not if anyone can bring up a node

Again, Federated Byzantine Agreement, like Fediverse: anyone can bring up a node (in this case a network validator)

It’s up to clients/wallets to pick a selection of validators that are not in collusion with each other.

The real loss in FBA design is trustlessness. That is really what PoW provides.

A bad-faith PoW actor still has to pony up ~50% hashrate. A bad-faith validator just needs to spin up a few validatorss and convince people to configure their wallets to pick more of the bad-actor validator nodes instead of honest nodes.

IMO, it’s a small price to pay for the benefit of being (a) super high max. tx/s, and (b) “green”, low-carbon-impact crypto

AFAICT the process of registering new nodes could be decentralized or centrally-managed; neither way is specific to the FBA design.

FBA but it seems relatively centralized

Only as much as the Fediverse is. Not all of us run big nodes or even little monero.town

IMO it would not be any different from today. In theory every wallet can be a node. How many people actually run nodes vs just have wallets? The same people that run nodes today, would run FBA validators.

And the network would support 3 orders of magnitude more tx/s, and consume no more electricity than Fedi services.

it’s been years now but I remember looking at re-org data and just shuddering

I think the majority of the Monero community shares this concern. If there was a better solution for the purposes of securing a decentralized ledger, we’d move on it quickly. Problem is, in all these years, as a community we haven’t seen a better system.

PoS tends to continually centralize power. End of story. There is no situation where PoS does not ultimately fully centralize.

Ostensibly super fast mechanisms like Nano are subject to insane re-orgs, which they mitigate by checkpointing the chain, which means the re-orgs that should have happened, don’t happen, … it’s a frickin’ trainwreck and would be exposed as such under real-world high scale loads.

IMO the next-best solution to PoW is Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) aka “validator nodes” like Stellar. These are crazy high throughput, super efficient, and slightly more centralized – that wallets have to choose a set of validator nodes, and hope that those nodes are not colluding.

Think of FBA Federation as being like the Fediverse: there are semi-centralized hubs. But anyone can spin up a hub and people can migrate easily. It’s not 100% decentralized where every node is identical. But you get orders of magnitude more throughput and less electricity use.

Dup

https://monero.town/post/6447043

Sorry but with a clickbaity title and a blank page this post smells like an astroturf

Why not, it’s doing its damndest to detect everything else

TBH I think pr0n and cam sites should lean in to Monero.

First, ASIC investment disincentivized network updates and crushed innovation.

Then VenmoCashAppApplePayZelle became instant person to person virtual debit cards superior to most crypto for most purchases

Then USDT/Tether showed what a bad idea stablecoins are (like, just use Venmo or w/e)

Then NFTs made crypto synonymous with scammy

Then the Trump administration made stablecoins and grift synonymous with public policy

I hadn’t heard of “Proof of Useful Work”. From the the name alone, it sounded like stuff hyc and others were looking at a few years ago, just before it was realized that the only way to really ASIC-proof the algo was a fully random-yet-deterministic state machine (Tevador’s RandomX)

But then I did a quick search and read what appears to be the most up-to-date and authoritative paper on the subject, and it’s based on the idea that fast matrix multiplication is an inherently good and relevant computation.

Ummm… yeah. No, afaict their paper isn’t concerned with the issue that this is an inherently GPU-friendly algo and so favors centralization. The paper focuses of course on making a prover and verifier out of FFM operations.

Which is cool and you can get an ArXiv paper out of it, but not relevant for the real-world at-scale adversary-rich environment that is Internet Currency.

(Edit: 1. No I didn’t watch the video; someone please LMK if it discusses a different PoUW 2. I did check and no, Cabanas is not one of the paper authors fwiw.)

Be safe, kids – don’t buy drugs on the clearnet!

Kind of OT but as a James Joyce enjoyer I like the name, it evokes this paper which always stuck with me

Dawn: A study of the present age and Finnegans wake through a close look at FW page 594, one page sufficient for our time

Literally 250+ pages unpacking one single page of the original ~700 page book, much of which reads like it was encrypted/compressed.

Will it be a tails spin? That might make a lot of sense

I’m all for I2P, it solves some design limitations that Tor has.

And Tor is absolutely not a bulletproof technology.

But please, have some concrete reasons for not using it. “The devs are shady” is about as scientific and useful as “vaccines cause autism”

https://californiaglobe.com/fr/csu-sacramentos-juneteenth-event-inspirational-or-a-breeding-ground-for-bigotry/

He stepped into a political minefield and did a reasonably good job of pointing out some unfortunately too-common offensive and racist positions from an academic discipline and institution that both frankly need to do better.

Given the politics of the present situation, he would have done well to suggest concrete alternatives for a Junteenth recognition that better promotes an inclusive, tolerant society – and his concrete plan for making that happen, using which Gubernatorial powers (beyond diktat).

I know I’m asking a lot but, he’s already made at least one rookie mistake.