Former Ethereum enthusiast A Jian: Is PoS a lie?

Original source: JackyLHH, Fork It community member

Published on August 31 Fork It #22: PoW vs PoS (text version), the Chinese podcast program Fork It, dubbed "Nian Geng" by everyone, recorded the 23rd issue just before the merger of Ethereum: Fork It #23: Is PoS a lie? This episode features Daniel and Terry Co-host, invited Mr. A Jian, the content director of BTCStudy, to talk to you about the debate about PoW vs PoS, his views and positions.

Ms. A Jian used to be a very hard-core researcher, translator, and content contributor in the Ethereum Chinese community. Teacher A Jian’s strength does not allow it, so if you have an understanding of the design ideas and basic concepts of PoW/PoS and distributed consensus algorithms, it will help you understand why PoW is better than PoS in all aspects through the analysis of Teacher A Jian. in conclusion.

If you are more interested in the problem analysis of "Ethereum Merge" and what is "Bitcoin thinking", you can skip directly to 1:10:00 of the podcast Start listening, or you can directly find the corresponding text manuscript to read.

At the end of the interview, Mr. A Jian’s most touching passage is excerpted here: A technical paradigm should think that it should protect its users, it should To protect the consensus, it should cherish every hard-won consensus, and it should accommodate every possible individual to enter this ecology, to be able to use it to continue dreaming, and to fight for a distant and beautiful future that I can imagine .

The following are community members (HelloKelly.bit, JackyLHH, Yifan.bit), the full text is about 2.6 4D:

1. Opening introduction

Daniel:Everyone Well, welcome to the new episode of Fork It. I am Daniel, the host of the show who has disappeared for a long time. I will host it with Terry today. We have invited Mr. A Jian as a guest.

Before I start, I will make an introduction to the current special time point. The recording time of this program is very close to a very big event in the Ethereum community, the so-called Ethereum Merge. Ethereum Merge will happen within 48 hours. When you listen to this episode, it should be when the merger has just been completed.

Alright, let’s introduce today’s guest, Mr. A Jian.

A Jian:Hello, listeners and friends of the Fork It podcast, hello everyone, my name is A Jian. It was great to have Daniel and Terry invite us to be guests at Fork It. Because I have listened to many episodes of Fork It before, I found that Fork It can always invite the most professional people to talk about some of the most professional topics, so I also regard this as Terry and Daniel's recognition of me , I feel very happy.

I entered this industry in 2017, and since then until now, I have been working as a translator. From 2017 to 2021, I have been working for Ethereum enthusiasts, and now many friends may know that I am also because of Ethereum enthusiasts, because I have been doing translation and editing work in it. If we look at it from this point of time, I guess I may be a relatively experienced person in this industry as a translator. Because I have been doing the same thing for so many years in the industry, and I am also constantly learning during this process, and I have done some research. Although these studies may not be said to be very important, they can be regarded as accumulating some understanding of the blockchain.

I have been doing BTCStudy since the end of 2021 Contribution, this is a very small website. There is actually no redundant content on it. It is all about the technical principles of Bitcoin, some possible technical improvement directions, and some interesting technical solutions that are emerging in the ecology.

Daniel:Actually, I know that Mr. A Jian doesn’t seem to take part in things like the front of the stage too much, you mainly Some content and article work is done behind the scenes. Some listeners may not know, but Mr. A Jian is a very important figure in the core technology circle of Ethereum enthusiasts in China. Why do you say that? Because whenever a major event occurs in the Ethereum community, everyone will discuss it. The real opinions of these KOLs, which we call KOLs, can often play a very crucial role in the entire Chinese community. Mr. A Jian is one of the few KOLs in the small circle I know who is really hardcore in Ethereum.

Terry: There are many KOLs, but there are fewer hardcore ones.

A Jian:When I thought I was a member of the Ethereum ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem was also very exciting. You can see a variety of characters and a variety of viewpoints. I feel that I am relatively special in it. Maybe I have one thing in common with Terry, Daniel, and these guests who have been on Fork It, that is, we pay special attention to technology and the bottom layer. I feel that a lot of things about the application layer are not my greatest interest, or not what people with such an identity as I call the community should care about the most. So during this process, I paid a lot of attention to the protocol layer of Ethereum, including its ins and outs, and its direction. I think probably this point may make people think that I have some understanding of these issues. I think it's just that.

2. PoW is better than PoS

Daniel: In fact, Mr. A Jian does not participate in very frequent discussions, but whenever there is a very critical discussion, as long as there are your comments, I will definitely send them out and read them carefully. For quite a long time before the Ethereum merge happened, the whole community started to debate about PoW and PoS again. I believe that Mr. A Jian may have participated in this kind of discussion many times. Could you please introduce your position or proposition to this protracted and year-long discussion.

A Jian: First of all, regarding the position, I have no doubt that PoW is an all-around better thing than PoS, yes omnidirectional.

I also think that this debate may actually have existed since a long time ago, when the idea of PoS first appeared, about 10-12 years, and it may be 14 at the latest Year. Because of the 14 years of research on Ethereum, including its development, it has already started. From that time until now, my greatest feeling may be that during this process, with the development or further research of the PoS mechanism proposed by Ethereum and other projects, there will be some new ideas or new opinions. .

However, during the whole process, the PoS party's argument on the PoS superiority theory, in fact, I think it contains a lot of impurities, and I even think that Most of them contain lies. They actually used an argument based on the selective presentation of facts, that is, when you only partially present the facts, instead of presenting the whole truth, although the part you present seems to be the truth, But your statements cannot be called arguments, in the sense that I would call them lies.

Let me give you a simple example. For example, a voice that often appears is that PoS is a new thing. Since it is a new thing, and Improvements on old things must be a new trend and a new future. For another example, they think that PoS abandons the computationally intensive block production process of PoW, and it can become so-called greener without wasting energy to produce blocks. In other words, because the process does not need to consume so much calculation, the scalability seems to be improved. These are missing comparisons.

To take the simplest example, is PoS a new thing? This is a very interesting topic. Many people think that it was after Bitcoin first proposed PoW that someone came up with the idea of PoS. In fact, technically, I think it's a category error. Because if you know something about the consensus algorithm in the distributed field, you will know that the research on the consensus mechanism in the distributed field originated from Lambert, Leslie Lamport published a paper in 1987 on the Byzantine Generals Problem. What he envisions is a voting-based mechanism with unforgeable proof of identity, aka a digital signature scheme. Under this premise, a key conclusion of the Byzantine general problem is that 1/3 is an insurmountable upper limit. If more than 1/3 of the people are malicious and do not want to reach a consensus, then this distributed system has no way to reach a consensus.

Next came the so-called Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm, that is, when no more than 1/3 of the participants are malicious, we have Is there no set of algorithms that can reach this consensus? In fact, these Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithms are based on identity and digital signature systems, so you can think that the Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm at that time is the predecessor of the so-called PoS algorithm.

It appeared much earlier than PoW, but in the earliest form of using the Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm, it defaults that the signature weight of all participants is the same , it will not have the case that the voting weights of the participants are not the same. The conceptual advancement of PoS to the Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm is that it relaxes this, so that the signatures of different participants have different weights. However, in fact, we can say that PoS is an older thing, and it does not actually bring us a consensus mechanism like Bitcoin that does not require permission and everyone can participate in. This is a very important feature.

Back to the technology itself, there are actually quite a few points to discuss, for example, based on a familiar model, security, scalability and decentralization To compare it in three dimensions, in fact, a lot of content can be compared.

3. Security: stake grinding attack, Nothing at Stake, long-range attack, 51% attack cost

Terry:I think it is very appropriate to talk about it from the direction of the impossible triangle. Now I see a common saying about PoS, that is, it is more secure in terms of security. If this is not comparable, they will point out that PoS is more secure at the same cost. In terms of anti-censorship, I think it is the obvious disadvantage of PoS, but at this time they usually compare badly together, saying that PoW is not much better in terms of anti-censorship. In terms of decentralization, they said at the earliest that PoS would not have a mining pool or a stake, but later found that this is a very professional thing, and there must be a stake. Can you analyze the current general views from these three dimensions as a whole, and your evaluation of their erroneous views.

Jian:I might ask the Fork It audience to be a little patient with me because I'm going to be very long. As I said above, all the arguments about the superiority of PoS that I have come across contain a lot of missing comparisons or selective comparisons. I can put the conclusion here first: in any dimension, it cannot be argued that PoS is better than PoW. I take responsibility for this statement.

