Global high-performance proof-of-stake blockchain with erasure coding

https://github.com/qkniep/alpenglow

by lawrenceyan • 1 year ago

36 105 1 year ago

github.com

Animats• 1 year ago

Proof of stake: Government of the rich, for the rich, by the rich.

Can't anybody do better?

drdeca2• 1 year ago

Ruling is done by rulers, and the people who have lots of power are the powerful people. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

If we have no way to determine whether two accounts are held by the same person, so that influence can only be determined by what one has, then it should behave the same pattern I would think.

packetlost• 1 year ago

Yes. Proof of Logits.

weregiraffe• 1 year ago

You can use weapons. Let's call it Proof of Ammo.

tonyhart7• 1 year ago

but that just how life goes

wmf2• 1 year ago

Proof of Eyeball —sama

sph6• 1 year ago

Yes, see the Bitcoin white paper ;)

kinakomochidayo3• 1 year ago

I don’t think Bitcoin whitepaper talks about ASIC monopoly and economies of scale :D

bawolff3• 1 year ago

Depends on what properties you want your system to have. For some properties yes, for others no.

Of course anyone can come up with something new at any time.

everfree20• 1 year ago

Proof of stake isn't a government, it's a network time protocol.

up2isomorphism• 1 year ago

Proof of stake is exactly a scam.

drdeca2• 1 year ago

You seem to be using the word “scam” in an unusual way. What do you mean by it?

bracketfocus• 1 year ago

What’s with the hate for proof-of-stake? Seems like the hate is directed towards the fact that those have more to stake, benefit more.

Can’t the same argument be made about proof-of-work? Those who have the ability to buy more compute, also benefit more.

Instead of buying GPUs/ASICs for mining you’re buying into the network you’re trying to secure.

wmf2• 1 year ago

I suspect it's tribalism with layers of rationalizations on top.

sph6• 1 year ago

Capital (stake) can be accumulated infinitely, without friction, and usually the more you have the more its value accelerates upwards.

Work can be increased, certainly, but you pretty much hit major physical blocks to its increase, whether it’s productivity, lack of capital, energy costs, competition finding new ways to do the same work for less cost.

Really, the parallels to real world wealth disparity are reflected in why proof-of-stake is just a bad idea, unless you are one of the “1%” of crypto mining, then you just have to sit and wait for your stake to increase indefinitely. Then why not lend it for interest? You can get it to grow even faster. Whoops, we have reinvented the global economy and the wealth disparity.

D13Fd3• 1 year ago

With proof-of-work, we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels on a warming planet just to ensure people don’t cheat at various distributed spreadsheets. Even if you don’t participate in crypto, those who do are polluting your environment, increasing your electricity costs, and generally making the planet worse all to run their distributed spreadsheets

With proof-of-stake, all of the annoying crypto folk are basically harmless. They generate near zero economic value (moving money from place to place, which can be accomplished without crypto) but they don’t hurt anybody except for other crypto folk.

Mistletoe• 1 year ago

It’s just ignorance pure and simple. Proof of stake means you don’t enrich chipmakers and electric companies on the way to your security.

proxynoproxy23• 1 year ago

Nah you just enrich the founders who did nothing except print all the tokens out of nothing. PoS is worthless, it came from nothing, it is worth nothing.

proxynoproxy23• 1 year ago

Because it’s not external referencing. It’s all on chain, and any external price of tokens is all in humans minds. Of course, true of Bitcoin too. However, energy is the external thing that links time and computation to the chain data. Really, Bitcoin PoW is an amazing discovery. Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database.

Bitcoin through Proof of Work is a global computational one-way valve for a ledger, which enables a fuzzy decentralized time, by which we can enforce digital scarcity! The ledger record becomes the digital commodity. What an age!

Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc. it’s not really different than 26 banks doing the same. And really you have to ask yourself about the purpose of any of this if you are trading 26 banks for 26 dudes in a discord.

keeganpoppen• 1 year ago

Bitcoin proof of work is both the sine qua non and the ne plus ultra of the entire sphere… and i say this as an enjoyer of all the fancy math et al. in the space. it is genuinely a monumental achievement… one whose value… is indeterminate (at best; and worst). and i wouldn’t dare opine on that point, because i’m “from Switzerland” on this. but that it opened a mathemeatical pandora’s box is undeniable. when i read the original Bitcoin paper (about a year after publication) i was suffused with the feeling that something fundamental was “discovered” in a way i’ve only felt a handful of times in my entire life… (and then i spent all my BTC on drugs)

throwaway2903• 1 year ago

PoW is supported by two things, belief that waste of energy is valuable and criminals using it to workaround sanctions.

everfree20• 1 year ago

Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database.

Proof of Work is much more self-serving than Proof of Stake, as it demands external expenditures to keep itself running. PoS can perform the same job (running a blockchain) without demanding that the world drop what it's doing to contribute electricity to one massive global tragedy of the commons.

Being self-referential is a beneficial feature, not a bug.

Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc.

That's where Proof of Work ends up, not Proof of Stake. PoW's economies of scale always eventually result in a network controlled by a handful of massive mining operations running at razor-thin margins. The "26 dudes in discord" that people talk about are the CEOs of large mining warehouses with custom chips that make it impossible for home miners to break even.

