Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: A(nother) downside to Proof-of-Stake?
by
achimsmile
on 03/11/2014, 19:19:26 UTC
Well I agree with you, it would be nice to have an independent in-dept review on the security of transparent forging. But it doesn't actually change the forging algo, which was reviewed here:
http://www.docdroid.net/ahms/forging0-4-1.pdf.html

and the crypto behind it looks sound (https://gist.github.com/doctorevil/9521116)


The paper you cited doesn't refer to transparent forging algorithm except as a footnote link which shows a forum post where there is a proposed algorithm.

It would be nice if a Whitepaper is available discussing transparent forging in detail otherwise the use of the term is mostly marketing fluff.

No, it means you are too lazy to try out if one can really know the account  that will forge the next block (transparent). I provided you a step by step guide on how to verify. I feel like there's a pudding in front of me and I'm telling you it's there, but you keep your eyes closed and pretend it's not, you wan't to read an abstract first that proofs that the pudding exists.



How does this protect you from 7-12 compromised stakeholders?

It does not, and I never said otherwise. This is a different argument. Thank you for not answering anything to my criticism against the anti-PoS paper. The attack you describe has nothing to do with a technical weakness, but with size of community and distribution.

I'll be fair and calculate which accounts you'd need to compromise:

Current estimated active stake in Nxt is 413,042,354 NXT. Meaning you'd roughly need to control private keys of 207M Nxt at the moment (if inactive holders don't start forging which they probably would if they noticed an attack).
If you're only after the largest stakeholders, you'll need to find out who the following accounts belong to, where they live, and where they store their private keys, and then steal them.


NXT-THLJ-CYAL-JQST-6FNS5
NXT-4GSE-75S2-TVVP-3N2YV
NXT-R3V3-2S79-F3ZM-BVXKZ
NXT-GQPU-UKGD-H89L-EUWFN
NXT-MRBN-8DFH-PFMK-A4DBM
NXT-A2Q2-N6JD-AAEW-GYTT8

Yay, only 6 accounts, pretty easy. Smiley They have a combined amount of 223'155'189. Good luck in finding them (hint, they might use Tor and have their private keys in cold storage hidden anywhere in the world since not all of them are forging).

I think it could be easier to just put a gun to the head of the 3 operators of Discus Fish, Ghash.io and KnC Mining pool. Since BTC is worth way more, this approach would be more profitable.

Disclaimer: I am against any voilence and unethical stuff such as stealing or threatening, both approaches are disgusting.


So you are disagreeing with me and are suggesting a NaS attack is likely?

No.