A brief history of POS—eight years of evolution

Editor’s note: This article is from Coin Circle Donkey Head, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

timeline

timeline

Although as early as 2011, someone proposed the concept of PoS in the Bitcoin forum BitcoinTalk. This is the earliest recorded proposal of PoS. From 2011 to 2019, for a full 8 years, pos currency was short-lived in 2013-2014. (Representatives are peercoin, NXT, blk). From 2015 to 2016, pos coins fell to the lowest level as a whole. Even in the bear market of 2017, the overall currency value of pos coins did not perform well. After crossing the bear market in 2018, can pos coins borrow the east wind in 2019 and skyrocket?

Donkey Head will divide the past of pos coin (the four development stages of pos coin) and the future (whether pos coin can rise) into two articles, and give you a detailed interpretation.

Go straight to the topic: a brief history of pos consensus

I will explain the evolution history of the POS consensus in the past eight years from two aspects of the introduction of POS—the four major stages of POS development

What is PoS?

PoS: The English full name of PoS is Proof of Stake, which is a proof of equity mechanism.

V God, the founder of Ethereum, is also an advocate of POS. He understands POS in this way: In the system of PoS, the generation of new blocks requires the participation of coin holders or certain influential verifiers. This is more efficient than PoW and does not require Efficient hardware, also requires no electricity.

PoS: It is an algorithm that achieves a consensus through the consent of the holders. Its purpose is to produce a new block. Compared with PoW, the whole process does not need to consume more power, nor does it require efficient hardware.

secondary title

(Generalized) POS consensus development process (4 stages)

PoS has been developed for 8 years since it was proposed in 2011 to 2019. PoS has experienced two bulls and bears in the currency circle, and the relative pos is also constantly evolving. Each bull and bear will bring some more representative PoS currency.

1. four stages:

2. Hybrid Consensus: PoW+PoS (Peercoin)

3. Pure PoS consensus (NXT, BLK (pow is just a way to solve the initial coin fork))

4. Delegated Proof of Stake: DelegatedPoS (DPOS)

Pos variants: BFT+PoS, PoS+PBFT, etc.

Phase 1: Transitional Hybrid Consensus (PoW+PoS)

On August 19, 2012, the first PoS+PoW consensus-based project Peercoin (Peercoin) was born. Its function is similar to that of Bitcoin. It wants to become a payment currency. It may be because of the unique problems of PoS. It was created by the founder Sunny King. The consensus of Peercoin is actually based on PoW and PoS, not pure PoS. Although Peercoin retains a large number of PoW (btc) designs, the design of Peercoin allows us to see many new concepts: like coin age ), random parameter fields, PoS checkpoints, etc.

The mixed consensus PoW+PoS is a transitional stage from PoW to PoS. The PoW consensus of Bitcoin was the most authoritative between 2009 and 2014, because the computing power at that time was pitifully low compared to the present and the scope of use was small, so Most people don't pay much attention to the waste of resources and efficiency of PoW. Many PoW projects based on Bitcoin fork, such as Litecoin, are highly praised in the market just by shortening the block time. It is said that the design of Dotcoin still stands on the shoulders of PoW, and has carried out many good strategies, such as incentives, fork protection, consensus realization, and fork strategies, etc. Because PoS was born in a very short time, most of PoS has been explored in the Peercoin project, so we have seen a transitional way of Bitcoin on PoS.

Phase 2: Pure PoS Consensus (NXT)

On September 28, 2013, the NXT (Future Coin) project was launched on Bitcoin Talk. NXT (Future Coin) is a pure PoS project;

2. Complete pos mining 3. The initial distribution is determined by donations. The total amount and distribution: 21 BTC, share one billion NXT.

5. After 73 people invested 21 bitcoins in the initial stage of wealth creation, NXT gradually declined.

Blackcoin (BLK)

Blackcoin (Blackcoin), Blackcoin is actually a project in 2014. Its PoW mining lasts for about a week, and then the entire mining will no longer accept PoW verification, but instead accept PoS verification; shadow The same is true for the currency, its duration is probably a fixed height, and then it enters the PoS mining.

Phase 3: Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS)

DPOS(BTS、EOS)

The DPOS proposed on the BitShares forum in early 2013 was first proposed by Daniel Larimer, who is BM: Why not let the token holder voters sign the validator of the block instead of doing it himself, because at that time, he needed to run the validator himself A node, the motivation to run these nodes is still relatively poor, so you can elect some people to help you do this.

EOS is built on the basis of the graphene platform. Until 2018, we still see that many gateway assets in the Bitcoin exchange (Bitshares) are based on graphene-based DPOS.

Advantages of DPOS (BTS, EOS):

1. The tps has been greatly improved, the main chain is tps5000, and the loading side chain is expected to exceed one million tps. The scalability is extremely strong, and the EOS ecology is almost invincible in the same period

2. Super node + inflation solves the reward problem

Disadvantages of DPOS (BTS, EOS):

1. Centralization problem: BTS began to verify with more than 100 nodes. With the decline of the currency price, the number of nodes gradually shrank to more than 30. EOS directly set the number of super nodes to 21. Although the list of candidates was retained, its centralization The problem has been criticized.

DPOS is still active in 2019, including Cosmos, Polkadot, Dfibity, Cardano, and the upcoming Ethereum. The algorithms of these projects have one thing in common: let capable users entrust their own rights and interests to different verification nodes . , as nodes tend to be centralized today, we feel that entrusting rights and interests to node verifiers and letting more professional people do more professional things may be the trend of PoS now, because after all, pure pos verification will cause many problems. The instability of the main network is due to forks.

The fourth stage: Pos hybrid: BFT+PoS, PoS+PBFT, etc.

BFT: BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) is called Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Byzantine fault tolerance technology is a kind of fault tolerance technology in the field of distributed computing. The Byzantine assumption is a modeling of the real world, where computers and networks may behave unpredictably due to hardware errors, network congestion or outages, and malicious attacks. Byzantine fault-tolerant techniques are designed to handle these abnormal behaviors and meet the specification requirements of the problem to be solved.

The role of BFT: Occupational fault tolerance is essentially to improve the anti-pressure and anti-risk capabilities of a system of the entire PoS consensus. That is to say, if the Byzantine consensus is added, it allows the entire network to lose some nodes or some nodes to be dishonest or evil, or In case of offline or downtime, the entire network can still run smoothly.

BFT+POS was proposed by the founder of the Tendermint team in 2014.

Highlights of BFT+POS

1. The finality of the new block.

2. Improve the tps performance of pos

secondary title

From 2011 to 2019, pos was born for 8 years

From 2011 to 2019, pos has experienced four stages of development