ZmnSCPxj [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2023-08-28 🗒️ Summary of this message: The design ...
📅 Original date posted:2023-08-28
🗒️ Summary of this message: The design relies on the honest majority assumption, but it doesn't restrict usability. Sybil-resistance is necessary to rely on the assumption.
📝 Original message:
Good morning Mr Nuclear,
> You are correct that the design relies on the honest majority assumption.
> However, I disagree that it restricts the usability of the proposal,
> due to the following considerations.
>
> 1. Any distributed system consensus, including bitcoin PoW consensus,
> relies on the same (honest majority) or a stronger (hones 2/3) assumption;
> and for some cases even 1/3 can break the consensus conditions (like with
> selfish mining); so the untrusted peer networks are not something which
> by definition requires stronger guarantees.
The major difference here is that for PoW, it is impossible to create a "sybil attack" where you only need to spin up multiple nodes on AWS containers, each with its own identity.
For PoW, every such node requires its own continuous hashpower; on Lightning, each such node can be generated by simply incrementing a 256-bit number.
Thus, the honest majority assumption can **only** be relied on if you have ***some*** sybil-resistance.
PoW *is* the sybil-resistance that Bitcoin uses.
In short: you can only reason "I think, therefore I am", but you cannot from there derive that others exist; you MUST assume that there are only two entities: yourself, and the rest of the universe.
Without any sybil-resistance mechanism, it is entirely possible for me to run multiple nodes, then vote you out of your funds.
There is a reason why every non-custodial trust-minimized multiparticipant offchain mechanism requires n-of-n.
Regards,
ZmnSCPxj
🗒️ Summary of this message: The design relies on the honest majority assumption, but it doesn't restrict usability. Sybil-resistance is necessary to rely on the assumption.
📝 Original message:
Good morning Mr Nuclear,
> You are correct that the design relies on the honest majority assumption.
> However, I disagree that it restricts the usability of the proposal,
> due to the following considerations.
>
> 1. Any distributed system consensus, including bitcoin PoW consensus,
> relies on the same (honest majority) or a stronger (hones 2/3) assumption;
> and for some cases even 1/3 can break the consensus conditions (like with
> selfish mining); so the untrusted peer networks are not something which
> by definition requires stronger guarantees.
The major difference here is that for PoW, it is impossible to create a "sybil attack" where you only need to spin up multiple nodes on AWS containers, each with its own identity.
For PoW, every such node requires its own continuous hashpower; on Lightning, each such node can be generated by simply incrementing a 256-bit number.
Thus, the honest majority assumption can **only** be relied on if you have ***some*** sybil-resistance.
PoW *is* the sybil-resistance that Bitcoin uses.
In short: you can only reason "I think, therefore I am", but you cannot from there derive that others exist; you MUST assume that there are only two entities: yourself, and the rest of the universe.
Without any sybil-resistance mechanism, it is entirely possible for me to run multiple nodes, then vote you out of your funds.
There is a reason why every non-custodial trust-minimized multiparticipant offchain mechanism requires n-of-n.
Regards,
ZmnSCPxj