Quote from: d5000 on August 01, 2024, 07:51:53 PM

I have defended PoS in many debates in the past and still think it has some merits, but after years of discussion my opinion now is that PoW is (unfortunately) superior in most aspects.

I was actually personally very skeptical of PoS at first, mainly due to the potential for long-range attacks. But now it seems to me that at when you dig into the core of the concepts behind PoS and PoW, then they are both just decentralized ledgers that both create a Nash equilibrium in order to prevents cheating in their everyday protocol. And the difference in the core concepts just lies in the fact that for PoS the voting power is directly proportional to the amount of stake you have in the blockchain, whereas for PoW the power is instead distributed according to the hash rate an individual controls (and where the miners of course compete for the privilege to add new blocks and gain rewards). I personally don't see 'weak subjectivity' as ever truly becoming a problem for the consensus on a blockchain like Ethereum. The point is: Why would the Ethereum stakeholders ever allow an attack to finalize for good when that would undermine their currency?

Quote from: d5000 on August 01, 2024, 07:51:53 PM

If computer science advances and finds out that PoS can work without weak subjectivity and thus the PoW superiority paradigm is wrong (probability is very low), and also as an absolute last resort "mitigation strategy" against any large scale 51% attack, Bitcoin could simply change to PoS after the attack (i.e. creating a new chain based on a snapshot based of the old chain 1 block before the attack). This would perhaps be a "capitulation" or assuming that PoW is inferior and could make it lose some value, but a large part of the Bitcoin ecosystem would be able to be retained. Thus it is likely that Ethereum folks would not be able to profit from the attack at all. They would perhaps even be seen as pariahs of the blockchain world and Solana could take over or so Wink

I like this proposition a lot. But I don't see why it wouldn't be even better, perhaps very much so, for the Bitcoin community to try to come to agreement on this in advance. Then it would be seen as much less of a capitulation in the hypothetical event that an attack happens, and it would perhaps not be seen as 'the "little brother," Ethereum, bullying Bitcoin into submission.'

Quote from: d5000 on August 01, 2024, 07:51:53 PM

Yes, I'm speculating wildly now myself, but you have not done different in this thread. As a "researcher", you should not speculate but try to find evidence, and you should be neutral regarding the result, not trying to prove a point. I would even say that in this thread you're not behaving like a researcher but like a random Ethereum shill.

Since the topic of the discussion is the security of Bitcoin, it is okay to speculate about what could potentially happen. It is also okay to speculate the other way around in order to discuss why a risk might not be very high, as you do, but then you just have to make sure, at the end of the discussion, that you haven't accidentally based your conclusion that Bitcoin is safe and secure on some speculative assumptions that you made along the way. That would be a poor security strategy.

But this doesn't mean that too speculative assumptions don't need to be called out on both sides, and you are free to call mine out if you can point to some; at the end of the day, we have to assess together what is probable and what is not, on both sides of the argument.

(And I don't see how I behave like a shill, I very much beg you to differ on that point. I'm trying to discuss a potential security risk of Bitcoin, and when almost everyone here has so far tried to argue that there is nothing to worry about, then that requires me to argue the position that the risk might be real. Otherwise it would be a moot and boring discussion, wouldn't it?)

Quote from: d5000 on August 01, 2024, 07:51:53 PM

Quote from: mjdamgaard on July 31, 2024, 12:17:03 PM

In regards to the potential for an attack on Ethereum, see my recent Reply #51. I don't believe that Bitcoin would even be able to retaliate, and the other PoS blockchains pose a much lesser threat, to say the least.

In this reply you argumented that Bitcoin (whales) would not attack Ethereum because it could only profit from a low "market share". For smaller PoS coins, the opposite would be true. Several whales of distinct "Ethereum killer" chains could even unite to take Ethereum's throne. Tongue

Yes, I can't quite see how Ethereum stakeholders will be able to profit from attacking themselves? Especially since it seems that other stakeholders would just subsequently vote to revert the attack. And since the voting power is already distributed according to PoS, this would not be a capitulation on Ethereum's part. (In fact, they already seem to state that they intend to do so in case of an attack.)

Quote from: d5000 on August 01, 2024, 07:51:53 PM

And I repeat: "Market cap" is not the same as "sales".

Sales? Bitcoin and Ethereum are a currencies. Their worth is, in principle, equal to the perceived value of each BTC, in case of Bitcoin, times the amount of BTC in circulation. Now, you might speculate that there currently is a minority of investors/buyers who perceive the value of Ether to be more than others, and that these are somehow able to set the tone for the pricing, which would mean that the price would be more than it actually is. (And if you then were to take a short position on Ethereum, you would become a wealthy person, given that you have something to invest in that venture.) But at the end of the day, the market cap is representative of what the (tone-setting) buyers currently perceive the value of the cryptocurrency to be.

Every single Ethereum stakeholder believes that their Ether is worth its price, or more. Otherwise the would sell it, the price would drop slightly, in theory, and the same proposition would be true once again. If a Goldfinger attack against Bitcoin causes the price to rise 100% or more, then each Ethereum stakeholder will by that time believe their Ether to be worth that much as well.

Please, if I'm overlooking some advanced and profound mechanism that makes this proposition untrue (and I am admittedly not an economist), do correct me.