First of all, let's talk about security. The existing security research on PoS will basically mention a very basic attack: Stake Grinding attacks , stake Grinding attack or rational fork.

PoS does not use the competitive method of PoW to compare who is lucky enough and fast enough to propose the proof-of-work mechanism of the next block. Quickly find a random number that meets the difficulty requirements. A block generation method of PoS is to divide a period of time into, for example, 12 segments and 36 segments according to time, and arrange a block producer for each segment.

Another way, such as the earliest PPCoin point currency, its way is that everyone owns a UTXO, each UTXO has a face value, and is not The time spent is called Coin age. Two factors determine whether you can use UTXO to become the block producer of the next block. Some calculations still need to be done in the middle, but the most interesting point is that the block generation property of PoW is no process, Progress Free. What does that mean? It is assuming that this block is released now, no matter how to adjust the hash value of this block, no matter how many times you try, it will not affect the probability of digging out the next block. The producer of the next block still has to go through a lot of calculations. Affecting the hash of the current block does not actually help the difficulty of the next block.

But in PoS, everyone has to use the previous historical blocks as the source of random numbers, and use a source of random numbers to produce a random number Number, using this random number to determine who will generate the next block, or who will generate the next ten blocks, will lose the feature of no process.

What does this mean? It means that whoever dug out the block and the characteristics of the data in the block can determine the block producer of the next block or even ten blocks.

So what will everyone do? Although at this point in time, for example, I can only have one block within ten seconds, I am actually digging secretly, and I have counted 100 blocks. Still being the block producer, or which block to look for, can maximize my chances of producing blocks in the next chain, this is called Stake Grinding Attack. It will continue to try to mine at any block point, and try to interfere with the choice of future block producers.

Stake grinding attacks were very common at the time and very deadly. Because although we see this point in time, it seems that there is only one block on the network, but in fact, everyone has secretly dug hundreds and thousands of blocks. Just wait for him to dig out a super long chain by himself, and then wait until a certain moment to show it to you with a snap, and everyone jumps over it with a snap because of the consensus on the longest chain.

But is the longest chain consensus stable? It's also unstable, and the next thing someone snaps you a longer chain. This was the equity grinding attack that appeared at that time. Later, everyone attributed it to an attribute called Nothing at stake, the rights and interests have nothing to do or no stake. What does that mean? That is, although you only arrange for me to click out blocks, I am secretly mining N blocks, which will not have any impact on my interests. It has only benefits and no harm.

Stake grinding attacks directly lead to the introduction of penalty mechanisms in almost all subsequent PoS mechanisms. Everyone has found that this reward-based, random block creation method does not work, so a penalty mechanism is needed to restrain everyone from doing rational forks. What is its logic? That is, when people have proposed a block, if they are found to have proposed this block on another chain, they need to be punished, so as to constrain not to mine forked chains and ensure that only one chain is dug. This principle basically runs through the design of all subsequent PoS chains since 2014.

But we will find that this problem is actually not that simple, because the punishment mechanism we just talked about seems to be only one-way in the dimension leading to the future, to avoid everyone Excavating a large number of forked chains can constrain everyone to one chain and produce blocks straight forward. Does that mean there is no problem? no. Because a chain not only has a dimension leading to the future, it also has a historical dimension, and we even think that the historical dimension is more important.

Why? Because if the history of the chain can be tampered with at will, how can it play the role of ledger, how can it play the role of everyone's basic transaction system, and build various application functions on it? This is what I think is the more critical element. If the blockchain can form an untamperable ledger, an untamperable history, then I can not be afraid of anything. As a regular user, I would never worry about losing my money, as all histories are pretty much reliable. The cryptographic schemes of private keys and digital signatures have given me a property attribute that is comparable to any other property system, or even better than them.

Next, you will find another situation called long-range attack, Long Range Attack. The long-range attack means that although it seems that everyone can generate blocks on one chain, this does not solve the problem. Why? Because I can dig out another chain from the original state, this chain is not necessarily longer, but the point is that we don't have any formally effective way to compare this newly mined chain with the one that everyone has been using in history. What is the difference between the chains.

This is the most critical attribute, why? For example, as an ordinary PoS chain user, when my node synchronizes to a chain, I actually don’t know whether this chain is a chain that everyone has participated in through the PoS consensus. It wasn't dug out by someone else. Some say we can observe signatures because each block carries the signature of a PoS participant.

But here just happens to be connected with another thing, everyone found a very interesting thing, all PoS verifiers need to lock the coins in, but Locked in for what? It's about making money, right? Once you earn money, you will always have to spend it one day, and it will always be unlocked. If it cannot be unlocked, it becomes a one-way process, and no one will want to participate in such an algorithm, because it means that there is no benefit at all.

The validator’s currency will have a release time point, once the release time point is reached, all the penalties set at the consensus level of this chain will not be for you Any more sense. Because my money has been withdrawn, what are you punishing me for? My money has been withdrawn, and there is no way to impose any punishment on me at this time. The kind of punishment mentioned above to make a person only sign a block on one chain is not true in itself.

This is the process of combining long-range attacks with a special form of attack that people have discovered before, called old private key attacks. That is, once a PoS participant leaves the constrained scope of the consensus layer, you have no way to actually have any constraints on his private key behavior. Then at this time, someone can completely buy some old private keys. It may be very cheap to buy old private keys, because it is just a private key and no property is needed.

With the old private key, we can forge a chain that is exactly the same as the previous chain, all transactions can be replayed, and all signatures can be replayed Put it up again. So which chain is the real one? In the case of such long-range attacks, we will find that all existing PoS algorithms cannot technically solve this problem, including Ethereum.

Ethereum’s Casper algorithm has undergone many evolutions. Its core concept is based on penalty constraints to make people produce blocks on the same chain to ensure Consensus will be reached on a regular basis. Based on the whole concept of penalty algorithm, the complexity and sophistication of its design should be listed as the first among the current PoS mechanisms. Very delicate, and it's based on the concept of punishment to the fullest.

For example, if someone proposes two conflicting blocks, they will be punished; It is a vote for past historical block checkpoints. The checkpoint is equivalent to the fact that everyone needs to periodically refresh its initial state. The original creation state may be the zeroth block chain, and now after the 100th block, everyone has 2/3 of the votes, then everyone will turn the 100th block into a new starting point for all state construction , then block 100 becomes a new genesis block.

Casper’s punishment mechanism is that whenever there are some misbehaviors in the checkpoint voting, including double voting and surrounding voting, specifically, you will not Will you vote for two competing checkpoints, and when voting for a checkpoint, will you jump to another fork point? The B chain has gone up, which means there is a problem.

What is another more interesting punishment? It is when the entire chain fails to reach a consensus, it will punish all participants. Note that all participants, not just those who are not online, punish all participants. If you understand game theory, you can think about why these offline participants should be prevented from framing other people by not forwarding other people's blocks and signatures?

The consensus algorithm itself has severe penalties for offline participants. Being offline is verified by your signature appearing in a certain period of time. If there is no penalty, then I can keep this chain in a state where there is no way to confirm the consensus for a long time by not forwarding your signature. On the one hand, it makes your own weight higher. To prevent this from happening, a penalty is imposed for such behavior, which is then used to continually weed out participants who are not online and get them to re-sync. But even if you add it all up, there is still no way to deal with what we call long-range attacks and old private key attacks.

Why? Because all participants will withdraw from the system one day, after withdrawing from the system, the old private key attack becomes an incentive, which is a feasible attack on the incentive mechanism. Just buy an old private key and you can create a super long chain.

This attribute has been discussed very fully by everyone, and there are many related materials on the market. There is a very important document, the original version of which was published in 2014, and later the author revised the paper again in 2015, the name is On Stake and Consensus, "On Equity and Consensus". This article is very important, it summarizes all the attacks I mentioned above. The final conclusion is that this long-range attack actually represents the final form of PoS attack, and it can be superimposed.

For example, I also heard that a friend proposed a very interesting attack called scattered coins. It is to match the long-range attack at the same time, give these people an airdrop, and let these people support my chain instead of the original chain. For example, if I want to fork Ethereum now, I will not only let you have so many coins, but also give you a little more coins. In this process, it can even be combined with some other social consensus attacks, such as launching a propaganda war, telling others that the gang of the Ethereum Foundation broke our chain, and they can’t do it, so we want a revolution and punish them. The currency is distributed to everyone, our currency does not have any inflation, and its value is still strong in the market, but we punish the bad guys.

