PoS-Only Pitfalls
📜 TL;DR:
Standard Proof-of-Stake (PoS) systems like Ethereum face two primary risks:
Weak Subjectivity, where attackers could potentially gain majority control by accumulating old PoS keys, enabling them to create alternative chains; and
Censorship, where a current majority stakeholder blocks or ignores transactions, akin to a traditional 51% attack.
🚨 Weak Subjectivity
This risk involves an attacker accumulating enough keys of old PoS miners to gain majority control at some point in the past. With this control, they could create a valid, alternative/competing version of the blockchain which would appear equally valid to a bootstrapping node attempting to sync the network for the first time, and could also be used to create seemingly valid zero-knowledge proofs of chain state that differs from the legitimate canonical chain.
While Ethereum relies on community consensus to avoid long-range reorganizations of its chain, its PoS protocol doesn’t technically prevent this type of attack.
🚫 Censorship
An attacker with current majority stake could potentially block or ignore certain transactions, exercising a form of majority control that undermines the network's decentralization and fairness.
❌ Lack of Protocol-Level Defenses
Since PoS operates entirely within its network, it lacks protocol-level defenses against the types of attacks mentioned above.
Among the vulnerabilities, the limitations are:
No External Correction Mechanism: If internal rules fail or are exploited, there's no external system to protect or correct the network.
Self-Contained Security: PoS systems handle all their security internally within the blockchain network.
By using PoP, Hemi prevents against weak subjectivity attacks because the illegitimate chain an attacker produces when attempting a long-range reorg could not be appropriately published to Bitcoin. Hemi's fork resolution algorithm prevents a reorg from occurring if the new proposed fork does not have PoP publications that are in-step with or before the current chain's publications. As a result, Hemi's consensus algorithm has strong subjectivity and reorganizing a segment of Hemi's chain which has reached Bitcoin finality would require the attacker to 51% attack Hemi and Bitconi simultaneously.
As a dual-chain L2, Hemi can also provide robust censorship resistance against attacks from majority block-consensus power actors. Any valid Hemi transaction can be published to either Bitcoin or Ethereum, and Hemi's block derivation protocol will force the inclusion of these transactions in Hemi blocks.
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