2/ The eagerly expected Ethereum PoS solution now running on testnet for several months forked on Friday when the majority of the nodes got stuck because of a bug.
3/ It turned out that this critical bug occurred in a component using the Roughtime protocol. The network of servers supporting Roughtime is operated by the likes of Google and Cloudflare thus unveiling a huge centralization problem in the ETH 2.0 PoS design and implementation.
4/ Even worse, the bug also activated the protocol NoS protection, also known as the “Slashing” mechanism, while designed to deter attacks on the network, in practice it confiscated funds of node operators whose only crime was running a buggy software.
5/ True, this happened on a testnet, a network meant to find these sort of bugs. But the reliance on third parties, as we’re seeing on Ethereum, is turning into a major flaw.
6/ A bug is a bug is a bug and nobody in the #blockchain industry is immune to bugs. Recovering from this unfortunate situation will be the true challenge for the distributed teams of #Ethereum developers working on ETH 2.0
8/ Running for over 6 years using PoS we have enough context and experience to know for sure that slashing is not the way to go as it is likely to punish honest node operators that cannot afford to lose their deposit due to some obscure reason.
9/ As I explained in the past, NoS is mostly a theoretical issue hackernoon.com/thoughts-about… while in practice a simple PoS algorithm is more secure than most PoW alternatives techburst.io/pos-vs-pow-rev…
10/ Rest assured that #Ardor will never rely on external services to reach #blockchain #PoS consensus and never confiscate funds from block generators.