I remember that a few years ago, including Jan also mentioned that the entire model of PoS is a bit like ouroboros, which is a snake biting its own tail. If your ledger is to be safe, then the consensus mechanism must be safe, but if you want the consensus mechanism to be safe, then the ledger must be safe, so it constitutes a Ouroboros.

The author on equity and consensus also came to the same conclusion, why is the consensus mechanism of proof of equity insecure? Because it depends on the ledger it wants to form to impose its growth. Everyone can jump to another ledger and launch a long-range attack to fork the chain. On this forked chain, all the punishment measures of the original chain will not work. Under such circumstances, how can you say that your consensus mechanism is safe? So everyone boils it down to a circular argument:Ledger If you need security, you need the consensus algorithm to be safe, and if the consensus algorithm is safe, you also need yourbook to be safe.

Note that I used two "security" here, assuming that the two security are exactly the same in definition, what does this mean? Meaning it's a circular argument. But in fact, the current Ethereum PoS algorithm, including Vitalik himself, thinks that this is not a circular argument. Why? Because the two definitions of "security" in this sentence are different, he believes that the latter definition of ledger must be secure is different from the definition of consensus algorithm must be secure. He believes that the security of this ledger is based on the so-called social consensus, which is a social process. This social consensus determines that we all agree that this chain is Ethereum. So based on this, we will form an Ethereum PoS consensus participation process on this basis, and further decide which transactions will be processed by this chain next.

But what he has no way to deny is that if everyone has not been synchronizing this chain, the entire process has not been synchronizing this area from its genesis block In the case of block chains, there is really no way to tell which chain is the real Ethereum among two chains with the same form and the same form some time ago. There is no way to do this technically, and there is no way to reach a consensus.

So he proposed weak subjectivity means that the node must guarantee to go online once every four months. Once it is offline for more than four months, it must be sent to a node you trust. Note that it is a node you trust. Synchronize. That is to say, no matter who you synchronize with, the chain that was broken four months ago actually needs to trust the node that provides you with blockchain data. This is weak subjectivity.

It has no way to achieve the same objectivity as PoW, there is no need to trust any node that provides blockchain data on PoW, why ? Because I can independently verify from the genesis block, and it is a lightweight verification to the latest block, it is useless for anyone to lie to me. The consensus model of PoW through competition makes everyone condense on one chain in the end, which is the proof of PoW in terms of security.

However, it cannot be done in the operation of the entire consensus algorithm of the PoS chain, and ultimately depends on social consensus and so-called trust. As long as you are offline for a long time, you will suffer from weak subjectivity, and you must trust a node that provides you with blockchain data. Why is this important? Because it means that the consensus is constantly weakening, and eventually everyone's information source will tend to be centralized towards those who have not been offline for a long time.

And PoW will continue to accumulate consensus, everyone will continue to accumulate workload on the same chain, and all nodes that join do not need to trust others. They only need to use a computer to verify all the data and verify its formal validity, and they can conclude that this is a valid chain. Therefore, PoW is a process of continuous accumulation and continuous cohesion in terms of social consensus.

What do these two mean? I think everyone can think about it carefully, what problems do we want the blockchain to solve? Do we just need a machine that everyone often checks and repairs, or do we hope to find the most basic principle, based on the most basic principle, the blockchain can be used as a 24/7 processing system that continues to generate blocks to us? Provide the most basic services, and continue to build consensus in the process. This is what we want the blockchain to do.

So PoS has no way to compare with PoW in terms of security. What I hate the most and the most common lie is a kind of lie proposed by Vitalik himself. Argue why PoW is not safe, because as long as you rent 51% of the computing power, you can launch a 51% attack. But attacking PoS requires buying 51% of the coins, or buying 51% of the deposits in the hands of PoS participants.

Isn't this a naked lack of comparison? What is this comparing? The comparison is the cost of launching a short-term temporary review of PoW, such as a few hours or dozens of blocks, and permanently destroying a PoS chain. This is obviously comparing two different things.

If you only rent 51% of the mining machines, it is equivalent to launching a censorship attack temporarily, or launching a double-spending attack for a short time. So what we're asking is what's next?

The fact that 51% of the computing power can be rented first is not true in reality. We can see a 51% attack cost website, which shows how much it costs to rent a 51% mining machine, from a few thousand dollars to a few Thousands of dollars are available. If the cost of attack is really so cheap, why is no one doing it? Because he still has many insurmountable difficulties, such as the difficulty of network implementation and so on.

Assuming that it is really possible to rent, what is the result of the attack? **Everyone had a few hours of chaos, and then it was over. The PoW longest chain consensus will promote everyone to continue to gather on the same chain. The PoW system has not been crashed, it has not been completely destroyed. **Unless you can guarantee that you can continuously control 51% of the mining machines, there is no way to continuously launch 51% attacks. This is a very obvious truth.

If you really bought 51% of PoS, what would you do? The answer is that you can do whatever you want. Because if you occupy 51% of the equity, you can completely rule the process of block generation. It also means that newcomers who want to participate in the PoS process must also get your consent. Because they have to lock their deposit into the system through a transaction, if he cannot lock the funds into the system, there is no way to become a staker, there is no way to participate in block production, his signature is invalid and meaningless of. As long as you can hold 51% of the rights and interests of PoS, you can permanently destroy a PoS chain.

Some people will say, don’t we still have a social consensus? If that happens, we'll fine him. This is a ridiculous statement, not to mention that this is a missing comparison. If we want to compare at this level, we cannot compare PoS to PoW. The second is that it's ridiculous if you really think it's a viable solution. Because what we need is a 24/7 system, but this system actually requires the participation of the whole people, and it is often checked for problems. And when something goes wrong, are you sure you can gather so much social consensus to punish it? Or from the perspective of the consensus mechanism, is this social consensus a way that can be exploited?

Because if someone, through a propaganda war, makes people believe that we now have a consensus that we want to punish a group of people, that group of people will be punished , Do you think that as a participant and user of a PoS consensus chain, do you feel safe? This means that the security of your assets is completely subject to that illusory social consensus, and there is no mechanism to protect you. And the point is that everyone's ability to initiate social consensus is different, which is an obvious fact. Are you going to put the safety of your assets at the will of a handful of people? That a small group of people can mobilize social consensus means that they can attack your property at any time. Is this a system you want? Is this a system you want to put your assets in? This is a very absurd and ridiculous statement.

4. Is the attack an opinion or a fact?

Terry: When it comes to social consensus, first of all I think this word is a bit ridiculous. But to you, the term attack is an opinion or a fact? I used to think of attacks as a fact, but now I think forks are a fact. After having a social consensus, I dare not take it as that kind of fact, more like an opinion. How do you think about this problem?

A Jian: I think Terry is right about this question, your sense is very keen. When we have such a mechanism, we can only come to one conclusion in the end, that is, because this system is subject to the will of certain individuals, it cannot achieve the effect we want to protect individuals.

In fact, these attacks are just an opinion, because some people’s views have been condensed, and one party says it is an attack, But the other party said no, this is a just action, and I am sanctioning you for the security of the chain and consensus. Unless you also have enough consensus to fork another chain, there is no way to defend against this attack.

Terry:It feels like the judge is defining.

A Jian: No, you think too easily, this is not a judge, this is the unity of politics and religion. It is a group, or subject, that combines religious leaders and political power.

It is precisely because everyone does not have so much consensus, so we have to create various technologies including blockchain to restrict participation in expression opinion or participate in the consensus process. You have to let it have a boundary. If there is no such boundary, then social consensus may be used at any time and become a tool to attack people.

Just like during the French Revolution, everyone wanted to deal with traitors for the so-called freedom, equality, and fraternity in France, but if the handling of traitors becomes an unconstrained Behavior, if everyone can do it as long as they reach a consensus, then this is out-and-out tyranny.

We all know that in a truly just society, individuals must be protected. It cannot be said that if everyone accuses him, he is guilty. A series of procedures must be formed judicially to protect him, such as the British Magna Carta. A man could not be found guilty unless he had been tried in the presence of those of his feudal rank. This is the basic principle of our legal system. If there is no such mechanism, the final result must be that everyone wants to attack each other and ask others to prove their innocence. For example, prove that you did not attack the Ethereum blockchain. If you cannot prove your innocence, I will attack you.

5. Security: balanced attack, seed node

Terry:< /b>Another question is why some people can believe that PoS is more secure, because they do not understand this set of theories. The more intuitive feeling is that there are many PoS chains, and the attacks you mentioned have not occurred, but some PoW small coins often appear 51% attack, so they can easily conclude that PoS is more secure. What can you, as a practitioner, do to give them some clarity in this regard.

