Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: The Ethereum Paradox
by
Traxo
on 26/05/2018, 08:52:11 UTC

Ethereum's Casper shit is more of the same proof-of-stake (nothing-at-stake or centralization by economic weight, e.g. DPoS) nonsense. The betting stuff enables what Vitalik refers to as "dark uncles" or "dunkles", which Vitalik incorrectly thinks will solve the nothing-at-stake problem. Also Casper has the problem that all deterministic finality PoS and Byzatine agreement systems have, which is a 33% liveness threshold which if that many validators balk or stop processing, then the chain can't move forward without a hard fork.

Major casper issues have already been solved, i think you're stuck with 2015 infos about casper. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/minimal-slashing-conditions-20f0b500fc6c
https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/simple_casper.v.py
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

Also casper does not assume rational attackers, so if a 51% attack happens in POS, at curent prices, the attackers would have to burn 100-500mil $. In which case they would rather do it now than later because it would cost them 10 times less. With ~30$ mil you can even attack bitcoin.


@anonymint tells me in private chat that Vitalik hasn’t solved anything. Here are some of his initial thoughts:

https://medium.com/@shelby_78386/i-dont-see-how-it-s-plausible-for-parallel-forks-of-the-hash-chain-to-be-finalized-concurrently-cb57afe9dd0a
https://medium.com/@shelby_78386/first-apparently-youre-not-aware-that-the-casper-slasher-design-work-appears-to-be-fundamentally-c2a72d18f5fa
https://medium.com/@shelby_78386/the-caveat-though-is-that-when-the-attacker-can-fork-the-vested-interests-of-some-of-the-users-9340dd037a61
https://medium.com/@shelby_78386/ftfy-for-the-both-to-be-finalized-then-at-least-%E2%85%94-of-the-validator-set-of-the-parent-block-must-6da5da9197cc
https://medium.com/@shelby_78386/my-analysis-of-vitaliks-logic-doesn-t-allow-for-new-stakers-to-restart-the-stalled-chain-91016ee63587

And he says a new blog is coming that will detail many more flaws in the plans for sharding in Ethereum.

I have news for you folks. Vitalik Buterin is not a human being. He is an alien from a galaxy on the other side of the universe. He came here through a portal to save our world.

Again from @anonymint:
"After reviewing the above links, I think you will be sad to learn that Vitalik is human, fallible, and apparently quite inept at designing a new blockchain consensus algorithm."