Monero

I have recently seen some heated debates about Proof of Stake and Monero.
I think we are missing some clarification to make sure we are all discussing the same things. Let's chat about this so we can all contribute to improve the network.

The Monero network has recently seen some mining centralization.
As a hostile mining pool, the attacker has some attack vectors that can cause more or less disruption, and that disruption needs to be addressed, carefully. This comment on lemmy explains this point in more details.

One of the disruptions caused by the attacker is deep block re-orgs, that cause exchanges like Kraken to increase deposit times for Monero (details also in post above).
One of the solutions proposed to resolve this issue is to record somewhere that a block is accepted, and it should not be changed in the future. Something that says, we solemnly declare that this block is in its final state, and we won't change it anymore.

Of course, we are not going to the city hall for that, we need a way to do it in a decentralized and trust-less way. But wait, we actually already have a solution for the problem of aligning different actors that have trouble communicating and agreeing on things, in a decentralized way: a blockchain. We could use a blockchain to say that this or that Monero block is finalized and no block re-org can change it.
If we go with that option, it needs to be a different blockchain, it needs to generate blocks faster than the Monero network, and it needs to be secure enough for this use case (for example, that blockchain should not itself have many deep block re-orgs).
Considering this, POW blockchains tend to have longer block times and might be just as susceptible to block re-orgs. More info in this lemmy post.

This is where Proof of Stake comes in as an option for a place to record that a given Monero block is finalized.
There are many things to consider before jumping into this, but this is the general idea.

That discussion is not about moving Monero to a Proof of Stake model with anointed super validators that can punish bad miners, and that will soon start judging and punishing naughty users too.
That is an entirely different thing and nobody is seriously considering doing that.

The PoS finality layer is just one of the options on the table to fix issues on the network. It isn't even the easiest or fastest to implement if we just want to deal with the current situation.

Another important point is that even in the scenario of a PoS finality layer, RandomX stays. This finality layer thing is not about making Monero a PoS coin, it's about using some other PoS to record things about the POW RandomX Monero as we know it currently.

All the options need to be considered and feel free to post your ideas here or on GitHub or on the Monero Research Labs chats. The worst thing that could happen is that only very few people learn and participate in those discussions and people like you and me exclude ourselves from the discussions because we don't know enough about it.

There is something that is clear though, some parts of the network are not yet completely ready for attacks by annoyed state actors. Right now the attacker does not seem like the proxy of very annoyed actors, and we have time for some adaptations. We might not have that much time during the next attacks, so we also need to chose solutions that will be useful in that scenario.

So, what do you think of using a PoS finality layer for Monero ?

Personally I think that if you directly apply these conditions for a PoS finality layer, you end up on the bright idea of using something like Ethereum or Litecoin. The Monero community does NOT want to have to rely on ETH or LTC for security. That would feel like a huge blow and a huge let-down…

But yeah, if need be, for me, this is still a perfectly acceptable temporary solution.