A Jian: We actually agree that in the PoW camp, there will be PoW chains supported by different computing power, and there will be PoS Chains with different locked values. If you really want to analyze technically, you can only use the control variable method. It is to distinguish which mechanisms are crucial and which features will affect its security only from the most fundamental things in technology.

You can see some examples of 51% attacks on PoW chains, such as the attacks that have appeared on ETC before. This example can actually wake us up, because the computing power of ETC itself is relatively small, and all Ethereum mining machines can mine ETC. So in fact, the computing power you occupy is actually only a small part, and this part may not be too large, so your consensus has a security risk.

But it is not true to say that PoS is more secure just from the final result. To take the extreme point, suppose you run a PoS algorithm or PoA algorithm that only you run, it is safe, and all the consensuses that have been reached will not be subverted, because you do not need to subvert yourself. But that doesn't prove its security. When we really want to discuss the issue of security, we need to give it certain constraints and a clearer definition to really speculate on this issue technically in detail.

Daniel: I think of one sentence that can roughly describe this scene, that is, talk about toxicity regardless of dosage is a hooligan. Teacher A Jian talked about some problems, defects and subsequent remedies brought by PoS from the womb, including Nothing at stake attacks and Long range attacks. When we talk about security, the PoS camp will always say that although we have these attacks, it is so difficult to construct these attacks that you cannot falsify them. There are often such theories that cannot be proved or falsified. exist.

A Jian: I think these friends should be regarded as an example of how to get hammered. If you have known the Ethereum Casper algorithm, it actually has two parts, one part is called the fork selection rule, and the fork selection rule is based on these so-called witnesses to send signatures to blocks, called attestation ; The other part is the so-called Casper FFG, which continuously refreshes checkpoints through Casper voting.

In fact, these two parts have undergone quite a lot of improvement in research, and later formed such an expression. I vaguely remember that its security is not based on the assumption of time synchronization, that is, it is also possible to be asynchronous in time, while the activity of continuous block generation is based on the so-called semi-synchronous assumption, which means that the communication delay has an upper limit. Please forgive me if I have made a mistake in the expression here, because I haven't read it for a long time, and I am not sure what the most accurate expression is.

Later, someone proposed an attack on the forum called Balancing Attack. This kind of attack actually involves attacking an assumption of liveness under the so-called semi-synchronous assumption. I have no way to recount the full picture of this attack. Later, on the basis of Balancing Attack, the researchers of Ethereum added some things to the consensus algorithm to resist this attack. This means that we have proved, or we have shown, that even under the assumption of semi-synchronization, there is no way to guarantee its safety and liveness.

I think these things are enough to show that when people say that PoS is safe or there is no way to give an example of an attack, a large part of the reason is that they have no been touched. For example, stake grinding attacks, some PoS blockchains have died due to stake grinding attacks, such as the Balancing Attack I just talked about, a new form of attack, which seems to be proved to be necessary to prevent an attack.

So, if you look at more technical information, you will get more ideas, not just saying "There is no attack now, those PoS Isn't the chain alive and well?" Such remarks. In fact, these are not enough for us to draw a clear conclusion and choose when we really need to choose.

To put it mildly, if you buy a financial product that will explode, it will be safe until the day it explodes, but in fact you cannot guarantee It has always been safe. At this time, I was reminded of a very mean joke told by Russell. He said, you raise a flock of hens and feed them every day as soon as you hit the pot, and it goes on and on. These hens concluded that knocking on the pots was equivalent to having food, until one day, when you knocked on the pots, the hens who came around broke their necks. It's a very mean joke, but it's true.

Daniel:Just now, when Mr. A Jian criticized very sharply about weak subjectivity and other issues, Terry and I have been following Laugh wildly.

Terry: I have another question. I just mentioned weak subjectivity, including the need for nodes to be online. I heard some Comments, saying "there is also a seed node in the BTC code. When it first went online, you also need to find a few nodes through the seed node written in the code, and then you can start synchronizing." They believe that there is also some subjectivity in this, and it is only the difference between weak and strong, not black and white. What do you think about this view?

A Jian: This is not comparable at all. In fact, for all blockchains, when a new node joins the network, others need to provide him with blockchain data to synchronize. The key is whether you can verify the data given by others. We often say: "Don't trust, verify." You have to verify it yourself. Whether it is Bitcoin or Ethereum, there are seed nodes, and there are seed nodes. These nodes provide you with the current state of the blockchain, and you You may find a node closest to you to download the block data.

A feature of the PoW blockchain is that its blocks are very difficult to produce So that every time you receive a block, verify its proof of work, as long as the verification process continues and you are connected to enough nodes, your trust can be minimized during this process That is to say, the factor of trust has been compressed to the minimum in the way we can think of. Therefore, we can say that PoW itself is trust-minimized, but PoS obviously does not meet this point.

Daniel: This is actually a very important point in terms of security. When you want to ensure security, some of your assumptions based on security are to Minimized, you can't assume a whole bunch of things are safe, but assume the least number of things possible so that you can prove it's safe.

6. PoS does not improve scalability

Daniel:We have already talked about security. In addition to security, blockchain also has decentralization and efficiency. I don’t think efficiency needs to be discussed, because PoS has made so many compromises, mainly to improve efficiency.

Terry: But this merger of Ethereum did not improve efficiency. I can introduce this common misunderstanding to you.

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A Jian:Yes, there is no improvement.Thinking that PoS can improve scalability is a misunderstanding in the blockchain community. I discovered this in January.

As an example, the first thing an ordinary node does is to verify the so-called consensus, that is, the Whether the block is a valid block or not, the second thing is the transaction processing. We control the variables. Under the same hardware conditions, the total resources of the nodes remain unchanged. The more resources you spend on verifying the consensus, The less resources you have to process transactions, the lower performance/throughput is, right? This is an obvious fact. From this you can deduce that the so-called PoS can improve scalability, which is a piece of nonsense. Because the cost of PoS consensus verification is much larger than that of PoW.

Here we do not involve transaction processing, only talk about block verification. When verifying PoW blocks , in fact, you only need the hash value of the previous block and the nonce of the current block, and you can know whether the current block is valid or invalid after one calculation. In PoS or delegated PoS, you have to verify 10, 100 signatures, or an aggregate signature containing dozens of signatures. Take the Ethereum PoS block generation as an example. The block generation unit is called a slot. A slot may have 32 verifiers. You need to verify the signatures or aggregate signatures of these 32 verifiers. Note that after verifying the signature, you have to do one more thing, you have to know how much weight these public keys have. The signature is not just a signature. The key point of the signature is which public key it corresponds to. Next, it is necessary to find out whether the corresponding public key can produce a block, and how much weight the signature should be considered, before it can be determined whether the block has been completed. Meet the block requirements.

So, when PoS verifies consensus, it is a so-called stateful verification, which is different from PoW verification. The verification of PoW is a stateless verification, that is, it does not need to know who controls the public key, but only needs to calculate the hash value once to know whether the block is valid. In the verification of PoS, you must first verify the signature, and secondly, the verification is stateful. You must know how much weight each public key corresponds to, so that you can calculate how much weight it has in the final block signature, and then you can determine Does it reach 2/3, does it meet the requirements of the checkpoint.

PoS has a stateful verification, which has a very far-reaching impact. This means that the overhead of PoS on consensus verification will increase with the increase of the number of verifiers, which is an obvious fact. If there are 100 validators, there are 100 states, 1,000 validators have 1,000 states, and 10,000 validators have 10,000 states.

There is a little news that many people have not noticed. The Casper algorithm that Ethereum is proud of claims to be an open algorithm that can accommodate tens of thousands of verifiers. In fact, it was proposed very early that the number of verifiers may be limited in the future. Why limit the number of validators? Isn't the more validators participating, the better? Because the more verifiers there are, its verification efficiency will become worse, so it is necessary to limit it. This is one aspect.

Another aspect that many people have not noticed is that the communication overhead of verifying blocks will also become much larger than PoW. Inside the PoW block producer, you mine yours, and I mine mine. Whoever produces the block first, everyone will follow behind. This is non-interactive. In PoS, block creators need to keep in touch with others and need to collect signatures sent by other witnesses. When you want to collect the signatures of multiple participants, you may not have a one-to-one network connection with these witnesses, and it may take many jumps to collect. In Ethereum PoS, it sets up a signature collector for each slot, and the signature collector must publish the block he proposed, and then receive signatures from others.

