Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Bitcoin's Proof of Work Validated and Vindicated
by
Peter R
on 02/04/2015, 22:20:55 UTC
Im still waiting for you or someone to break it to prove it can be done….

It's already been broken:

Quote from: Andrew Poelstra

From https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/alts.pdf , page 15

Failures. It is not well-advertised, but in fact there has never been an example of a cryptocurrency achieving distributed consensus by proof-of-stake. The prototypical proof-of-stake currency, Peercoin, depends on developer signatures to determine block validity: that is, its consensus is not distributed. The same fate has befallen other nominally-PoS currencies such as Blackcoin. In its initial incarnation, NXT was susceptible to a trivial stake-grinding attack (to be described below) and could not achieve any consensus. Since becoming closed-source17 while spamming technically- illiterate claims at popular conferences, it has fallen out of scope of this document.

In fact, Peercoin was originally intended to drop the developer signatures once stake had been distributed. They attempted this once and were immediately attacked by stake-grinding. They quietly removed their text showing intention to drop developer signatures and added a small PoW to make stake-grinding less trivial.

Finally, it should be mentioned that developer-signed blocks are known in the PoS community as checkpoints. This is a very misleading name because it is already used to describe an anti-denial-of-service measure of Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network; Bitcoin’s checkpoints have nothing whatsoever to do with consensus. Therefore claims by PoS advocates that “Bitcoin has checkpoints too” are simply false.

Without developer-signed blocks, Peercoin is easily attacked; with developer-signed blocks, Peercoin is not decentralized.  

PoS proponents may next argue that by layering some complexity on top of the basic PoS structure, that they've solved this problem too.  Yet they can never seem to rigorously analyze the security of the resulting system.  For example, the Satoshi white paper convincingly shows that "Bitcoin is secure provided at least 51% of the hashing power is honest." What is the analogous statement for PoS or DPoS?  Can that statement be proved?