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... Think about it, the world isn't ready yet to adopt a simple money transfer feature of bitcoin, not to mention more complex features like smart contracts. Smart contracts might be useful a few years in the future, not now.

+1440

Anyone read this yet?

http://bitfury.com/content/4-white-papers-research/2-proof-of-stake-vs-proof-of-work/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf

Anyone read this yet?

http://bitfury.com/content/4-white-papers-research/2-proof-of-stake-vs-proof-of-work/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf

https://twitter.com/MagicNxt/status/649516436096946176 

... shed any light on the things they actually sáy?

- here was mthcl's reaction on one of the things:

... сначала на меня наехали ("Анализ (4), проведенный в белой книге Nxt [14] недостаточно убедителен"), а потом пришли к тем же выводам, только более криворуким способом.   

which translates to

first they accused me ("The analysis of (4) performed in the Nxt white paper [14] is not entirely convincing"), and then came to the same conclusions, but with a very crooked way.

As I read it, they are only using Bitcoin to prove their arguments that PoW, as a system, is safe, because of the huge network behind the blockchain. An attack is posible but not likely/feasible because of the enormous amounts of money and/or recourses needed to attack it.

But smaller PoW coins do not have the advantage of a huge network securing it, so it wouldn't take huge systems and/or a lot of money to attack those, would it?

So though their argument may hold for BTC, I don't find them very convincing in proving that PoW in itself is as safe as they claim.

And I do think most people actually agree PoS (still) has it's flaws, they're not lying there, but people/devs are actively trying to find solutions to counter those.

But I'm no expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong. 

Quote from: Damelon on October 02, 2015, 10:53:07 am

I think we are doing ourselves a disservice by just pushing things away that we don't like. 

We are always like this , not only to POS&POW dispute,but also for other competitive coins,such as BTS,ETH,BTC ...

Seems to me Damelon probably means that we don't even try to defend ourselves.

People say NXT is not secure, we don't argue or try to disprove said statement, so third parties must believe it's true, and as a result don't invest in NXT, because investing in NXT means you will probably lose all your money in some network attack...

Quote

As Vitalik Buterin puts it '[A]ll “pure” proof-of-stake systems are ultimately permanent nobilities where the members of the genesis block allocation always have the ultimate say. No matter what happens ten million blocks down the road, the genesis block members can always come together and launch an alternate fork with an alternate transaction history and have that fork take over.'

Which I suppose is correct.

But that's not correct. Why does the fork have to take over?

First of all, it'll be super hard to create that fork. Second of all, why will everyone follow that fork? If an attack is made, can't devs make a hardfork to avoid that fork. Third, it seems to me there are many possible solutions (economic clustering being one, I can think of other possibilities but I'm not an expert) but because this fork attack is super impractical (how to get all the original keys) it doesn't seem worth it to put large amounts of effort into combating it right now.

Also, proof of work has many giant insurmountable problems which have surfaced due to the massive mining infrastructure required.  Proof of Stake solves most of the proof of work problems, but ends up having a potential security issue. Instead of looking to solve this issue (BCNxt, kushti, Buterin, Suuny King have all looked at proof of stake and seen it as solvable) proof-of-work aficionados just throw up their hands and immediately say "Impossible, we must go back to wasting gazillions of electricity". Instead of weighting up "gazillions of electricity forever+other problems" vs "security issue" and saying, let's put some effort into solving the security issue. That's how Buterin ultimately came around to choosing proof of stake.

Also, seems disingenuous to use a quote from Buterin when he has gone back (somewhat) on his original thoughts and now thinks that proof of stake is the best option.

Quote from: Cassius on October 02, 2015, 11:19:26 am

Quote

As Vitalik Buterin puts it '[A]ll “pure” proof-of-stake systems are ultimately permanent nobilities where the members of the genesis block allocation always have the ultimate say. No matter what happens ten million blocks down the road, the genesis block members can always come together and launch an alternate fork with an alternate transaction history and have that fork take over.'

Which I suppose is correct.

But that's not correct. Why does the fork have to take over?

First of all, it'll be super hard to create that fork. Second of all, why will everyone follow that fork? If an attack is made, can't devs make a hardfork to avoid that fork. Third, it seems to me there are many possible solutions (economic clustering being one, I can think of other possibilities but I'm not an expert) but because this fork attack is super impractical (how to get all the original keys) it doesn't seem worth it to put large amounts of effort into combating it right now.

Also, proof of work has many giant insurmountable problems which have surfaced due to the massive mining infrastructure required.  Proof of Stake solves most of the proof of work solutions, but ends up having a potential security issue. Instead of looking to solve this issue (BCNxt, kushti, Buterin, Suuny King have all looked at proof of stake and seen it as solvable) proof-of-work aficionados just throw up their hands and immediately say "Impossible, we must go back to wasting gazillions of electricity". Instead of weighting up "gazillions of electricity forever+other problems" vs "security issue" and saying, let's put some effort into solving the security issue. That's how Buterin ultimately came around to choosing proof of stake.

Also, seems disingenuous to use a quote from Buterin when he has gone back (somewhat) on his original thoughts and now thinks that proof of stake is the best option.

Is it not true to say that the ~70 original NXT stakeholders could do whatever they wanted with the network? Yes, you'd have to get them together and yes, they'd kill it and it's wildly impractical and almost pointless but...

No, the genesis block stakeholders can no longer do anything to harm the network. The rolling 720 blocks checkpoints protect the nodes that are up to date from switching to such alternative fork, and the hardcoded checkpoints done at each code hardfork, the last one being at block 445000, protect the nodes that start downloading the blockchain from scratch.

Quote from: Cassius on October 02, 2015, 10:30:34 am

Quote from: Damelon on October 02, 2015, 10:29:19 am

Anyone read this yet?

http://bitfury.com/content/4-white-papers-research/2-proof-of-stake-vs-proof-of-work/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf

Quote from: Cassius on October 01, 2015, 09:13:23 am

Quote from: LiQio on October 01, 2015, 09:00:53 am

Just stumbled across this PDF:
http://bitfury.com/content/4-white-papers-research/2-proof-of-stake-vs-proof-of-work/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf

The conclusion is of course no surprise 
But maybe someone can use it for something.

TL;DR: A business that relies on PoW supports PoW.
I am shocked, I tell you.

OK, moving on AWAY from the traditional knee jerk reaction of "they don't like PoS", can anyone shed any light on the things they actually sáy?

I think we are doing ourselves a disservice by just pushing things away that we don't like. 

Here's the thing, people will believe what they want.

I know from experience, with over 90% of Scientists show via studies and data that global warming is happening and it IS cause by mans actions. Yet, there are still is a large percentage of people (in the US at least) that still don't "believe" it. The listen to Poloticians, Talking Heads, etc... and point to that as proof that the science is wrong.

What makes this worse is that Cryto is MATH. And people don't like math, I mean "MATH IS HARD" as Barbie said. What's worse is that while Crypto is BASED on math it is very hard to prove attacks and such since you can never create a "test" network with the number of nodes the production network has on it.

The bottom line is, to attack the NXT (or pretty much any PoS coin) you need to OWN a large amount of that coin. In order to do that, (unless you can hack a lot of people that keep their passphrases in a text file), you have to buy it. When you start buying it the price will climb quickly. Could you buy and own more than 50% of NXT? Maybe. But, once you've spent that much money to do it your only hurting yourself. Is it worth spending $100million (just some fantasy amount) to kill NXT?

So yea, bottom line, people will believe what they want to believe no matter how many facts and mathematical and scientific studies by reputable people show otherwise.