this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
-13 points (45.6% liked)
Privacy
40249 readers
639 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, yes, exactly. That's the problem. There have been innumerable innovations and improvements in the field over those 15 years, but Bitcoin ossified early and so it's got none of them.
You've got a very inaccurate and skewed view of this. Most significantly, it's not "proof of ownership," it's "proof of stake." Proof of ownership and proof of stake are distinct technologies that operate in different manners. Ethereum is not proof of ownership.
You're clearly not very familiar with how Ethereum's proof of stake system operates because "51% attack" is not meaningful. There's nothing magical about the 51% threshold in Ethereum's system of staking. There is a magical threshold at 66%, if you've got more than that you can prevent "finality" from happening which will in turn cause some disruption to the chain. But most significantly, it doesn't prevent blocks from continuing to be processed and doesn't allow stakers to forge blocks. It's a highly theoretical attack since no stakers or staking pools are anywhere remotely close to that sort of dominance, and even if they did do that there'd still be mechanisms by which they could be slashed.
Lightning has been an entirely predictable disappointment. The problem is that Bitcoin was not designed to support something like Lightning, and that very feature you touted above - Bitcoin's complete ossification of protocol upgrades 15 years ago - means it can't be made to support it. Lightning's total capacity is $300 million. Ironically there's thirty times more Bitcoin being transacted on the Ethereum network in the form of WBTC than there is Bitcoin being transacted in Lightning.
If you're interested in layer-2 solutions then Ethereum's recent updates have been all about providing better support for that kind of thing, using many cryptographic advances that came along in those 15 years. Some of them incorporate Monero-like privacy systems, even, such as Arbitrum.
No, there is a distinction here, and it's a very important one.
If you're using proof of ownership then there's no way of penalizing the owners who are validating the chain if they misbehave. That's somewhat more like what Bitcoin uses, actually - proof of ownership of mining rigs, in a sense. If a Bitcoin miner 51% attacks the chain then after the attack is done they still have their mining rigs and can continue to attempt to attack it if they want.
With proof of stake, the resource in question - the tokens, in Ethereum's case - are put up as a stake. Ie, they are placed under the control of the blockchain's validation system, so if the validator tries pulling some kind of funny business their stake can be slashed. Someone who attacks Ethereum has to burn their stake in the process, which would cost them tens of billions of dollars and prevent them from attempting future attacks.
You can own millions of Ether and that's meaningless as far as validation goes. It's only once you put them up as a stake do you get "skin in the game."
You were earlier touting Bitcoin's lack of protocol upgrades as a key feature. Now it's performing upgrades?
The problem with Bitcoin's upgrades is that they've made "no hard forks" into a religious tenant, so whenever they try to do anything new they have to squish it in as a soft fork somehow built on top of the existing foundations. The existing foundations aren't well suited to this kind of thing, though, since they were designed 15 years ago. So it makes for some very labored and inefficient design, like in the case with Lightning.
Layer 2s on something like Ethereum, which was designed from the ground up to support them and which continues to add new features making them more efficient and feature-rich, are far easier and cheaper to work with.
It's important to call out that nodes in general are not important for validating the chain, it doesn't matter who's controlling them. You can run your own node and there's nothing those other non-validating nodes can do to tamper with your view of the network, the worst they could do is stop sending you updates (which would be obvious and you could then go hunting for replacement feeds).