Think about it, all he knows is the public key of other witnesses, he doesn't know their network location, this is a risk point, because it means His block should be sent out normally, just like we broadcast a transaction. In addition, when other witnesses do not know the network address of the signature collector, they have to send it out in a normal manner until the signature is collected by the collector. This actually causes a very large communication overhead.

If we think that this is just an internal problem of the faster node, I think it is right but not completely right, because in the process, it is indeed In fact, it takes up the communication bandwidth of those who do not participate in the block generation. Therefore, we will find that if you only study consensus algorithms and consensus mechanisms, but do not study blockchain protocols, it may be difficult for you to realize this.

If you have studied the state expression of Ethereum and its state expansion problem, you will be keenly aware that the PoS algorithm is essentially the verification The state of the user is separated from the state of the ordinary user. The verifier is still stateful, and has an external state corresponding to each ordinary user's account and contract, etc., as well as an internal state. Ethereum uses a mechanism to ensure communication between two states. All participants in the consensus are stateful, so there will be what we call the state expansion problem, and there will be a problem of rising verification overhead.

Daniel: This problem has not been exposed yet. I don't know if the nodes that have been running the Beacon Chain (Beacon Chain) for a year have seen any clues to this problem.

A Jian: I have not followed up on this aspect, but this is the technical inference, technically it will happen, sooner or later It will happen one day, it's just a matter of when. Like you can't just say it has no effect just because it's not causing a bad effect right now, right? Therefore, the statement that PoS is more scalable is actually based on a lack of comparison and selective presentation of facts.

Another simple example. Now PoS supporters say that after using PoS, it only takes 12 seconds for Ethereum to produce a block, while it took 15 seconds for PoW Ethereum to produce a block. You can't really compare that because a 15-second block can be bigger than a 12-second block. The throughput of 4 blocks per minute may not be lower than the throughput of 5 blocks per minute, because the former can have more gas, while the latter requires more overhead in consensus verification. Doesn't this mean that PoW is more scalable than PoS? Why have we been obsessed with this so-called "block production speed determines scalability" myth?

Daniel:In fact, I just wanted to say that in some typical blockchain architecture designs, the PoS consensus design aims to improve Efficiency, improve the so-called throughput, and sacrifice or compromise some other factors. As a result, Mr. A Jian directly moved out the PoS consensus mechanism of Ethereum 2.0 to overturn this statement.

7. Anti-censorship

Terry: Just me I also want to ask. Last time I interviewed Cipher, I happened to talk about the topic of censorship. Let’s take Ethereum as an example. After it switches from PoW to PoS, if it faces scrutiny by relevant US agencies, is there any difference in resisting censorship? Or is there a distinction?

Daniel: I can add one more detail. Usually in the debate, when attacking PoW anti-censorship, it will be said that the PoW mining pool is actually controlled by several large mining pools, and behind the mining pool is a large capital that controls energy. Based on this, many people say that PoW does not have a very Good anti-censorship foundation, also easy to be censored. Of course, in the last issue of Fork It 4, Cipher mentioned that PoS will also face this problem when OFCA requires censorship.

A Jian: I am not a professional on this issue, but I would like to remind you that you participate in the block generation in PoW , In fact, it has nothing to do with your identity. Your public key can be changed every day, but you can’t do it in PoS. You can keep switching URLs, but your identity is always that identity, so in PoS you can Based on this identity, it has been continuously tracking you.

The best way for us to increase censorship resistance, or improve privacy, is to allow everyone to use it naturally, without deliberately using certain technologies This is the ultimate goal we are pursuing in technology, because now we will see some extreme situations, that is, developers who provide these technologies will themselves become targets of attack. Tornado Cash is an obvious example. Of course, this has something to do with the architecture of Ethereum itself, so I won’t go into details.

8. Finality

Terry: OK, your point is interesting. You think PoS rights are stronger, so I would like to ask a question, what do you think of finality? Many people like to talk about this.

A Jian: PoW Ethereum, to achieve finality, it takes about 15 blocks, about 4 minutes. After switching to PoS, it takes 1/2 epoch, plus a little waiting time, to confirm fork-related matters. I calculated before that it will take a total of 6 and a half minutes to reach finality. Why do you say that after the switch to PoS, the speed of Ethereum reaching a certainty has increased? This is a very strange thing.

Terry: Very interesting.

9. The merger of Ethereum is to take the big block route

Daniel : We have talked a lot about the debate of PoS and PoW, and Teacher A Jian also shared a lot of his views. Looking back now, I would like to ask Mr. A Jian a question, are you optimistic about this merge of Ethereum?

A Jian:I must first declare that since July or August last year, I no longer pay attention to the future direction of Ethereum Some things on the Internet, but before that, I still pay attention and understand. If you want to ask me about The Merge and the future direction of Ethereum, I think The Merge is the big block. I said on Twitter before that I wanted to make a meme pack, a man with a hooded head, very glossy, with the words Ethereum merged, and then he lifted the hood, and there were a few big characters on it - big blocks. This is my real opinion.

Daniel: Mr. Jian, can you popularize the concept of large blocks first? Because large blocks and related debates mainly occurred in the Bitcoin community rather than the Ethereum community, and whether to take the large block route also led to the fork of Bitcoin.

A Jian:Big block, as the name implies, is to expand the size of the block and ask nodes to invest more resources to come Achieve the effect of throughput improvement. We still take Ethereum as an example. At the beginning, the upper limit of gas for a single block of Ethereum was 3 million, which was very early, and then it was raised to 8 million, then to 12.5 million, and then to 15 million. After EIP-1559, it directly becomes a large block, and the amount of gas can be doubled, but the average block size is still theoretically maintained at 15 million.

In this process, because the amount of gas that a single block can accommodate, that is, the amount of calculation that can be accommodated, has increased, so you can think that each node is in Within a unit of time, the number of transactions that need to be processed or the amount of resources that need to be invested has increased. If you use tps as a measure, the amount of gas that a block can accommodate changes from 8 million to 16 million. If the transaction composition inside does not change much, then tps will double.

About 2015 and 2016, everyone found that the blocks of Bitcoin began to be full. Before that, it was in a state of dissatisfaction for a long time, so everyone Start with the issue of block size. When the block is full, the so-called congestion problem will start to appear. You cannot send a transaction to be confirmed quickly, and you may have to wait for 1-2 blocks or even longer. At this time, someone proposed how to expand the capacity of the blockchain system, how to increase its throughput, so that everyone's transactions can be confirmed faster, and transaction fees and handling fees are lower. It is probably going in this direction.

At that time, someone suggested that we have the simplest solution, and he even quoted Satoshi Nakamoto, because Satoshi Nakamoto also said that we should Improving throughput is actually very simple, just increase the upper limit of the block size, because there is a limit of 1MB in the original case, and blocks exceeding 1MB will be rejected by nodes. So some people suggested to increase the block size from 1MB to 2MB, at least not in the immediate future. Because of this, the Bitcoin community at the time was full of sharp controversies.

Daniel: At that time, whether Bitcoin should take the route of large blocks was very controversial, and it was so big that it involved the level of belief up. Both parties are concerned about the future of Bitcoin, and even debate this as a question that truly determines the future of Bitcoin. Let’s talk about the results first. Do you think Bitcoin is taking the big block route now?

A Jian: At this point, I have to make some criticisms, Bitcoin has not completely followed the route of large blocks, but Segregated Witness does indeed increase the block size limit. Segregated Witness moves the data called witness in cryptography, that is, the evidence proving the validity of a transaction, to a special place. The other content in the block is still limited to 1MB in size, but if you count the witness For data, the block size is also 2MB.

Daniel: Today, 5 years later, we look back at the debate on the size of the block 5 years ago, and the ending is the current Bitcoin The blocks are a little bigger than before, but not by much. My understanding is that Bitcoin did not really implement the large block route proposed back then, because the expectations of the supporters of the large block back then were 10 times, 20 times, or even more. Moreover, we can still see some idealists in the Bitcoin community today. They still believe that if Bitcoin adopted the proposal of large blocks back then, Bitcoin would be in a different and better situation today. All in all, the dispute between large and small blocks is a very important one in the history of Bitcoin.

A Jian:I would like to add that why many people opposed large blocks at the time was because large blocks have a price , which means that the operating cost of the node increases. If the block size is limited to 1MB, with an average block every 10 minutes, you can calculate how much hard disk space will be used in a year. If the block size becomes 2MB or 4MB, the hard disk space will double. There is no doubt that this will hurt the property of decentralization because it increases the cost of node operation. Because of this, I also had a little opinion on Segregated Witness. From a fundamentalist point of view, Segregated Witness is flawed and something we don't want to be shown frequently in the future, and of course it turns out that it hasn't been shown again.

