Cardano [ADA]’s Charles versus Ethereum [ETH]’s Vitalik: Rebuttal continues

Cardano [ADA]’s Charles versus Ethereum [ETH]’s Vitalik: Rebuttal continues

Charles Hoskinson of Cardano and Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum have come face to face in yet another rebuttal session. The altercation between the two started last month when Buterin took to Reddit to question the competency of Cardano’s Ouroboros protocol.

On 13th August, Buterin responded to Hoskinson’s previously posted rebuttal, which stated:

“Answering this is easy and also showcases the importance of having concrete statements about protocols and proofs of their properties.”

Buterin also cited points in reference to theorem 1 of Ouroboros Genesis paper and theorem 9 of Ouroboros Praos and said:

“Right, I think I see. So 1/f is the “average block time” (roughly), Delta is the network latency, so when Delta >= 1/f * ln(2) (ie. network latency exceeds block time multiplied by >= 0.693), (1-f)Delta <= 1/2, so you can’t prove any level of security at all.”

In response to the above, Hoskinson replied by saying that the general idea behind the above is correct [modulo exact constants] and is a “well-known property of Nakamoto consensus.”

Furthermore, considering the above point, Buterin had also said that a security assumption was being made. He stated:

“To me, that feels like you are making a security assumption that Delta < 1/f * ln(2) in order to get any guaranteed safety/liveness at all, and so it would be most accurate to call the algorithm synchronous. Or is there something I’m still missing here?”

In rebuttal, Hoskinson posted a response comparing Ouroboros to Dolev-Strong consensus protocol as an example. He said:

“Synchronous protocols are typified by a round-based structure, an explicit hard-coded upper bound on network delay and protocol logic that handles timeouts. Take the Dolev-Strong consensus protocol as an example. Such a protocol cannot tolerate that any single honest player suddenly experiences network delays beyond the hard-coded bound.”

The Cardano’s Ouroboros protocol is handled to tolerate delays in contrast to the Dolev-Strong consensus protocol, according to Hoskinson. He also claimed that it is very similar to Nakamoto consensus. He explains:

“In contrast, Ouroboros can tolerate an arbitrary percentage of nodes to experience large delays — the protocol will still continue to operate without disruption (albeit slower). This is achieved by specifying a level of silence, w.r.t. an operational upper bound on network delay.”

Charles went on to further explain how such resilience is achieved in the Ouroboros protocol, comparing it with the Byzantine Fault tolerance [BFT] protocol which requires more than 2/3 of honest participation. He further assumes a situation where 80% of the nodes start experiencing huge delays.

Hoskinson explained that the BFT protocol will get stuck and not make progress indefinitely until messages start to get delivered in the above situation. Ouroboros Genesis, on the other hand, will slow down its chain growth but continue without any issue relying just on the honest majority of the stake from the remaining parties, Hoskinson claimed.

Conclusively Hoskinson stated that both Ouroboros and Nakamoto consensus are capable of recalibrating their current estimate on silence/difficulty, in order to speed up processing back to normal. In turn, allowing the network to recover without considerably affecting transaction processing in the long run.

Sebastian a Twitter user commented in response to the ongoing altercation:

“By the time Ethereum deploys any of the updates planned Cardano will be way ahead.”

Twitterati, Byron Froneman tweeted:

“@VitalikButerin I think it’s safe to say Hoskinson and Ouroborus have clearly won this battle. Casper isn’t up to scratch buddy, but keep trying.”

Another Twitter user Christian Rendel said:

“I’m glad to see that the discussion evolved to a healthy exchange of ideas. After all, you are all pursuing the same goal and the success of both projects is in benefit of a common vision.”

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