In contrast, with a well-designed Proof of Stake system, people can contribute by staking at home and running mini-PCs in closets at edge locations. It has the potential to remain a much more grassroots network with less concentration of wealth, if the initial distribution is relatively fair. There is no economy of scale and ideally no concentration of wealth over time - as everyone earns the same percent returns in staking.

runeks3• 1 year ago

With proof-of-stake, an attacker compromising a majority of private keys results in the attacker taking control of the blockchain. The attacker could publish only empty blocks using this stake majority, and there'd be no way to distinguish these malicious valid blocks from actually useful blocks.

This makes proof-of-stake inherently less secure than proof-of-work because for PoW blockchains, consensus is not affected by compromising private keys.

bawolff3• 1 year ago

Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute.

For a smaller chain, purchasing a lot of compute sounds easier than hacking everyone's keys. Not to mention if you can hack someone's private key, surely you can hack their server farm

(Fwiw, i think both have a similar level of risk, its just coming from different threats)

everfree20• 1 year ago

I think it would be much easier for e.g. state actors to take control of a few of the world's PoW mining locations than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.

someone2352• 1 year ago

Btw, this is one of the reasons they wanted to revert the DaoHack - they didn't want a malicious entity to hold 5% of the stake

someone2352• 1 year ago

If someone has 30% of the stake, he can keep his share forever if he wants to. If someone has 30% of the hash power he has to keep innovating and keep up with the competition to keep his share. This kind of dynamics makes PoW permissionless, since you don't need cooperation from other miners in order of joining the game.

everfree20• 1 year ago

To join a PoW chain as a profitable miner, you need cooperation from a chip fabrication factory, a local courier, your local government (customs), and your local electricity company, at minimum.

To join a PoS chain as a profitable staker, all you need cooperation from is literally one person anywhere in the world who wants to sell you some of their coins. Then you can stake on commodity hardware.

tetrisgm3• 1 year ago

Genuinely asking: do people here still care about blockchain? I used to work in the space, I’m not trying to be nasty. Just that it seems the interest has vanished

0xOsprey• 1 year ago

Yes

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/04/stripe-closes-1point1-billio...

https://cointelegraph.com/news/tether-us-treasury-holdings-s...

crq-yml• 1 year ago

There's a quiet rumbling left over and doing more background development, trading is still taking place. The major impasse is really with "what's the framing for this invention now" - the invention is still interesting but it isn't a good technology until you have established a motive to depend on it at scale.

The flood gates are opening to do things with blockchains again in the US, although the motive for that is "more scams".

tetrisgm3• 1 year ago

It feels like they are still searching for demand and a use case. Having made a lot of tech in the space and in ipfs, I find that all the things it’s good at are just more readily accepted when in web2

ycui1986• 1 year ago

it is because we are not at the top of this bull market. When crypto hits Hacker News front page every other day, then you it is the peak of the bull cycle. Happened every time in all past cycles.

proxynoproxy23• 1 year ago

I don’t think this is anything like past cycles. Blackrock and Nations be playing this time. Stack accordingly.

sph6• 1 year ago

It’s all AI these days. In 10 years we’ll ask the same question about LLMs when we have all moved on to **

munksbeer5• 1 year ago

Completely disagree. I'm a long term bitcoin holder but as interesting as the original bitcoin whitepaper and game theory mechanisms are, it still feels like technology looking for a problem to solve.

LLMs and their generative variants are far more mind blowing. It is kind of pointless to get into another debate about use cases, because that has already been done a lot, but people are producing actual real world output right now with these tools. Right now, they are at the worst they will ever be.

Obviously you don't have to agree with me, but I think you are 100% incorrect about this technology. It may not exactly be LLMs in a strict definition that we interact with in 10 years, but it will be derivatives.

csomar2• 1 year ago

The bubble has popped and the euphoria has tuned down. However, the stable coins market is a $1-2trillion market (https://defillama.com/stablecoins), so there is still a long way to go/grow. Other cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum will continue to exist. Bitcoin mainly as an asset against the stable and Ethereum as a network to process defi transactions (you can exchange stable coins for crypto without an exchange now).

veqq• 1 year ago

Bubble popped? Bitcoin is right at its all time high, about $110,000.

palmfacehn• 1 year ago

There are still interesting use cases for blockchain based applications and payments. I'm not sure that these uses justify the current valuations. Similar things can be said about traditional financial markets or momentum driven stocks.

Cryptocurrency markets exists on the extreme end of over-financialization. Bubbles and financial mania are not unique to blockchain tech. Pets.com would be another example. These things exist downstream from easy money policies.

Most of the hyper-grifters have pivoted to AI + blockchain hype.

bawolff3• 1 year ago

Hype cycles always eventually die down. The true test of a technology is whether it survives the post-hype low point or slowly fades away. Time will tell which one blockchain is.

theywillnvrknw• 1 year ago

I am hoping we (humans) can build self sustaining economies around high throughput blockchains like this one - https://internetcomputer.org/

flakeoil• 1 year ago

Most replies relate to crypto, but blockchains can be used for so many other applications than crypto coins.

tetrisgm3• 1 year ago

In theory. That’d be just a slow but decentralized database. I think people have yet to come up with a product that has demand and uses this idea

Flemlo• 1 year ago

Someone wanted to fix block chains now we have one more problem XD

Btw to add content: exchang between block chains is not a solved problem. Adding more doesn't help

Global high-performance proof-of-stake blockchain with erasure coding

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