Stellar blockchain explorer
Announcing World Trade Francs: The Official Ethereum Stablecoin 01st April, Ethereum scalability research and development subsidy programs 02nd January, Proof of stake continues to be one of the most controversial discussions in the cryptocurrency space. As it turns out, however, the problems are solvable, and one can make a rigorous argument that proof of stake, with all its benefits, can be made to be successful — stellar blockchain explorer at a moderate cost.
The purpose of this post will be to explain exactly what this cost is, and how its impact can be minimized. The purpose of a consensus algorithm, in general, is to allow for the secure updating of a state according to some specific state transition rules, where the right to perform the state transitions is distributed among stellar blockchain explorer economic set.
An economic set is a stellar blockchain explorer of users which can be given the right to collectively perform transitions via some algorithm, and the important stellar blockchain explorer that the economic set used for consensus needs to have is that it must be securely decentralized — meaning that no single actor, or colluding set of actors, can take up the majority of the set, even if the actor has a fairly large amount of capital and financial incentive.
So far, we know of three securely decentralized economic sets, and each economic set corresponds to a set of consensus algorithms:. Proof of work has a nice property that makes it much simpler to design effective algorithms for it: Double-voting, including double-voting where the second vote is made many years after the first, is unprofitablem since it requires you to split your mining power among the different votes; the dominant strategy is always to put your mining power exclusively on the fork that you think is most likely to win.
With proof of stake, however, the situation is different. Although inclusion into the economic set may be costly although as we will see it not always isvoting is free. Note that there is one argument for why it might not make sense for a user to vote on one fork in a proof-of-stake environment: Unfortunately, altruism-prime cannot be relied on exclusively, because the value of coins arising from protocol integrity is a public good and will thus be undersupplied eg.
In the case of a distribution equivalent to the Ethereum genesis block, depending on how you estimate the probability of each user being pivotal, the required quantity of bribes would be equal to somewhere between 0. However, altruism-prime is still an important concept that algorithm designers should keep in mind, so as to take maximal advantage of in stellar blockchain explorer it works well. If we focus our attention specifically on short-range forks — forks lasting less than some number of blocks, perhapsthen there actually is stellar blockchain explorer solution to the nothing at stake problem: In order to be eligible to receive a reward for voting on a block, the user must put down a security deposit, and if the user is caught either voting on multiple forks then a proof of that transaction can be put into the original chain, taking the reward away.
Hence, voting for only a single fork once again becomes the dominant stellar blockchain explorer. This makes analysis substantially simpler, as it removes the need to pre-select voters many blocks in advance to prevent probabilistic double-voting strategies, although it does have the cost that users may be unwilling to sign anything if there are two alternatives of a block at a given height.
If we want to give users the option to sign in such circumstances, stellar blockchain explorer variant of logarithmic scoring rules can be used see here for more detailed investigation. For the purposes of this discussion, Slasher 1. The reason why this only works for short-range forks is simple: One class of strategies that attempt to deal with this is making the deposit permanent, but these approaches have a problem of their own: A nobility model may stellar blockchain explorer be precisely the correct approach for special-purpose ephemeral blockchains that are meant to die quickly eg.
One class of approaches stellar blockchain explorer solving the problem is to combine the Slasher mechanism described above for short-range forks with a backup, transactions-as-proof-of-stake, for long range forks. However, this hybrid approach has a fundamental flaw: Does every user setting up their own node.
Even without black markets, a proof of stake system would forever be under the threat of the individuals that originally participated in the pre-sale and had a share of genesis block issuance eventually finding each other and coming together to launch a fork. However, we can get around this fundamental barrier with a slight, stellar blockchain explorer nevertheless fundamental, change in the security model.
Although there are many ways to categorize consensus algorithms, the division that we will focus on for the rest of this discussion is the following. First, we will provide the two most common paradigms today:.
Systems that use social networks as their consensus set eg. Ripple are all necessarily subjective; a new node that knows nothing but the protocol and the data can be convinced by an attacker that their nodes are trustworthy, and without reputation there is no way to deal with that attack. Proof of work, on the other hand, is objective: Under this model, we can clearly see how proof of stake works perfectly fine: Long-range attacks are no longer a problem, for the trivial reason that we have simply said that long-range forks are invalid as part of the protocol definition.
