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RE: Scaling, Decentralization, Security of Distributed Ledgers (part 4)
Hi anonymint, I enjoyed reading your articles & leanrt a lot from it, would you mind sharing your opinions on Komodo's dPoW and Skycoin's Obelisk consensus ?
Komodo’s dPoW
I have a conflict-of-internet on dPoW because I helped @jl777 brainstorm the idea for it but I wasn’t involved in working out the details nor the implementation. I regretfully made some public comments around the time of the ICO launch which might have limited the size of the participation in the ICO and that may have temporarily strained my relationship with @jl777. So I don’t want to repeat that by writing anything about that could cause any damage to it. I have no investment in Komodo though. Actually I personally am only invested in Steem and Bitcoin at the moment so my lack of investment in Komodo shouldn’t be construed to have any meaning. I will just say that dPoW fixes the long-range nothing-at-stake problem of proof-of-stake because it (last time I checked) relies on the Bitcoin blockchain for objectivity (which could become very expensive in the future and I have not analysed what other game theory issues might be introduced by checkpointing in an external chain). That resistance to nothing-at-stake is important. It enables the proof-of-stake to run at low-energy and very fast between checkpoints in the proof-of-work chain. It’s not the way that the project I am contributing to will attempt to fix nothing-at-stake though.
Skycoin’s Obelisk
I will take another look at Skycoin. I had very crudely analyzed their whitepaper some years ago and it basically appeared to use a web-of-trust similar to Stellar SCP which I analyzed in Part 3 of this blog series, so probably the same flaws of Stellar SCP apply. If I have time, I will add some more meticulous analysis to this blog for Obelisk.
EDIT (7 hours later): I have studied Skycoin carefully and I have some positive impressions. I will be adding my analysis to this blog shortly. Skycoin has the most unique innovation I have seen yet. Not the original whitepaper (which was junk) but the recent one by Houwu Chen which is pure gold. The Asians are ready to make their mark on the world!
thank you for the answer
Yw. Added the Skycoin analysis to my blog. Enjoy! Hope it’s helpful.
thank you, your articles are very informative, I'll try to digest all of it, btw I shared your post on Cardano's Ouroboros onCardano's forum and there are some counter arguments https://forum.cardano.org/t/scaling-decentralization-security-of-distributed-ledgers-part-4-steemit/13118
I see he updated his post and I’m happy my elocution is closer to mutual agreement. He still has a few concerns and I would like to address those herein.
I appreciate the following quoted correction to what I had written in 2017 (which was posted on my behalf by @Traxo):
Okay that concurs with for example my recent suggestions in the Proof-of-Approval thread at
bitcointalk.orgfor how to active sufficient liveness by only considering the stake which is activated during an extended interval. That also improves security because we know that stake isn’t moving to new public-key identities during that locked-in interval. So I entirely concur that is a viable mechanism.However, I think his reply about “honest majority” which I excerpted from above as quoted (and his point about different possible thresholds for BFT) is missing the essence of my point. I am referring to the fact that even if the consensus of the current online majority is correct and secure, this does nothing to help the objectivity of the users who were offline and come online and are presented with an unbounded number of forks by the historic safety threshold busting attacker (and note below the safety threshold busting attacker can do insidious attacks instead overt double-spends). These are the “Past Majority Attacks” mentioned in the original Ouroboros whitepaper. IOW, if any time in this history of the chain an attacker had ever attained in excess of the safety threshold control over the total stake, then all bets are off w.r.t. to the objectivity for offline users. This is essentially a nothing-at-stake issue because the historic attacker has no cost to maintain that vulnerability forever even after he long since sold his stake.
Separately I have another concern which is to his point about “honest majority”. As he and I both know, the security of the online majority does not prevent an attacker who exceeds the liveness threshold from making the entire system stuck, nor does it prevent an attacker exceeding the safety threshold from censoring and taking all the rewards in the system (which is the more subtle attack than double-spending). My point is this is the economic incentive (aka economic power vacuum) which drives the formation of an oligarchy in all extant proof-of-stake systems. Also the designs which try to compensate by requiring a super majority to exceed safety tolerance then have only minority liveness tolerance (so more easily stuck).
Those two paragraphs summarize why I do not consider extant proof-of-stake systems viable for the Internet. But don’t fret, I posit that I probably already know to fix those issues.
Yet Charles ignored my attempted communications on
bitcointalk.organd Skype when I was very ill and asked for him to help me out to bring me to Hong Kong in 2016 (from the Philippines where I was trapped in poverty and shitty healthcare system suffering from gut Tuberculosis and not even knowing it, thought I had Multiple Sclerosis) so I could get proper healthcare and then work on his team. Remember Charles and I briefly exchanged messages on Skype to discuss possibly launching a project together after he left Bitshares and before he found Vitalik, but I had to decline because of my declining health in 2013 (which became horrific by 2015). Anyway, due to my hard work even while in horrific delirium and thanks to the kindness of others by 2017 I finally received loans to go to Singapore and they diagnosed my illness and I was undergoing highly liver toxic antibiotic treatment during the entire 2017 and just now finally coming back to the sort of health where I can work effectively. Please tell Charles that Wadler is incorrect about the global canonicity of typeclasses. I will also add that I was critical of WAVES and at the time I thought “Russian scammers” were trying to sell FOMO hype to greater fools. Charles wants to be friends with everyone so presumably he didn’t like my abrasive public comments. But at the time I was trying to figure out how does one launch and finance a project in this industry when ICOs are really illegal but the “Russian scammers” can use jurisdictional arbitrage to get away with it, while we US citizens can’t compete without incriminating ourselves. Also my experience with trying to hire freelance coders from Eastern Europe and Russia had given me a bad impression. Also I was very ill at that time and suffering intensely every minute of every day and was trying to find a way out of the horrific hole I was stuck in, so I suppose I wasn’t in a very good mood. Anyway, since that time I've become more knowledgeable about various options and also met online more people from that side of the world where I’ve never visited. And I have also become bewildered at even the attitudes of developers in my own birth nation. The world has gone insane with social justice, democracy, and socialism nonsense. ← highly recommended to click that link and read! My impression is that Charles seems to subscribe philosophically in some degree to that madness about the anti-pattern named ‘governance’. And obviously so does Dan Larimer. I hope Charles reads this.I will edit my blog again to make it more clear that DFINITY and Ouroboros provably solve the specific aspect of the security and liveness of proof-of-stake within the Byzantine fault tolerance thresholds of the model. Then I will make it more clear that I’m making a separate point that the political-economic power vacuum problem is still not yet solved in any extant published system that I’m aware of. And I will continue my claim that until that political-economic power vacuum issue is resolved, I don’t believe these systems are viable for wide Internet deployment in use cases similar to the abject failure of Steem.