Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Is Ethereum heading to centralization?
by
TPTB_need_war
on 07/03/2016, 03:30:16 UTC
Check https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/492fse/serenity_poc2_ethereum_blog/d0okwaw and https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/492fse/serenity_poc2_ethereum_blog/d0oik7j, please. Are those centralization concerns legit? I suspect that any real criticism will be shadowbanned on sites controlled by Ethereum marketing team, so I'm asking here.

Add those to the reasons I already explained as to why Ethereum can't scale with shards and thus can't scale without centralization:


The error is here on slides 11 & 12:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CjD0W4l4-CwHKUvfF5Vlps76fKLEC6pIwu1a_kC_YRQ/edit?pref=2&pli=1#slide=id.gd284b9333_0_39

As I predicted:

When will the design details of the new PoS system be shared so we know how they plan to scale?

The plans are sufficiently shared already in the numerous presentations and YouTube videos. I know the limits of the range of choices they can possibly choose from. So I know they are stuck up river without a paddle. They will eventually realize this, and then either they will try to shoehorn some crap that creates a Prisoner's Dilemma and breaks Nash equilibrium (such as "transaction receipts") and/or [...]

Again a receipt instead of every validator validating breaks the Nash equilibrium and creates a Prisoner's Dilemma:

I will repeat again for the 10th time in this thread. Every validator must be able to validate the entire history of the lineage of transactions for the shard that validator is responsible for. Otherwise that validator can't be sure it is not going to lose its funds (i.e. electricity for PoW or deposit for the proposed consensus-by-betting) because it approved an invalid transaction due to some lie in the history as trusted but not validated. Combine this with the impossibility of sharding the gas as explained already to you.


Vitalik has replied to your comment on the page that I linked above,
so there's some bigger game for you.

Thanks. I replied again to Vitalik:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/12/28/understanding-serenity-part-2-casper/#comment-2551146572

Vitalik hasn't replied.


Using a receipt is lowering security by orders of magnitude,correct?

I haven't tried to model it quantitatively. It might be a long-tail distribution, thus maybe they can get away with for a while until there is failure of the Nash equilibrium and perhaps split into multiple forks that refuse to converge.

It is something for them to think about, not me. I wouldn't waste my time with that sort of design flaw. Thus I am not that interested in developing a model of its failure. Limited time and resources to do work that doesn't benefit my goals.

Just to reiterate or resummarize, if a validator of a shard has to trust the validators of other shards (for cross-shard state, e.g. the gas balance from one shard being spent to run a script that resides in another shard) then it creates a game theory which is not a Nash equilibrium but rather a Prisoner's dilemma, because the trusting validator can lose his income if the other validators lied to him (and that includes all blocks downstream from that one). Now one could perhaps reduce the probability of the other validators lying over the short-term by incentivizing them to report each other in exchange for a reward (proof-of-cheating), but I analyzed this for my own design and realized it is flawed and abandoned the idea. Because of several reasons such as those validators have an incentive to become coordinated to cheat (in some game theories whereby they can profit, e.g. shorting the coin), and it is impossible to make the reward more than any possible value that can be gained from cheating, etc...


Also the Dapps look mostly like nonsense or they don't need Turing complete scripts:

Cheesy Cheesy Cheesy

WOW....

all these prediction would be fit perfectly in augur... LOL 

Except that augur is nonsense, because the market is not an accurate prediction paradigm. The market speaks, but after the fact.

I could sell you idiots turds wrapped in a Snicker's bar wrapper and you'd buy it, take it home proudly, and put in your ref for safe storage without ever opening to verify it. Then later when your frig smells like shit, you go searching for some poo and never open the Snicker.

augur more like decentralized betting market,  they want us to bet on everything.  if you look at it that way, it actually make sense.

True. But we can already do that. What augur is trying to do is figure out how to record of the outcomes decentralized. But the problem is that violates the Nash equilibrium (since users have game theories to profit on reporting different outcomes). I don't expect Augur to function decentralized and expect it to diverge into chaotic disorder unless they centralize control of the recording of the outcomes (in which case they've accomplished nothing). Bitshares is centralized which enables using a price feed for the BitUSD algorithm.

There is a lot of bullshit floating around in this forum.