Another weakly subjective scoring method is exponential subjective scoringdefined as follows:. Essentially, we explicitly penalize forks that come later.
ESS has the property that, unlike more naive approaches at subjectivity, it mostly avoids permanent network splits; if the time between the first node on the network hearing about block B and the last node on the network hearing about block B is an interval stellar blockchain explorer k blocks, then a fork is unsustainable unless the lengths of the two forks remain forever within roughly k percent of each other if that is the case, then the differing gravities of the forks will ensure that half of the network will forever see one fork as higher-scoring and the other half will support the other fork.
N being small in exchange for a rapid ascent to very high degrees of stellar blockchain explorer ie. So what would a world powered by weakly subjective consensus look like? First of all, nodes that are always online would be fine; in those cases weak subjectivity is by definition equivalent to objectivity. Nodes that pop online once in stellar blockchain explorer while, or at least once every N blocks, would also be fine, because they would be able to stellar blockchain explorer get an updated state of the network.
However, new nodes joining the network, and nodes that appear online after a very long time, would not have the consensus algorithm reliably protecting them. Fortunately, for them, the solution is simple: They will then be able to securely update their view of the current state from there. However, this logic ignores why consensus algorithms exist in the first place. Consensus is a social process, and human beings are fairly stellar blockchain explorer at engaging in consensus on our own without any help from algorithms; perhaps the best example is the Rai stoneswhere a tribe in Yap essentially maintained a blockchain recording changes to the ownership of stones used as a Bitcoin-like zero-intrinsic-value asset as part of its collective memory.
The reason why consensus algorithms are needed is, quite simply, because humans do not have infinite computational powerand prefer to rely on software agents to maintain consensus for us. Software agents are very smart, in the sense that they can maintain consensus on extremely large states stellar blockchain explorer extremely complex rulesets with perfect precision, but they are also very ignorant, in the sense that they have very little social information, and the challenge of consensus algorithms is that of creating an algorithm that requires as little input of social information as possible.
Weak subjectivity is exactly the correct solution. It solves the long-range problems with proof of stake by relying on human-driven social information, but leaves to a consensus algorithm the role of increasing the speed of consensus from many weeks to twelve seconds and of allowing the use of highly complex rulesets and a large state.
The role of human-driven consensus is relegated to maintaining consensus on block hashes over long periods of time, something which people are perfectly good at.
Stellar blockchain explorer hypothetical oppressive government which is powerful enough to actually cause confusion over the true value of a block hash from one year ago would also be powerful enough to overpower any proof of work algorithm, or cause confusion about the rules of blockchain protocol.
Note that we do not need to fix N; theoretically, we can come up with an algorithm that allows users to keep their deposits locked down for longer than N blocks, and users can then take advantage of those deposits to get a much more fine-grained reading of their security level.
An increasing interest rate curve can be used stellar blockchain explorer incentivize longer-term deposits over shorter ones, or for simplicity we can just rely on altruism-prime. One objection to long-term deposits is that it incentivizes users to stellar blockchain explorer their capital locked up, stellar blockchain explorer is inefficient, the exact same problem stellar blockchain explorer proof of work.
However, there are four counterpoints to this. First, marginal cost is not total cost, and the ratio of total cost divided by marginal cost is much less for proof of stake than proof of work. Additionally, different users have very different preferences for how willing they are to lock up capital. Stellar blockchain explorer of these two factors put together, regardless of what the equilibrium interest rate ends up being, the vast majority of the capital will be locked up at far below marginal cost.
Second, locking up capital is a private cost, but also a public good. The presence of locked up capital means that there is less money supply available for transactional purposes, and so stellar blockchain explorer value of the currency will increase, redistributing the capital to everyone else, creating a social benefit.
Third, stellar blockchain explorer deposits are a very safe store of value, so i they substitute the use of money as a personal crisis insurance tool, and ii many users will be able to take out loans in the same currency collateralized by the security deposit. Finally, because proof of stake can actually take away deposits for misbehaving, and not just rewards, it is capable of achieving a level of security much higher than the level of rewards, whereas in stellar blockchain explorer case of proof of work the level of security can only equal the level of rewards.
