Hey this is Steve Good and Yuri Cataldo
and we're back again on The Coin Chat
cutting through the noise and misinformation on cryptocurrency
to tell you what truly matters
hi welcome back Yuri nice to see you again good to see you again Steve
I don't feel like I got enough out of this whole kind of consensus thing
that I started thinking about you know
it is so confusing when I look at the mining stuff I thought maybe it might
just be worth just sharing with people exposing them a little bit to more
details on you know all the different protocols in mining because it's so deep
and so technical it's a rapid hole on a rabbit hole on a rabbit hole all on its own
just a maze of stuff okay I thought maybe the easiest ways to sort of
describe it from what you and I were talking about offline which is this
concept of the Byzantine sort of Byzantine Byzantine sorry that's okay
I say... Byzantine Generals Problem that's what Byzantine Generals Problem okay yeah this was an idea
that was brought up in in the early 90s actually right about about consensus so it's been around for awhile
right so I put up an image on the screen for those who are on YouTube
but for those who are just listening in what we basically got is a castle in the middle
and in a nice kind of I'm going to attack the castle model
all the little red arrows surrounding the whole castle could all be an agreement
we're gonna attack the castle that's great cuz everyone's gonna attack
right but it only works if they all attack at the same time and together and together
in consensus in consensus and they're all far apart so it's they can't just
like wave a flag and one part and all the generals see it right
it's the way that's where the that's where the basic problem starts from and then
in between all of them are these traitors
who will sometimes change whatever the
information is so who do you know how do you trust
that the information you're getting is correct
and how then do you work together in a unit to decide when to all attack at the same time
right so therein lies the problem if you got a
castle and you've got a bunch of
generals surrounding the castle you need
to have a mechanism for communicating
between all the generals and there's
where your consensus comes in you still
need it at least 50% of the guys to say we're going ahead and if a few
traitors decide to bugger off or they
don't want to fight or they're scared of
losing their lives or they want to go
back to their wives or whatever it was
that was going on back then or even
today then you still need to know that
there's enough consensus across all the
other generals to go ahead and attack
and that there is still agreement mm-hmm
so that's the how'd you call the
Byzantine General's... Byzantine General's Problem
problem problem problem yeah cool you're
you're welcome right so that right there's so many
different protocols in mining and in consensus that I thought this was a good kind of story
good way to start it to kind of explain
the problem set which is we need to have in the mining community for it to work
you need to have 51% or above because if
you don't that effectively someone can infiltrate the mining operation
globally as a decentralized organization
and can destroy that, right, there are a ridiculous number of protocols
we've talked about a few in the past The simplest ones proof-of-work which is
basically the Bitcoin model of using ASICs and using GPUs or not GPUs but in
Ether use GPUs or ASICS in Bitcoin to effectively run a bunch of calculations, computations
and come back and say this is the results and everyone says yes or no
and if there's outliers that say no they're just ignored because it's gonna go ahead
and those those are the traitors and in the proof of stake model
it's pretty much the same thing the difference being now you're just staking coins
but your computer still does the calculation
and as long as there's 51% that agree the traitors are thrown out and the consensus says from the computers
yes this calculation is correct yes this transaction is fine
and go ahead and proceed with transaction go ahead let's see that's the Ethereum model right yeah
so now let's talk about... Proof of Stake is not necessarily the Ethereum model
there's a there's a lot of coins that use Proof of Stake but Proof of Work is Bitcoin and Ethereum
and I know that Ethereum of course is moving to a Proof of Work / Proof of Stake model
it's doing a bit of both but right there are other coins like the one we talked about the
adult coin which was definitely a Proof of Stake yep and there's a number of other
Gincoin and there's lots of other projects out there that are using
Proof of Stake models where you have to hold the coins in order to participate in the mining
but actually Yuri you and I were talking offline there's a whole bunch of other types of consensus
based mining models should we just rattle off a few to give people a flavor
of the complete and utter madness that's out there in the world of crypto
sure sure okay so first off there's the Delegated Byzantine Fault-Tolerance
that's used by Neo only you could say that I would never have managed to say that on the first go
and it's a little bit of a mouthful to explain so should we just name them or do you want to
lets just name a few of them first and then circle back, so thats one
there was I saw that there was proof of elapsed time
mm-hmm
there's a proof of activity
proof of storage
proof of burn proof of burn? I just saw that one recently
what else?
proof of capacity okay interesting
there's also proof of coin which I'm I think those are kind of mixed together
okay and then there's if you're trying to do a public and private blockchain solution
there's I think it's called tender mint right yeah I read about that couldn't get my head around
I've no idea what it said I mean no I kind of get it but to be honest
some of this stuff is super mega technical because there's multiple ways to implement this stuff
and people are probably sitting here wondering right now what do we mean can we give some examples
of the differences
I mean we've already described the difference between Proof of Work and Stake
is Stake you have to have coins and Work you just provide mining power or compute power
but yeah proof of storage you have to have storage capacity
and the storage capacity counts and the more capacity you have
than the more that your mining kind of weird right yeah yeah yeah
and then it's to another one Loop Fault Tolerance
I'm just gonna keep naming these off
these random ones which get really a lot more technical than that one
there's a current coin it's I C O N they're the the primary ones who use the loop fault tolerance
ICON right yeah ICON yeah Do you want to elaborate on that one?
no no that's really really technical and I I'm not as technical of a person so
it's gonna be harder to describe it but I think the point we're making here is that
there has been any evolution in the the various types of of mining solutions that are out there
to account for or solve various problems and to make sure that there's efficiency in the way that coins are mined
or that coins are validated or the transactions are verified
these are all different forms of consensus across a network of a decentralized environment
yeah which I again I think is fascinating that they're basically all using this one
one issue that was brought up back in the early 90s and then most of these solutions are coming from that idea
of like how do you get a group of generals who may or may not be lying to one another
to arrive on consensus so I think it's absolutely fascinating yeah
yes so there's a you know when you look at things like I was just thinking of an example
it was like delegated proof of stake did we talk did you mention that? no I don't think I did
so Delegated Proof of Stake is just another form of Proof of Stake where the delegates
can also propose other types of changes to the network and their proposals
are distributed to be voted on by all the stakeholders mm-hmm
so that's almost like bringing users in to kind of vote on something but but not
did we we can about Proof of Authority?
we did not well so that's everyone has one and only one reputation
so everyone gets one vote regardless of what they're doing so it creates a level playing field for all people
mm-hm and then there's what EOS does the
transaction has Proof of Stake right
so everybody gets one right
so there's then we mentioned Proof of Elapsed Time
which was actually somehow is related to Intel
and I believe hyper ledger is using some parts of this on their Sawtooth blockchain project
so it's called POET, Proof of Elapsed Time and it's a lottery designed consensus protocol
that builds on trusted execution environments provided by the Intel SGX CPU chips
so talk about you know make sure you have to have Intel in order to make the mining work
right exactly
so there's a lot of really cool I mean innovative ways to
validate transactions other than I sent it and you received it
right cool right and and it's amazing to see where things are going and
I'm excited to see which ones start showing up more and more and more
and allow for faster transactions and
secure networks right absolutely one thing I I noticed in reading through
all these things is no one really talks specifically about speed of transaction
it's all about the consensus and the agreement side of things
I agree with you Yuri I think the big thing missing
that I'd like to see more of in the world of consensus
is people focusing more on how to make it faster
as part of consensus it means you have to vote faster too!
exactly!
great well I think that was a really good quick little overview for people to
just kind of get their heads around what is crypto mining
in the sense of consensus and all the different protocols that are out there
and how things are evolving
thanks everyone for listening in to the Moon
until next time