ETH and move to Casper Protocol (from PoW to PoS)

Apparently ETH’s price jumps are linked to Casper rolling out on Testnet. This is the long promised move from PoW to PoS, or the start of it.
Their implementation for PoS is quite different from Oroborus.

Here’s a good article detailing Casper and also calls out how PoS like NXT have weaknesses.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4132934-ethereums-casper-protocol-will-address-problems-proof-stake

Offhand I think Oroborus is more elegant, but having ETH move to PoS may make PoS more accepted broadly for investors, and payoff for Cardano in that respect.

3 Likes

That site requires signing in to read page 2 and on.

Sorry about that (re: registration) - it auto logs me in so I forgot it had that for non registered.

That said, here’s another summary quote that may help on the Casper topic from Blockgeeks:
"So how is Casper different from other Proof of Stake protocols?

Casper has implemented a process by which they can punish all malicious elements. This is how POS under Casper would work:

The validators stake a portion of their Ethers as stake.
After that, they will start validating the blocks. Meaning, when they discover a block which they think can be added to the chain, they will validate it by placing a bet on it.
If the block gets appended, then the validators will get a reward proportionate to their bets.
However, if a validator acts in a malicious manner and tries to do a “nothing at stake”, they will immediately be reprimanded, and all of their stake is going to get slashed.
As you can see, Casper is designed to work in a trustless system and be more Byzantine Fault Tolerant.

Anyone who acts in a malicious/Byzantine manner will get immediately punished by having their stake slashed off. This is where it differs from most other POS protocols. Malicious elements have something to lose so it is impossible for there to be nothing at stake.

This is not the only place where Casper punishes the validators.

As Hudson James and Joris Bontje note in their answers in “StackExchange,” Casper designs harsher incentives to guarantee network security, including punishing miners who go offline, unintentionally or not."

I didn’t see anything about Ouroboros monitoring network availablity for miners/validators, though it is robust to slot leaders not responding in time…but ultimately to ensure transaction speed I hope it will account for network quality (or up time) of a validator.