I think one of the most important things that Segregated Witness brings us is that it always reminds us that big blocks come at a price. If you want to increase the throughput of the blockchain system, large blocks are a simple and straightforward method, and it can indeed improve the throughput, but it is not an ideal solution. In order to maintain the viability of a chain, this method can be used or not.

Daniel: Along with the big block competition of Bitcoin, BCH was forked, and then BSV , we will not discuss it here. Mr. A Jian, earlier you said that the merge of Ethereum is the large block scheme of Ethereum. How should we understand this?

A Jian: Let me give you a not so long reasoning. Let me do an on-site survey first, Daniel and Terry, do you think that layer 2 of Ethereum has a clear, verifiable or very beautiful expansion effect?

Daniel:I deny it.

Terry: I also deny it.

A Jian:Why do you two deny it?

Daniel: In my opinion, all the current Ethereum layer 2 expansion solutions deviate from the true first principles , because the current Ethereum layer 2 expansion solution is based on rollup, rollup is just The computing power of layer 1 has been extracted and improved. In fact, the constraints that can really expand are still on layer 1. So in my opinion, all these rollup schemes are just intermediate transitional schemes, and Ethereum has not really come out with a fully predictable and bright future layer 2 scheme.

A Jian: Yes, what I want to say has been finished by Daniel.

Daniel: No way?

A Jian: Indeed, Daniel summed it up very correctly. These layer 2 solutions of Ethereum will of course have different technical paradigms. I can give you a brief introduction first. For example, ZK-Rollup uses the so-called zero-knowledge proof in cryptography. Now we In fact, it does not use the property of zero knowledge, but uses a technology we call a proof system to generate a proof of computational integrity. That is to say, in the process of going from one state to another, I performed all the calculations that should be performed, and generated a proof that can be proved to you. You can know that every step of me is based on A certain calculation specification you know to run, this is ZK-rollup.

There is also a kind called Optimistic Rollup , it's even simpler. It does not provide you with proof of completeness, but asserts that the final result is this. If you don't believe me, you come to challenge me. We each pay for the deposit here. If you can prove that you are right, mine The deposit will be lost to you, but if you can't prove that you are right, then my state will not be affected, I will continue to take the money I should take, and then layer 2 will continue to go down.

Of course, at the same time, some people have proposed other solutions, such as a solution called Validium in the ZK camp. ZK-rollup and Optimistic Rollup have one thing in common. They both need to publish the transaction data that occurs on layer 2 to the main chain of Ethereum. The form of release is a data form we call Calldata. In this process, both ZK-rollup and Optimistic Rollup will inevitably occupy the resources of the main chain, because you need to store Calldata on the main chain. There is a reason to store this part of data. Without this part of data, you will have no way to construct the state of the layer 2 chain, and then you will not be able to initiate operations such as withdrawals, and you will not be able to initiate related challenges. This is called Data Availability. Validium abandons data availability and does not publish my data on the main chain, but puts the data elsewhere and discloses it in other ways.

Validium’s solution does not occupy the resources of the main chain, but at the same time, you can also think that it provides protection for users The effect will be weaker and slightly weaker, that's the difference.

I have a simple judgment, you can see whether the resources of the main chain are still used in this process? If so, the scalability is limited by the capacity of the main chain resources. Many people who are new to Ethereum layer 2 may misunderstand the term layer 2, mistakenly thinking that all layer 2 will occupy the resources of the main chain, but it is not. Payment channels like the Lightning Network, and state channels, all interact off-chain. There is no need to publish any data on the main chain. You only need to store the locked transaction and the final settlement transaction on the chain. OK.

So, if your layer 2 wants to improve scalability and transmit data to the main chain, then either provide more Calldata on the main chain Data space, or reduce the gas amount of Calldata even lower. Let me remind you a little bit that the expansion effect of Ethereum layer 2 is measured by measuring the amount of gas that each transaction that occurs on layer 2 occupies the main chain.

Daniel: I remember that Ethereum once reduced the cost of Calldata, in this way Let the performance of rollup improve a little.

A Jian: Yes, the price has dropped more than once, I remember it was twice. What is the effect? The effect is equivalent to a layer 2 block occupying a smaller amount of gas on the main chain, so a constant amount of gas usage can accommodate more rollup blocks or pack and compress more transactions, so it is said that "scalability has been improved. ". Do you think this argument works? Technically speaking, I think this kind of argument is outrageous, why? Because you obviously invested more resources. If you tell me that you have now changed the block from 1MB to 2MB, which can hold more data, so the scalability has been improved, people like me who only study technology will find it very problematic. The current solution is to reduce the gas consumption of Calldata, so that the same Ethereum block can accommodate more rollup blocks with the same gas limit to achieve the so-called scalability improvement effect.

What we care about is, what will Ethereum do after The Merge? I briefly read a few articles, including articles written by Vitalik himself, and his thoughts are like this. After the merger, a certain number of PoS witnesses will report at each time point, and we let these layer 2 operators publish blocks to these witnesses. The associated data will use a scheme called erasure coding. The erasure code scheme is to divide a file into many redundant fragments, so you only need to get some of the fragments to restore the original data. Through the erasure coding scheme, PoS witnesses can check whether these layer 2 operators have published their blocks honestly.

Then, Vitalik also proposed a new transaction type, blob-carrying transaction, a transaction that carries data. The particularity of this transaction is that the transaction fee is cheaper, but it cannot interact with EVM smart contracts, etc. Another feature is that it can only be stored for a period of time, such as one month, and the node may not be able to get this data after one month.

Vitalik's thinking is like this, each slot has a certain number of witnesses, then let these witnesses check the rollup area released by the layer 2 operator Blocks, for example, let each slot check the rollup blocks with a size of 1MB to see if they meet the data availability requirements, and then the throughput of the entire system is improved.

We can actually see that in this process, everyone knows that every step is actually expanding the size of the block, because it has to carry more The amount of data, it needs to accommodate more data, it needs to check more data, but at the same time, it tries to limit the effect of block expansion through a series of restrictions at each step. For example, the gas of Calldata has been reduced, but it cannot exceed 1MB in each block. This additional limit limits the effect of block expansion.

After The Merge, why do I say it is a big block, because the verification of the PoS blockchain consensus layer becomes more complicated, if Calldata further reduces the price If , it means that these blocks permanently saved by Ethereum will become larger. If you use the special methods I mentioned above, such as transactions that carry data, to accommodate more data, although these data will be deleted after a period of time, the block will still be enlarged.

Therefore, in the end, there is one sentence - big block. In my opinion, it is a very sad thing to improve the so-called throughput through large blocks.

Terry: Yes, but to expand on it, it has achieved a paradigm shift from PoW to PoS after so many years of iteration convert. In the latter part, there are multiple lines and multiple technical routes to be promoted simultaneously, and then there will be several integrations in the future. Maybe at present, the actual effect is actually a large block effect or an abstraction. I agree with such an effect of large blocks, and I think this is indeed the case.

A Jian:OK, if you are very interested in this topic, I highly recommend you to read two articles. One is an article by John Adler. I don’t know if you know him. He is a very powerful person. In October 2019, he wrote an article called "Security and Scalability of Committee-Based Sharded Blockchain". In my opinion, that article was the first article to wake up everyone's dream about the sharding system, and of course it also woke me up. After that one, I first started to realize the way I should be thinking about this problem, and that article was great.

If you read that article, you will understand that it is actually very difficult not to fall into the trap of large blocks. For many technical routes, if you think about the problems it wants to solve and where it puts the complexity, you can finally come to the conclusion that it may inevitably be a large-block solution. This is one.

Another article is Ruben Somsen, who wrote an article in 2020 called "SNARK and the future of blockchains", this article also clearly demonstrates this technology in the end How to expand, it is also this article, let us know, in fact, in this expansion of Ethereum, it still uses the resources of the main chain in the end. Both articles are highly recommended for everyone to read.

Terry: OK, I will ask Mr. Ajie later to ask for the information of these two articles and put them in Show Notes.

A Jian: Okay. If the first article is John Adler's article, now you can actually search it directlyEnglish original, and its Chinese version is actually a pity , because the earliest Chinese version was provided by Ethereum enthusiasts, and now you have no way to read this article on Ethereum enthusiasts, because this website no longer exists, although it is an Ethereum enthusiast translation, but you can only find him on other sites.

