Do other coins have any countermeasures against this? Other than it being expensive to control 51% of the networks hash rate?
I guess raising the amount of required confirmations helps but even then it's just a matter of time.
I guess raising the amount of required confirmations helps but even then it's just a matter of time.
Proof of stake is more secure than proof of work because an attacker must acquire a large amount of ETH each time they attempt an attack. Attacks against proof of stake are incredibly capital-inefficient.
Heck proof of stake is significantly less secure because you can have stakes working together to game the system.
If your goal is a decentralized system POS is just a fundamentally broken idea, as was known years ago (and long before ethereum existed https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf ). Ethereum isn't a decentralized system-- as demonstrated by them editing balances to recover coins the ETH administrators personally lost by gambling on an ill-advised contract-- but they have to keep up the pretext.
Uh, I'm fairly sure this never happened but you're welcome to provide a source.
Most people who opposed the fork also stayed with ethereum because the ethereum foundation, which they'd collectively invested millions in, announced it would not support the fork. (in fact, it announced that the fork wouldn't even exist-- which caused companies like coinbase hundreds of thousands in losses from replays due to not being prepared for it)
The DAO was supposed to be a VC firm. If you want to say that the DAO was gambling then so is all Venture Capital.
> The funds in it were a majority coming from ethereum foundation members. The reason that they were 14% of all ethereum at the time was that at the time something like 85% of ethereum in existance had been premined by the ethereum foundation (at the moment it's 75%).
What a laughably stupid thing to say. Ethereum did an ICO before that term was a thing, mined a shit ton of ETH and sold almost all of it for Bitcoin. By the time the DAO was a thing the Ethereum foundation controlled ~12M ETH, which did not overlap with the ~11.5M ETH in the DAO (The funds were for the development of Ethereum, not speculative purposes). There was an additional some 60M ETH from the initial sale + ETH from newly mined blocks, not in the DAO and not part of the ETH foundation.
>Most people who opposed the fork also stayed with ethereum because the ethereum foundation, which they'd collectively invested millions in, announced it would not support the fork.
The Ethereum foundation announced it would not support what exactly? If you mean Ethereum Classic well that is not a fork of anything - but a continuation of the original DAO chain. 11% of people voted against the Ethereum fork and presumably did not migrate (or likely just used both).
>in fact, it announced that the fork wouldn't even exist-- which caused companies like coinbase hundreds of thousands in losses from replays due to not being prepared for it
Er, what? Assuming you are referring to ETC, which again is the original chain, the Ethereum Foundation does not have the power to determine its existence or non-existence. The original chained continued to be mined and supported by nodes.
The issue with proof-of-stake: How do you define consensus on what ETH is? Without PoW, an attacker can cheaply generate an alternate history in which they control a large amount of ETH. If the alternate history is accepted, they benefit, and if not, they risked nothing.
It becomes trivial to generate the longest chain. This is a real problem, and some PoW currencies like NXT have proposed solving it by using an out-of-band solution like asking friends or trusted nodes whether you are on the right root blockchain. This defeats the very purpose of a decentralized currency. If you're going to trust a core set of nodes, just use a centralized database with M-of-N access control.