You can target the UXTO so that their value in crypto starts back at zero. But because they still have the mining hardware, they still control 51% of the hash power that secures the network. They can just mine from a different address and it won’t be clear who to target until they once again begin to produce majority blocks on the chain. This way they can continually attack the chain and render it useless.
When you burn a PoW miner’s crypto addresses, you aren’t burning their capital and stake, because it’s in the form of mining hardware, not tokens. When you burn a PoS staker’s crypto, you are burning their capital and stake which is in the form of tokens.
Most crypto including Bitcoin is governed off-chain. People come to consensus on a set of rules that allows them to create a public and permissionless BFT ledger. Attacking the ledger then costs millions or billions of dollars. If one dishonest node or a group of colluding actors decide to spend this much to amass majority control of the network, the rest of the network can decide to fork the protocol to burn their staked capital.
The main goal of crypto - the base token and protocol rewards from PoW or PoS - is to secure this network and keep it permissionless and decentralized.
If the 51% is a single staker or small group of colluding stakers attacking the chain, the rest of the users will probably not want to continue using that chain. The users can activate a soft fork, just by changing the rules of the code to burn the attacker’s funds, and running the updated client software. The remaining honest stakers can then continue to follow the head of the non-attacked chain, and the attacker would be the only one left on their chain.
It takes time to learn but it isn’t obtuse. It’s extensively documented, with multiple open source clients being built in tandem. Besides, it is not the only PoS system running today.
All fields of engineering are complex to those that have an not studied them.
Their actions would most likely be visible on the network because it is transparent. The community can then decide whether to activate a fork and punish the colluding nodes.
In PoW, if you control 51% of mining the users can defend by switching to another hash algorithm, meaning the attacker needs to re-buy a lot of new hardware. If they’ve anticipated this, and attack again with new hardware, there is not much further defence. In PoS, users can coordinate a soft fork to burn the attackers funds, each time they re-attack the chain, until they eventually run out of capital.
So your main argument is that people are too stupid to understand that Ethereum is not the same as Infura, and so when one goes down you may as well call them both down? Lol.
Lack of education can be fixed. You can even help: instead of spreading poor information, try to educate your readers about the difference between a node as a service and liveness of the blockchain.
Why? PoW can only afford to be attacked twice. It even has a name: “spawn camping.” In proof of stake, this is pretty easy to defend against repeatedly.
Trying to understand how this differs in practice. Anyone delegating to a staking pool is forced into their values. Ethermine recently started blocking OFAC transactions, so does the majority of miners in that pool agree with this? If so, what is the defence against censorship in this scenario except for some to exit the pool and use another that aligns with their values?
It’s the same with staking. If you aren’t solo staking, you are just delegating to a staking pool. And you can withdraw that and deposit it elsewhere if they do not align with your values.
Interesting, so this is a problem if 66% or more decide to reject a transaction. How many blocks are currently signed by solo miners in PoW? Almost all blocks are signed by pools which looks like the PoS committees in practice yo my naive eyes. A miner with 0.1% hash power would probably be a very long delay.
I do agree this is probably the most concerning thing that Tornado Cash sanctions have shown us. Still don’t think the energy cost of PoW is worth it, and would rather see PBS and crList solve this problem.
Same argument can be made for key management. A typical user could use non custodial wallet, but they don’t. But that option exists, for when they become unsatisfied with their centralized wallet custodian, or when they want to change custodians, or when they want to use a multi sig that allows for a mix of custodial and non custodial.
Importantly: the option exists. The option to use non custodial EOA and smart contract wallet, DAI or RAI, Alchemy or a custom node RPC, Kraken or another CEX or DEX, the option is present and is chosen by plenty of users.
Is there any evidence that almost 100% of transactions use Infura? There are several other popular nodes as a service since the cited 2018 article was written: Alchemy, Quicknode, Moralis. Anybody running a full node, including home stakers, can point to their own RPC endpoint.
When one of the popular nodes as a service goes down, many dApps and users will need to change their endpoint to another. I think the author might be overstating the concern of this centralization.
The solution to RPC centralization is well known: light clients. It is on the developers roadmap but obviously they are prioritizing proof of stake and scalability.
He does not need to sell his anti-Amazon book on Amazon, it is laughably hypocritical and goes against his entire message in his Twitter announcement:
> it's an action-oriented look at how tech and entertainment monopolies steal creators' incomes, with detailed, shovel-ready plans to unrig creative labor markets and pay artists
You can target the UXTO so that their value in crypto starts back at zero. But because they still have the mining hardware, they still control 51% of the hash power that secures the network. They can just mine from a different address and it won’t be clear who to target until they once again begin to produce majority blocks on the chain. This way they can continually attack the chain and render it useless.
When you burn a PoW miner’s crypto addresses, you aren’t burning their capital and stake, because it’s in the form of mining hardware, not tokens. When you burn a PoS staker’s crypto, you are burning their capital and stake which is in the form of tokens.