (in which case yeah you will have liveness issues).
Your second paragraph is false also. Different BFT systems have different assumptions. Some work in asynchronous settings, some work in semi-synchronous settings, etc.
You should consider rereading Leslie Lamport's original paper. BFT is a property of corrupt votes, not the network. You keep trying to make it about the network. Like, if you want to have a conversation about how the network can influence the system's fault tolerance, you should instead consider the network topology -- as in, which routes between honest nodes include corrupt nodes. This is also considered by the paper, since corrupt nodes can censor or rewrite messages, and thus influence how many corrupt nodes the system can truly tolerate, given a network topology. But in no case does message delay give a BFT system's node an excuse to make forward progress without first verifying that at least 2f+1 replicas agree with its decision. Even voting on a view change to remove a presumed dead node requires a 2f+1 vote.
I wouldn't say PoS security has to be driven by the rich, but by whoever is staking, which people could be staking small like lets say 1 ETH total. The security is derived simply by the threat of having your staked ETH (however much) slashed away.
Nothing is slashed if attacker doesn’t publish the alternative chain until they have successful attack.
PoS is absolutely driven by rich and helps rich get richer faster than everybody else. If I get 10% stake - I get 10% of any future issuance, meaning my stake can never go below 10%, so my power in the system never dilutes even though I literally don’t have to do anything anymore. Miners in PoW have to participate in mining and their power can get diluted by anyone by simply getting more hardware online.
There isn’t a cap on validators so you can’t buy up a fixed percentage of the network. More people can always join. You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest(same as mining).
As we reduce the hardware costs and energy usage costs it becomes easier to participate in the network (especially via pools, same as mining but much much cheaper).
Being able to run a validator on a solar powered raspberry pi is a great improvement to making participation in the network accessible.
We should see the exact opposite of what you suggest, anyone who wants to participate not having energy or hardware restrictions should make it less Matthew-effect-like.
PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.
> There isn’t a cap on validators so you can’t buy up a fixed percentage of the network
you can during a pre-sale or pre-mine event
> More people can always join
joininng as validator means convincing another validator to reduce their stake (sell it to you), which is a form of permission.
> You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest
you can't be diluted if you don't sell you stake and continue staking. that's just by definition how PoS works.
> PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.
nope, literally none of it is true.
slashing mechanisms only obfuscate the attack, they don't make it more expensive. in fact they reduce security by virtue of piling more and more rules that require more and more code, which inevitably contains bugs.
threats of supply chain attacks are much less scary than threats of long range attacks from hacked / overtaken private keys of early / current validators.
producing more hardware to counter an attack might be expensive and early iterations of hardware can be inefficient, but at least nobody can stop you from producing it. as i've already explained - if somebody gets a stake in pos system, there is nothing you can do to reduce it.
pos simply doesn't work. it's been known a decade before pow and was just never considered seriously because it's not trustless and permissionless.
I think people care about decentralization only to an extent. They really just want to it to be decentralized enough that the SEC or CFPB won't shut it down. I call this 'plausible decentralization'.
If you try to run an unlicensed exchange without KYC on AWS, you will get shut down pretty quick.
I think the government will look at Solana and say its too complicated to shut down.
That only works as long as the government stays clueless. If Solana or Angorand or whatever gets big enough and the government employs some tech-savvy people to examine it, they'll figure out that there is a subset of blessed validators out there that could be legally compelled to cease and desist and that this would cripple the network.
That wouldn't really work for Bitcoin or other PoW coins. They could shut down big mines and new ones would pop up. Of course they could instead invest a lot in both seizing mines and building their own and 51% the network... that's always a risk and any large enough nation state could do it.
It’s the same for Bitcoin btw. The government can just forbid any VASP to accept bitcoin and to authorize on/off ramp and trades involving bitcoin. ISPs could also block miners and bitcoin websites. The coin is censorship resistant… to a certain extent. Maybe there’ll always be someone running it, and there’ll be a black market for on/off ramp, but it will severely cripple the adoption.
'it will severely cripple the adoption', I'm not sure it's so straightforward as that, if large numbers of governments take an authoritarian stance on independent global currencies is there not a possibility that, while impacting network efficiency, it might underpin a new found desire and need for said independent global currency and instead drive adoption of currencies that have this resilience?
I think it’s worth than that for bitcoin as bitcoin relies on a connected network for security. The risk of forks is too high without that. For other cryptocurrencies based on BFT at least the network would come to a stop and safety wouldn’t be violated (no double spending).
I don't think they really care, especially once they are invested. They may care enough to do minimum research before investing in a token, but once they are invested it is like watching football. Algorand claims to be decentralized, but relies on gatekept relays and a centralized domain. If you bring this up, it is like a cult where how dare you question anything about the coin we've invested in.
A big risk I'm concerned about is say some whistleblower posts some classified material to the Solana Blockchain, that the US government wants removed. Does Solana have the ability to roll back the chain or remove specific pieces of information from it?
If so, where is the line of what they will / won't remove? I fear we get into a Facebook like situation where nobody is happy where that line is drawn. Could legitimate projects be shut down because a government has deemed them illegal because they aren't complying with regulations?
> Does Solana have the ability to roll back the chain or remove specific pieces of information from it?
