At that point, there are two blockchains, one from block K1 and another from block K2. In a 51% attack, an attacker A sends a transaction from A to B, waits for the transaction to be confirmed in block K1 (with parent K), collects a product from B, and then immediately creates another block K2 on top of K – with a transaction sending the same bitcoins but this time from A to A. The meaning of the statement becomes clear when we attempt to analyze what exactly is going on in the event of an attempted 51% attack, the situation that any kind of proof-of-work like mechanism is intended to prevent. However, proof of stake, as implemented in nearly every currency so far, has one fundamental flaw: as one prominent Bitcoin developer put it, “there’s nothing at stake”. Once again, proof of stake, if it can be made to work, is essentially a perfect solution. Memory-hard mining algorithms like Scrypt and now Dagger mitigate this to a large extent, but even still not perfectly. With proof of work, mining has been essentially dominated by specialized hardware (“application-specific integrated circuits” / ASICs), and there is a large risk that a single large player such as Intel or a major bank will take over and de-facto monopolize the market. Second, there are centralization concerns. First of all, proof of stake is much more environmentally friendly while proof of work requires miners to effectively burn computational power on useless calculations to secure the network, proof of stake effectively simulates the burning, so no real-world energy or resources are ever actually wasted. And for good reason proof of stake has a number of advantages over proof of work as a mining method. The first proof-of-stake based coin, PPCoin, was releasd by Sunny King in 2012, and has consistently remained among the top five alternative currencies by monetary base since then. Proof of stake mining has for a long time been a large area of interest to the cryptocurrency community. Special thanks to tacotime for some inspiration, and for Jack Walker for improvement suggestions. Slasher may also benefit other cryptocurrencies that wish to exist independently of Ethereum. Rather, Slasher is a useful construct to have in our war chest in case proof of stake mining becomes substantially more popular or a compelling reason is provided to switch. The purpose of this post is not to say that Ethereum will be using Slasher in place of Dagger as its main mining function.
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