10. The story of BTCStudy

Daniel: Mr. A Jian, you also mentioned that starting from a certain time last year, you shifted your main energy away from an ethereum enthusiast, which I thought was a very tasteful ethereum content community in China at the time. Arrived at BTCStudy. In fact, I also want to ask, can you tell everyone what happened behind the scenes? This is the question I want to ask the most today.

A Jian: I have been waiting for such a gossip question for a long time, and I was finally asked.

In fact, at the end of 2021, we sent you an article It is equivalent to a farewell letter. In this process, I really feel that the experience is also multi-faceted.

For example, we all had a lot of hope for Ethereum at that time, and we also hoped to do our best, whether it was research or not , content distribution, or other aspects, to attract people's attention to it in different ways, and then include some progress in its technology, including some innovations in its application, these are what we hope to convey to everyone's stuff. Because at least at that time, we also appreciated and were very excited about what Ethereum could provide to the world, but in the process, you will also have a lot of bitter experiences.

One of the most concentrated things, if you know me, you should know that it is because of EIP-1559. If you have been paying attention to Ethereum lovers, you will find that although we are also introducing the latest developments including the Ethereum consensus mechanism, we will still convey a critical voice, that is, this thing is not as good as ours As ideal as imagined.

As Daniel said, I seldom express my views in public, but this is a true truth that I have always hidden in my heart Ideas, including in 2019, when I also wrote articles on Mr. Li Yang's official account Orange Book, and made comparisons.

Daniel: I remember very clearly that you issued After that article, people all over the Internet, friends I know, people who have something to do with Ethereum, and all KOLs are reposting this article. The article written by Mr. A Jian, I think what you said actually touched me very much, because I am such a person who has been paying attention to the ecology and community of Ethereum enthusiasts for a long time. Although I have also left the Ethereum community, Teacher A Jian may also know that when the website of the Ethereum enthusiast community was first created, I also participated a little bit, because I was with everyone at that time, and we invested ourselves Part of the energy and effort.

Although I did not participate in the operation of the Ethereum enthusiast community, I have been paying attention to the birth of this child. In China, in my mind, the Ethereum enthusiast community is the only one, and I can confidently say that it is the only one that I think is the most tasteful, ecological, thoughtful and content The content community, and it can be seen from the website of Ethereum enthusiasts that there are a group of small partners behind it, very passionate, and passionately promoting the content construction of this website. Among them, the last most passionate promoter is Mr. A Jian yourself. I think there is no doubt about this, and then such a big change happened last year.

I still remember one thing that impressed me deeply. I want to share it with you here. matter.

I would like to quote a book I particularly like, a book written by Zweig called "When the Human Stars Shine". He wrote about the very important time points that happened during the development of human civilization, and some things that some people at that time did at that time. This book records these important points in the development of human civilization. For example, what happened when Byzantium was captured, and what happened when humans discovered the New World of America were all recorded.

However, there is no way to compare the development time of the blockchain with the development history of the human civilization world. In the history of blockchain development, we have experienced many very important events in the past few years, and in each event, there are some very important people and things that should be recorded. For example, Ethereum EIP-1559, this proposal was passed. When the community was shouting, everyone was thinking about what kind of future and predictable benefits EIP-1559 would bring to them. Someone stood up Going to appeal to the community that it is actually harmful to the ecology, there are many potential problems, and everyone should be alerted that it is really unfair, and so on.

At that time, I remember that at that time, I raised my arms and shouted out the most important voice in the Chinese community. The one who impressed me deeply was Teacher A Jian.

At that time, you asked people around you to promote and promote, and then you made a sharing session on a popular audio forum called Club House at that time. I remember I went to listen to the live sharing on the Internet. At that time, you said that I would explain to you the ins and outs of what happened to EIP-1559 and my analysis of it, but in order to express completeness in this process, you don’t I hope that anyone will interrupt the sharing, you let everyone become an audience, don't go up to speak, and then we will quietly listen to your sharing below.

In that sharing, your point of view is very sharp, and I agree very much. After you shared, I immediately forwarded this sharing to my internal group. I told Terry and Jan that although I was no longer in the Ethereum community, I liked that moment so much. In the Ethereum community, there are those people who have true love for the Ethereum community, these people who are entangled in the future and destiny of Ethereum, the community of Ethereum at that time, let me see its most beautiful moment, and it is also my favorite of those people.

I left the Ethereum community, and I really liked those people and things in those communities at that time, which left a deep impression on me.

A Jian: The past cannot be traced back. At that time, Ethereum EIP-1559 should have been a proposal from 2017, but in For a period of time after 2017, it did not receive much attention. Later, it should be in 2020. At that time, I publicly expressed online that PoS is not as good as PoW, and its verification cost is higher. After this incident, I don't know why, EIP-1559 was quietly accelerated.

But in fact, I have already written an article before that point in time, saying what is the impact of EIP-1559 on income distribution, and it may affect What kind of impact will the level of transaction fees have? You may not know that I am a student of economics. There are actually very mature methods in economics. We call it the demand curve and supply curve analysis method of neoclassical economics. It is a very simple and easy-to-understand method, but In fact it is one of the most powerful key tools invented since the inception of economics. I wrote an article using this method to analyze the effect of EIP-1559 income distribution and its final results. If you are interested, you should still be able to find the articles I wrote at that time on the Internet.

In fact, there are opponents in the English community, and everyone’s objection angles may be different. For example, the CEO of a wallet objected to EIP-1559 because it made the wallet so complicated, but in fact Ethereum did not do a good job including developer education, nor did it propose a Available standards let these wallet developers know what the hell is going on. There are also some perspectives, such as the base fee of EIP-1559, its calculation is historical, and a reduction does not only affect the next block. Therefore, some users may wait specifically to send transactions when it is relatively low, resulting in the effect of magnifying the fluctuation of handling fees.

These are their angles. From my own point of view, I am very opposed to people thinking that this matter is only related to miners, because it is not aimed at miners, it is aimed at conceptually called block producers, who are originally eligible to get the Those who received some fee income, but the consensus mechanism of Ethereum happened to be the PoW mechanism at that time, so it was the miners who were weakened. If it is transferred to PoS, it is actually the witness we mentioned earlier, or the participant of the PoS consensus, that is weakened.

Everyone is also very excited, thinking that you miners earn so much, then after you unplug your income, it becomes deflationary, and everyone is very happy. This is actually a very short-sighted, extreme, and irresponsible idea, because you are actually weakening the motivation for everyone to pledge to the system consensus and provide it with security.

Daniel: People without economics literacy do not realize that deflation is actually a very terrible thing.

A Jian: I don’t think my point of view is like this, but actually it can’t create deflation at all. Because both deflation and inflation are harmful because of their anti-anticipation, that is, when everyone expects this, but it is not the case. For example, people expect it to be inflationary, but it is not actually inflationary, or it is expected to be deflationary, but it is not actually deflationary, or you expect it to be inflationary, but it is deflationary.

All of these deviations from expectations are actually detrimental to the currency. It is not that inflation is harmful or that deflation is harmful, but the effect we hope to achieve is that everyone has as clear an awareness as possible of its entire inflation and deflation.

This is also the reason why some economists or people who study economics are so excited when they see Bitcoin, because Bitcoin has finally completed numismatics The very best way that everyone can think of is to make its inflation transparent. Once it becomes transparent, our review of its real-time money supply can create the effect of what we call a sound currency, and we can build a better or more complete and sound market system on this basis.

Because we have found that this currency cannot be used consciously by some to deprive others of their wealth. The value of the currency itself is constantly adjusting its own price in a spontaneous process of the market, and everyone can find the market price of the currency itself and use it as a trading tool or a medium of exchange. Once this layer is unstable, you will find that it will continue to interfere with our social division of labor and the distribution of the entire industry.

In the end, you will find that economists should have participated in this process, or people who originally studied public policy should have participated, but But they can cite a literature that has not reached a clear conclusion, that is, the professor from an unknown university, he said that EIP-1559 will not have the effect of reducing transaction fees, as for its income distribution effect, he has no effect at all analyze. Such an incomplete paper is often cited by them, and these supporters are full of personal attacks and lack of quality when discussing it.

All of these discussions are actually on the Ethereum Magicians forum. Not only on the forum, but I actually told them directly, I said that you still have no way to provide everyone with an accurate gas quotation. They said that it is because you lack the data from the miners, and the miners can send this data out by themselves. Unless you are a bastard, otherwise you will not make random changes, and you will not often adjust the data or falsely report the data. So, what is this attitude? This is nothing more than saying that if a certain miner can't do what you want, you attack him, that's what it means.

