[Cryptography] Proof of Work is the worst way to do a BlockChain

[Ersin Taskin]

2018-02-06 18:49 GMT+03:00 Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at hallambaker.com>:

> ​https://medium.com/@hallam/proof-of-work-is-the-worst-
> way-to-do-a-blockchain-ff3e0c802049​
>
> Proof of Work is the worst way to do a BlockChain ...
>
2018-02-07 2:38 GMT+03:00 <jamesd at echeque.com>:

> On 06/02/2018 23:49, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>
>> But no, the BitCoiners insist. We must obsess about this one particular
>> threat to the exclusion of all else because gubermints and the bankers are
>> evul and untrustworthy
>>
>
> Actually governments and bankers are evil and untrustworthy, and the
> burdens of using trust mediated by bankers and governments to do business
> are rapidly becoming intolerable.  Accounting and HR have become vast and
> onerous bureaucracies, burdensome tentacles of the state in every business,
> making businesses larger than a family and smaller than giant multinational
> corporation with a skyscraper full of Harvard lawyers each drawing $300 per
> hour, increasingly impractical
>
> and we should instead trust the security of a scheme with a hole big
>> enough to swallow it whole.
>>
>
> Yes, proof of work is a terrible idea.
>
> But we need to replace it with something better than bankers and
> government.
>
> I have been working on it, but the result always implies pre-mining, that
> existing owners of currency are like shareholders in an existing business,
> which is politically unpopular right now, though I may well go right ahead
> with it anyway.




I am working on a protocol called Proof of Prophecy to kill PoW/PoS etc. in
the crypto asset context as you may have read on several posts of mine,
recently. However, I am a professional developer, prisoned to coding on
another domain by the company I founded, all day/everyday because of our
tight schedules which got tighter for my PoP paper work. I had recently
decided to stop following this list which seduces me to my PoP paper. I had
to prohibit myself Gmail access to resist the temptation of the list. This
morning I came early to the office. Took my espresso and could not resist
opening my Gmail with the seducing hope of finding something cursing at PoW
and the trolling fanaticism of the cyrpto world: BINGO!!!



Please kindly read my posts about DAG, Proof of Prophecy protocol,
decentralization, etc. Please note that I had been heavily criticizing
Bitcoin/PoW/PoS/etc. when the market cap was rising tremendously. A summary
of my thoughts is repeated below:


2018-01-29 0:37 GMT+03:00 Ersin Taskin <hersintaskin at gmail.com>:

> Pow, pos, dpos, etc. all have the same problem when it comes to security.
> When you are in the ocean, you cannot anchor to something made of or
> convertible to water. If you anchor to an iceberg, the attackers just melt
> it. In a financial system, you cannot anchor to anything made of or
> convertible to money. Pos, pow, etc suffer because stake is made of
> money, electricity is convertible to money. So all the cryptocurrencies are
> vulnerable to a super-rational attack involving enough stake/power. I call
> this the AR Theorem (Anchorlessness-Robustness) in my paper. I show that
> you cannot achieve both Anchorlessness and Robustness at the same time. I
> define Robustness with components like efficiency, super-rational attack
> resilience, etc. Funnily, we have an anchorage that we amazingly ignore. An
> anchorage you cannot buy, bribe, corrupt. An anchorage that everybody on
> this list trust. An anchorage that can be used to randomly create and use
> secret keys that secures the system. It is right there next to us. We just
> don't see it because we don't raise our heads. And we keep paying an
> amazingly huge technical debt to get vulnerable and poor systems:) This is
> a manifestation of the importance of skepticism, the fuel of science. Zero
> tolerance to fanaticism. We, the scientists, should never give up being
> skeptical about the things that we believe the most. That is the essence of
> paradigm shifts, which brought humanity here, whose frequency needs to
> increase.
>


Let me put down some bullet points from my work, which I hope to share with
you guys hopefully soon:



1. PoW can be good to fight against SPAM/DOS attacks where you distribute
the load to the endpoint/user rather than concentrate it on the system. So
a tiny load per sender of the mail/request instead of a huge amount of load
on the shoulders of the system helps build an unfair race against the
adversary. In Bitcoin PoW is on the shoulders of the system rather than the
users and relies on a fair race between the adversary and the honest. The
design mistake here is amazing! I acknowledge and appreciate the motivation
which served well at the birth phase. But Pow must go now. We thank him for
taking us here. Security strength is directly proportional to the
unfairness of the race against the adversary. PoS/dPoS, etc. all suffer the
"anchor to water" problem and thus cannot escape the AR dilemma. (Tony, the
intrinsic interest segregation between the delegates and the voters is the
common trust communication problem of democracy which cannot be resolved by
dPoS. You are subject to propaganda by candidates that promise you good
incentives for you to vote for them. The delegates have their own interests
and u cannot guarantee knowledge to all of them. To make things worse
voters have distinct interests. Plus you can always be deceived by a
super-rational attacker. In fact, the super-rational attacker has an
advantage over the honest candidate who lacks outside benefits.)

2. Asymmetric encryption provides a means for an unfathomably un-fair race
against the adversary. We should focus on it to find a solution to the
double spend problem. Once we have the anchorage required, the system
becomes much more powerful in terms of efficiency, flexibility, security,
privacy, regulation, government-people relations to the satisfaction of
both sides, etc. A new system beyond the dreams of everyone in the crypto
ecosystem today. Such a system is absolutely destined to be THE SYSTEM of
the future on which all other systems rely.

3. We must focus on the anchorage problem and use the super-rational attack
scenario as an example to make it understandable and as a component metric
to judge the Robustness of the system. I have been waiting for the right
way and time to explain the anchorage. My paper aims that purpose.

4. We need a system that can be implemented TODAY and evolve in the course
of time. We have to admit that state/government is a reality TODAY. Some
part of is bad but some part of it is good (at least as of today).
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/911307/Bitcoin-price-live-gunpoint-heist-rising-falling-ripple-ethereum-blockchain
. We have to acknowledge the legitimate parts of the state and design a
fair system that collaborates with that part of the state. No body would be
able to succesfully object to a crypto-system that shakes hands with the
legitimate and fair part of the state. Mobilizing the state has enormous
power.  Why not use it? As long as our anchorage has nothing to do with and
cannot be controlled by the state. It will be to the benefit of the state
to mobilize this new powerful system. Such a win-win situation is possible
and necessary if we want to be fair and practical. That is one of the key
advantages of the anchorage. It puts us as an independent and powerful
organism on the table with the state.

5.  Plus no bank has robbed me, served me poorly with my money deposited on
them in my entire life. I am talking about basic financial services. I
trust my banks more than I trust everyone in the cryptocurrency system
including Tether which ultimately managed to become the most trusted
cryptocoin, via relying only on our trust in our banks. Yes, I am aware of
the corrupt and unfair part of the financial system. However, this should
not blind me to the fact that we have banks out there, that we can trust
for basic financial services.


Finally, the misbelief buble that we would have a totally decentralized,
trustless cash system with zero need to talking to the governments and
banks, is about to burst. Let us get to work to find a solution before it's
too late.
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