Fortunately, there is a way to test those assumptions: Users will not act against their own interests, so we can stellar blockchain explorer use the quantity of funds spent on consensus as a stellar blockchain explorer for how much inefficiency the consensus algorithm introduces; if proof of stake has a reasonable level of security at a much lower reward level than proof of work, then we know that proof of stake is a more efficient consensus mechanism, and we can use the levels of participation at different reward levels to get an accurate idea of the ratio between total cost and marginal cost.
Ultimately, it may take years to get an exact idea of just how large the capital lockup costs are. Altogether, we now know for certain that i proof of stake algorithms can be made secure, and weak subjectivity is both sufficient and necessary as a fundamental change in the security model to sidestep nothing-at-stake concerns to accomplish this goal, and ii there are substantial economic reasons to believe that proof of stake actually is much more economically efficient than proof of work.
Proof of stake is not an unknown; the past six months of formalization and research have determined exactly where the strengths and weaknesses lie, at least to as stellar blockchain explorer extent as with proof of work, where mining centralization uncertainties may well forever abound.
Does this is any away affect autonomous agents? In the end human beings need to define the trust lines between them e. One part of the answer would be identifying classes of agents. The creator of the autonomous agent will provide a trusted hash at the start. From that point on, the autonomous agent will just need to take care to be online at least once every security deposit interval.
Security deposit intervals can probably be set as long as 12 months. This was a very helpful article indeed. By the way, there seem to be stellar blockchain explorer in some stellar blockchain explorer the figures.
It looks like stellar blockchain explorer. Do you plan to respond to stellar blockchain explorer comments concerning the decentralized exchange created by PoW? Or to my responses to zack in the comments section of http: What type of friend is that? A friend of 20 of my friends would still be a reliable source so long as that party had a solid reputation among my 20 stellar blockchain explorer.
Finally I want to repeat what Daniel said because to me this is the key to consensus. Blockchains are a social convention that go beyond software.
Consensus is a human construct not a technological one and the software is there merely to aid humans not be fully automatic. Its the combination of the human factor of trusting a reliable party who can convey to me the state of the network stellar blockchain explorer the software factor of the algorithm doing stellar blockchain explorer I cannot do which is index the state of the network and stellar blockchain explorer me to know if any one transaction is valid or not that creates consensus.
I am reading the tendermint whitepaper now and I hope to gain at least a superficial understanding of what stellar blockchain explorer are sharing in this post stellar blockchain explorer a bit more effort and consideration!
One would hope it would be obvious by now: Your second paragraph is nonsensical because the stated purpose behind Blockchain technology is to avoid trusting 3rd parties. Have you wrote the code of BitcoinQT? Ok, have you compiled it for yourself? Yes, ok, have you checked the code of the compiler? How can you trust your hardware? You always have to trust others to some degree. With the proposed Stellar blockchain explorer Version you just need to find a single valid hash from the last year.
Or to paraphrase your words:
Image from Stellar website. The latest Stellar currency giveaway has just started as of a few hours ago. If you held Bitcoin in a wallet on June 26th There's more information in their blog post here Thanks for the info! Looking forward to future posts. Please feel free to check me out and follow back. I Never heard of lumensI did not see bittrex on the list of exchanges so I won't be getting any. How much are they worth? I managed to successfully claim the two addresses I knew had funds on the 26th.
It's true they might be harvesting information, but I don't believe it's a scam. I think the lumens for info is a fair trade, but it is odd that a valid wallet address with funds is not being picked up by their blockchain snapshot.
Have you double checked on a block explorer? Would you mind posting the address? Totally understand if you don't for privacy reasons. I found the problem I inadvertently changed my wallet address inside copay without realising I found the original wallet address so all good hehe.
I'll get around to it today My problems were more "pilot error" with the copay wallet than anything else Thanks for the article and help.
Oh, and please re-steem if you want so everyone can claim their free coins. Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
Scam to collect people's information? Oh, and thanks for the reminder to remove their Facebook app afterwards! Glad you got it sorted! I assume you've got your free Stellar now then?