Discussion revolving PoW & PoS

General
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Hello, Zcash Community

I’d like to start a conversation about those methods of consensus. I’m going to start by stating my opinion and looking forward to hear from you.

I’ve had a great interest around distributed systems since I got to know Bitcoin around 2014. Like many others, I was excited and surprised to hear about Proof of Work. As time goes by, I became more involved with Ethereum’s community and there I learned about Proof of Stake. I’ve always had a highly skepticism around the latter.

During 2017, I encountered Decred and its Hybrid PoW/Pos solution and I really liked the solution. Sadly, we don’t have a lot of discussions about this specific model around the crypto community. From Decred’s docs:

The major contrast to the follow-the-satoshi scheme previously described1 is a new lottery system in which tickets must be purchased and then wait on a maturity period before they can be selected and spent. Selection of tickets for a block is performed lexicographically from a mature ticket pool based on pseudorandomness contained in the block header. Because manipulation of this pseudorandomness is difficult in a PoW system, manipulation of ticket selection is associated with a fundamental cost to the PoW miner. The selection of tickets over a time period can be described by a probability density function similar to the probability of obtaining a block in PoW at a constant hash rate over time at a constant difficulty2, yielding a probability distribution with a mode approximately equal to half the ticket pool size. The price to purchase a ticket is regulated by a new stake difficulty that is determined by the exponentially weighted average number of tickets purchased and the size of the mature ticket pool in prior blocks.

And, finally, I recently got very interested in privacy-focused currencies. I always appreciated the capability of Zcash’s community to build and form a dialogue about issues, and would love to hear from all of you. I’ll make some questions just to have the ball rolling.

  1. What’s your take on this Hybrid PoS/PoW?
  2. Do you think that this consensus method is compatible with the for-profit ZcashCo?
  3. Will Zcash someday evolve to others methods or is PoW sufficient?
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Since I’m a miner and supporter of ZCASH from the very beginning, some here who are not miners may find I’m biased. However, I still believe my opinion is valid.

Yes, you can go the POS/POW hybrid path. But, in doing so, you will lose “users” in my opinion. Most of the “users” are miners and speculators. That’s about it at this point in time. Bitcoin is one of the few to have more adoption in retail stores. ZEC is not fortunate enough to have that much adoption yet.

If you were to do a POS/POW hybrid, the profits for ZEC mining will diminish and I’m afraid the process for “adoption” will slow tremendously. I’m one who will no longer mine ZEC and would therefore have no need to be a “user” of the coin. Especially, since there are other alternative coins for “privacy” that I can mine.

Please, do not take my statements as threats or ultimatums because that’s not my intent. I’m simply stating what I believe to be a fact.

The statements Zooko has made recently about ASIC’s concern me greatly. It appears he’s looking for a way or means to back out of his promise for ASIC resistance. This does not sit well with most miners [Who are also “users” of ZCASH].

Zooko recently stated the following: “For example, suppose the hypothesis is that mining without ASICs is more decentralized than mining with ASICs. What sort of data could we find that could support or refute that belief? Here’s a stab at it: Monero mining, which doesn’t have ASICs. How centralized is it? I’ve been told that most Monero mining is done by botnets. Is there any way to verify that claim? And if it is done primarily by botnets, does that suggest that it is probably centralized?”

Well, NOW you have a perfect example of just how CENTRALIZED Monero was becoming. Bitmain already had HALF OF THE NETWORK HASH. Since the Monero Fork on April 6, 2018 [To become ASIC resistant once again] the network hash rate has dwindled from over 1,000,000,000 to 500,000,000. That’s more than HALF!!!. The network hash rate is not quite finished falling yet. We will know in full how much control the ASIC’s had over the network in the next couple of days. Here’s a link to the Monero network hash rate: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-hashrate.html#6m

You can switch to POS or POW/POS hybrid. That’s up to the developers. However, in doing so, you will lose MANY “users” and ultimately create more setbacks. Go ahead, disenfranchise those who supported the community from the beginning by cutting them out of the equation. Doing so will prove to be detrimental to the progression and the cause of ZCASH.

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Early to judge. many GPUs/botnets didn’t update yet.

I would like to correct you by changing “miners” instate of “users”.

I side with PoS(+PoW hybrid) but too early to discuss about PoS for Zcash.

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You’re more than welcome to side with whatever you like. I’ve voiced my opinion and you have responded with very little support for yours. Other readers will decide who they agree with…

Good day.

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