Well potentially if enough validators forked the chain before the material was added and were able to build a longer chain than the one with the classified material, but even then it would be pointless as the previous chain still exists and will have been distributed to every node.
The question is, why would they want to remove it? Solana is a global blockchain, not a US government entity. If they were to abide by US government requests, it would be only fair to also abide by the requests of other governments - but what if North Korea wanted information removed? As you said, where do we draw the line over what is a "valid" request?
And more importantly, who draws the line? There is no single Solana entity, it is a group of validators who would decide this. Achieving consensus on something like this would never happen, especially among a group of people who are trying to be resistant to government censorship.
> If you try to run an unlicensed exchange without KYC on AWS, you will get shut down pretty quick.
The next step in cryptocurrency technology is to decentralize the exchanges themselves. Ideally it should be impossible to shut them down, regulate them or even understand what's going on. Governments will either give up or become tyrants in the process of fighting increasingly subversive technology. We'll find their limits.
Almost there.. each network has its own decentralized exchange where you can swap and buy tokens. We are just missing contracts for derivatives such as futures and leverage trading.
#3 polygon is a centralized scaling solution. The question should be about decentralized options like rollups. Some examples are arbitrum, optimism, and zksync.
Polygon right now has capped the number of validators at 100, and the protocol atop which it is built (Tendermint/“Peppermint”) only remains fast and cheap if the “active set” of validators remains small. Polygon team have said they will introduce an “auction” mechanism for new validators to join the active set, but one would anticipate that will just favor validators with large stakes (i.e. the existing validator active set). Cosmos/ATOM is the sort of keeper of Tendermint and responsible for the reference implementation and they too cap the validator active set at 125 or 130. Practically speaking none of these L2s are very decentralized. They are fast and cheap which is what most people want but practically pretty centralized...(i.e. project founders and early operators are totally capable of launching 50% or 2/3rds attacks...they probably just don’t want to, and the small “active set” of validators is likely to mostly stay the same). A genuinely decentralized PoS L2 (i.e. can accommodate very large number of validators) that is also fast and cheap is something I’d love to see
You didn't answer any of the questions, especially regarding decentralization. If there's going too be only a handful of validators, then it's as good as a centralized app hosted on AWS. Then how is it facilitating "DeFi", when there's no "De"?
I’ve read a lot about Solana and have considered trying to get a Validator up on their testnet.
I think the concern about centralization of the Solana chain is a real one. I don’t know what to say about the coin distribution in general and frankly that is my biggest concern with Sol. But in regards to validator centralization, I wonder how many validators would be required to assuage these concerns. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Currently there are 632 validators on mainnet Solana with the largest stake holding I see close to 5% (1). Compare that to the ETH mining pools where the top two pools almost have a majority of mining hashrate (2). I’m not trying to make a “whatabout” argument, just pointing out the relative decentralization in comparison to current Eth network.
With regards to the eth2 network, the comparison is a bit more straightforward. If we do a calc of the market cap / #ofvalidators, Sol has about 16M$ market cap per validator. I see 172,920 Eth2 validator deposits (3) so if the Merge happened right now, each validator would represent about 1.7M$ (=300B / 172920). So in this highly oversimplified model, Eth2 has about 10x as many validators as Sol.
This of course means nothing about real world outcomes as you could imagine large staking pools forming and the situation looking more like the BTC or ETH PoW chains with a few large groups dominating either Sol or Eth2
Anyway, for me, that’s actually kind of reassuring. Solana wants to push out more validators but block times are so fast that growing the network has some real technical challenges. If they can overcome those challenges, they’ll be reasonably decentralized with regards to the number of validators, at least compared to ETH.
- ability for the system to run entirely in people's home. Anything that requires datacenters can be easily regulated.
- distributed holdings with no entity holding more than few percent at most.
Solana fails on both, most egregiously on the latter. Only 4.3% of coins were even offered in a public sale. The idea that defi can run on a chain controlled entirely by few VCs is ridiculous. Even Libra would be preferable with their Swiss based Libra Association.
1) Decentralization is a spectrum, BTC -> ETH -> SOL, AWS will be really difficult to get some blockchain properties: permissionless & composability.
For smart contract platforms, imo some level of decentralization can be sacrificed for higher throughput, read more here: https://haseebq.com/why-decentralization-isnt-as-important-a....
2) ETH will be more secure than Solana! Solana requires both higher bandwidth and a beefy machine[1] to run a validator node.
https://solanabeach.io/validators
3) Polygon is both less scalable & controlled by a multi-sig(less decentralized) which is also similar to BSC. Polygon is based on EVM, Solana is BPF/Rust based with some unique set of optimizations like Sealevel[2] which enables parallel processing.
1) ETH bulls say that Solana is not really decentralized. It achieves scalability by limiting the network to only a handful of validators; why not just use AWS at that point? Why are they wrong?
2) ETH bulls say that security of a proof-of-stake is driven by total coin market cap; the more cap, the more expensive an attack. This makes ETH more secure than Solana. ETH has an unbreakable first mover advantage for this reason, they say.
3) ETH bulls say that ETH plus Polygon (or similar level two solution) is just as scalable as solana, while retaining the above two advantages of ETH. Why is that wrong?