From the article we read "the long-term hope is that apps built from them will eventually make Ethereum the ultimate cloud-computing platform." Ethereum does not claim to be a computing platform in the same way that AWS is; it's for low-complexity business logic only. I think it's misleading to use "ultimate cloud-computing platform" to describe Ethereum.
With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker by just throwing more hashing power at bitcoin
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs#wh...
There's a lot of misinformation regarding PoS. Vlad Zamfir has spoken a lot on cartel attacks and how they're mitigated, but the biggest, and I mean bigger than biggest, argument against all of these attacks is that it's always detectable by honest nodes shy of 2/3rds attack and it defaces the value of the coin itself to attack at that volume.
You could do a hard-fork and slash their stake. In PoW, you can't do this.
> With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker
Not in the case of "selfish mining attack", where you may never know that an attack is happening until it's too late, you'll have little chance in defending with hashpower since the attackers will have a significant head start...
So ... theft?
you're being intellectually dishonest or even outright manipulative here.
there were never 184 billion coins created on bitcoin chain, there was a bug in validation logic of bitcoin client that made it follow the chain that was invalid.
are you seriously trying to compare that to stealing coins from somebody on a valid chain?
really?
They're not stealing coins from someone on a valid chain, they are forking away to another chain and slashing the user's stake. The user will still have all their coins on "their" chain and it's up to everyone else to decide which chain is "the right one". If the 51% user is truly malicious, the majority of network participants will move away to the new chain, rendering the 51% user's tokens (near) worthless.
so being successful is punished by destroying all wealth of the richest participant in the network? nice.
> If the 51% user is truly malicious
Having 51% doesn't automatically make you a malicious user. People also wouldn't move away to another chain simply because someone or some group owns 51%. They would move if said person or group abuses the power they get from owning a majority.
It won't surprise me at all if a PoS blockchain ends up looking just like a two party political system, where every now and then you get to choose which fork/party has the least objectionable outcome for you, but where both choices leave you worse off than you started...
You and I can go fork Ethereum right now and now just tell people it's great, but show them it's great. It's like if we could fork the US government, refactor all the policies and let it run to demonstrate how good it is, and then people can come on board. You can't do that in politics, but you can absolutely do it in crypto.
It is not clear at all that a small political experiment will scale to a super power. It is equally unclear that a small crypto currency experiment will scale.
This is without even touching on how easy, or difficult to it is rally support for a new system. Quite difficult, I'd say.
It holds because you can demonstrate its utility on a small network.
Whilst this is great for decentralization, I've read interesting arguments in favor of ASIC mining. People who buy ASICs are committed to a coin. This leads to a stable base of mining. Meanwhile, GPU miners tend to mine whatever is the most profitable at any given time. This leads to large fluctuations in mining rates.
The Ether switch to POS has some people worried, as it might free up a lot of GPU power, which might overwhelm other GPU based POW systems.
Then again, any argument regarding mining algorithms is filled by people who have biases to the tune of 100 000$ of hardware investments.
PoS is way more secure.
I think Ethereum is going big places, but the AWS ledger solution is probably also going to be good for smaller industries where competitors don't trust each other, they want a database that's shared, and they all might trust Amazon enough to control it (eg if they're all using AWS anyway)
This has been possible since the 80’s due to public key encryption.
It’s not having to trust a central actor that’s the innovation behind e.g. Bitcoin.
To put it another way, the problems that Ethereum will solve are not ones that could be solved by AWS.
Despite both being energy/transport companies, Embraer and Tesla are solving two very different consumer problems.
You could make an argument it’s a competitor to AWS Lambda, but it would be akin to saying lxc is a serverless competitor.
Everybody can see the code/transactions that are run for free. Everybody can have their code run and execute transactions for a price.
There are quite probably innovative new things that can be built using Etherium's "world computer", but my guess is that almost _none_ of what's currently running on (and paying for) AWS resources will move to it.
Those are multi billion dollar business with billion dollar requirements in infrastructure investment on a yearly basis. Not going to happen.
There's not a lot to go in in those two words, but claiming they mean Etherium is out to capture all (or any) of AWS's customers is a _very_ long stretch.
If POS worked, great.
I wouldnt trust it for a half decade of use.
Only if we enumerate all possible attack vectors, and prove resiliency against these, is the proof as general as you claim. The difficult part — as the WPA2 paper shows — is the former.
How do you know when you’ve enumerated all possible attack vectors?
sure.
> peer reviewed
not so sure.
Most PoS systems I’ve seen basically reward the oldest money holders with the right to stamp new transactions. This reduces the cost, but is extremely centralizing, bordering on neo-feudal.
The cynic in me also notes that developers of these chains are regularly the oldest money, making their motivations suspect at best.
Most PoS designs don't otherwise favor old accounts. I know Peercoin does, but that's a very small project, and I'm not aware of any others. Ethereum 2.0 definitely won't have any such mechanism. In the current spec [1], staking is binary; either you have an active validator account or you don't.
[1] https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/master/specs/c...
In PoW only a few people have the resources to build and run mining farms. Certainly not me. In PoS anyone can stake on a desktop or laptop. This greatly increases the amount of people who can participate in the network.