This is the quality of the Ethereum fork coordinator, which is really very disappointing. Throughout the process, you will find that, in my opinion, it is far from reaching the so-called full review of different opinions, and has not reached the so-called decentralized process. We hope that the decentralized process will bring us the effect, for example, that the opinions are fully reviewed, it is well thought out, and when someone raises objections, we should pay attention to the objections.

Daniel: At that time, the voice of opposition was obviously criticized according to the current statement, and all the voices of opposition were very was quickly submerged.

I heard you talking about EIP-1559 just now, and you are much more rational and restrained than at that time. At that time, you were really passionate, and you tried every means to raise your arms and shout out, so that everyone can realize that EIP-1559 actually has many problems, which must be paid enough attention to.

At that time, I was very worried about you. I was in a completely different public chain system, so I was not able to stand up for another The position of the public chain speaks out. In my opinion, when the whole community has a very powerful force to push forward a matter, even if you object, what you see is that it will rain and your mother will get married. But you have to make the voice of opposition heard by as many people as possible, and figure out how to face it correctly.

Ethereum is about to switch from PoW to PoS. Just like the implementation of EIP-1559 back then, it is also a matter of raining and marrying . But at this point in time, we still need to point out the original intention of PoW, the problems of PoS, and some things that deserve to be alerted and worthy of attention, and let as many people as possible know, maybe there will be some rationality More people will seriously think and analyze. I think this is enough. This is also the original intention of our Fork It to try to record a few more episodes of the topic of PoW and PoS, and to find as many people as possible to talk about this topic.

I think it is very meaningful for us to stop the car with a mantis arm.

A Jian: Actually, I can understand. I have heard many people express to me that they are very grateful for some of the content that Ethereum enthusiasts have made in the past, allowing them to understand Ethereum or to improve their knowledge at a certain point. I think this is Ethereum The merit of being a fan is also why everyone should remember it.

But I also have another feeling, everyone has paid so much for Ethereum, why are these contributions not taken seriously? It's not just me, it's other people too. In the end, those of us who are enthusiastic and join the historical process can only be forced to compromise to a process that is actually more centralized, or a more centralized governance process.

I am doing research on PoW and PoS myself. Around 2020 and 2019, I think that after I have a little answer, my focus will turn to Ethereum The research of Fang itself, this research finally led me to a conclusion, that is, the structure of Ethereum, whether it is its account model or its computing paradigm on the chain, in the end it has not actually thought about how to protect those users, how to Ability to accommodate users who do not authorize a process.

In Bitcoin, this aspect is there. For example, if you disagree with Segregated Witness, you think it is really a piece of shit, you can not upgrade to a node after Segregated Witness at all, you can use an old Bitcoin software, no matter which client it is , you can fully synchronize the entire blockchain, but there is no way to verify the transactions related to segregated witness. You can also say that if you pay me, you don't use Segregated Witness, I will use P2pKH. You don't want to change me, I don't have to withdraw from the network, I will continue to be my old node to verify transactions related to myself, and at the same time do my best for the part of the Bitcoin blockchain I see Provide security, provide verification. You can do this.

But on Ethereum, you can't do it. Because the architecture of Ethereum determines that it only has hard forks, its architecture actually does everything you can do with calculations on the chain. But in order to make these calculations more economical, it needs to adjust the gas consumption and make more price settings.

In the end, you will find that Ethereum is a political consensus without technical consensus, and it can only be implemented by hard fork. The reason I ended up wanting to leave. In the past few years, I have seen too many people, not just us, have expectations, imaginations, and even very ardent expectations for Ethereum, but why can’t these expectations be implemented in the end? Is it because they didn't try hard enough? Or is there some other reason? I think the ultimate reason lies in the technology and the technical paradigm. Has it ever thought that it should protect its users, it should protect the consensus, it should cherish every hard-won consensus, and it should accommodate every possible possibility? When individuals enter the ecology, they can use it to continue dreaming and continue to fight for a distant and beautiful future that we can imagine.

I think it has never thought about this matter, and the end result can only be that we people become the ashes of the times. If your direction is the same as that of the Ethereum Fund If you go in a different direction, you can only become ashes.

Daniel: I can feel the emotion Mr. A Jian said, so after the Ethereum enthusiasts published the last testimonial, they closed it, We turned the page and we saw another awesome BTCStudy in the community. This is a new beginning, this is a new story.

A Jian: Yes, because after EIP-1559, I really don’t have any intention to continue in the ecology of Ethereum down. So, I started researching Bitcoin, and after I found out about its user protection, I liked it a lot. Of course, there are original reasons for this liking. For example, Bitcoin supporters actually recognize PoW as a consensus mechanism, its real advantages and its indispensability. They understand this, and speculatively tease out as many arguments as we can imagine, pushing as far as we can at the moment.

And then, when we started BTCStudy, we found a problem. There is no good channel in China that allows everyone to concentrate on understanding Bitcoin , to explore the technical characteristics of Bitcoin and its possibilities.

Daniel: is the Bitcoin idea?

A Jian:Yes. After we have been in this circle for a while and have seen some things, we have this feeling that everyone has been emphasizing performance and functions in recent years. Many new public chains will emphasize that their performance is better than Ethereum and Bitcoin, higher tps, more functions, and so on. They are all using this method to advertise themselves, to promote themselves, and to find market positioning for themselves. At this time, Bitcoin will make a sober voice and punch you, telling you that large blocks have costs, large blocks have costs, and large blocks will sacrifice decentralization. You can say it's a very simple sentence, it's a cliché, even a cheesy, very old-fashioned sentence.

Daniel: What is really difficult is persistence, ten years of persistence.

A Jian:Yes. It will tell you that these things have a price. If possible, can we choose a smarter approach, or can we choose a longer-term approach? In my opinion, this is what attracts me the most about Bitcoin thinking. .

Because it is loaded, not how fancy functions my chain should provide, it cares about whether I can provide these functions while minimizing the overhead To keep the blocks from becoming larger, and to keep the verification overhead of each node at a relatively low level, so that each of us can verify the Bitcoin blockchain by ourselves.

I find this idea particularly appealing to me. However, it is difficult for you to find such a channel in China, or such a website, it will take the trouble, and it will specifically emphasize to you that this is the idea of Bitcoin, which is left to us by Bitcoin, or that this is Bitcoin Tell us an important lesson.

August 2021, when Taproot has been upgraded for less than 4 months, but you can hardly find a decent article in the Chinese world. In April, I remember that Li Hua wrote an article at that time, and wrote an introduction to Taproot. In fact, it was well written, and each component was introduced, but it may be because he did not find those original ones at that time. The source of the proposal made him incomplete in grasping some details. We did not find particularly good materials at the time, so we had to re-read these English materials by ourselves, and then tried to make up for our understanding of Bitcoin. This is our original intention to do BtcStudy.

Daniel: In fact, I now occasionally read some content and articles on BTCStudy. My feeling is that the taste is still there, and there are very strong technical articles , some forward-looking, exploratory articles, including some thoughtful articles. Where did I see the positioning of BTCStudy, which is to be a Chinese gathering place for Bitcoin ideas, is that true?

A Jian:Yes, yes.

Daniel: If the audience wants to learn more about BTC’s thinking, is there any way to make better use of BTCStudy? Because you must have a very good blockchain technology literacy, or the underlying philosophical literacy of the blockchain, before you can understand the content discussed in the articles on the BTCStudy website. Do you have any good suggestions?

A Jian: Actually, the best way, I think you click on BTCStudy, there is a module at the top of it, which is for Articles are tagged, one of which is particularly interesting, called culture . This column is dedicated to the articles we found about the spirit of Bitcoin or the spiritual context of Bitcoin. You can find them here.

One of the series is particularly famous, called Genesis Documents. It mentioned several predecessors of Bitcoin, what attempts they have made in digital currency, and how they finally failed to make their projects land due to some shortcomings, or did not create an event like Bitcoin. s things. I think that is very good.

In addition, there is also the history of Bitcoin, including how Bitcoin was developed before, what is Bitcoin’s current governance or its community culture of. I think it may be a better way to get started to see the spiritual heritage of Bitcoin and everyone's current mental outlook. You have to read a few more of these before you can feel them.

Daniel: I really understand what you want to say, I will translate what you want to say. In the process of collecting, sorting, and translating, you have discovered a lot of good materials, and then you have shown a very colorful world of the spiritual core of Bitcoin, waiting for those who are destined. If you meet someone with predestined relationship, he will feel the same way as you, and will discover a wonderful world, isn't it?

A Jian:Yes.

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