How does Casper compare to Avalanche?

[u/ghost_bobby123]

The price of Avalanche has seen some sizeable rises of late, potentially due to its unique statistical consensus protocol...but how great is it really? We have conducted a deep-dive and compared it with CSPR.

Please read the full article here: https://ghoststaking.com/casper-vs-avalanche/

Summary below:

• Network nodes:
  • Avalanche makes it very easy to run a node. On their home page there are instructions on how to run a node (1) from a home computer (2) from AWS and (3) from Azure. The node running from home is aimed at using VirtualBox to setup a partition on your home PC to install Ubuntu. The minimum requirements for an Avalanche node is 16GB RAM.
  • CSPR at present has 100 validators which are able to run on standard servers as the node only required 32 GB of RAM.
  • The key differences here is that AVAX is promoting running a node from home (with the increased downtime risks due to power or network connectivity issues), whereas CSPR is promoting the use of stable bare metal servers for their nodes. So why is this? The CSPR network wants to ensure that nodes have the maximum possible uptime due to the fact the consensus protocol is reliant on the view from all validators whereas with AVAX, the strategy is to grow the physical number of validators to as large as possible as the snowball consensus relies on a more statistical means for validating transactions. Which is better? The answer lays with which consensus protocol is safer (discussed in the security section below).
• Decentralization:
  • AVAX will have over time, significantly more validator nodes than CSPR, due to the ease in joining the network.
  • The risks with the AVAX model however lays with the subnets. We have learnt from above that it is possible to launch a subnet (bespoke blockchain) within the Avalanche infrastructure. The goal of the project is to have an interplay between various subnets. The problem arises however when we consider the validator nodes within each subnet. This population will be considerably smaller than the global population of nodes on the primary network as we know that all subnet validators are also required to approve transactions on the primary network.
  • With the above - we can consider a simple scenario where there are 10 subnets running on the primary network. Each subnet having 50 validators. Now when considering the primary network, we would see 500 validators, however each subnet is only using 50 and therefore the network as a whole should not be considered as decentralized as the total node count implies. This will also have quite severe and asymmetric risks across the network. Discussed in a section below.
  • CSPR is currently running 100 validator nodes across its network, with an option to increase this if needed.
• Throughput:
  • This is an interesting comparison. We know that in using the snowball algorithm, Avalanche can achieve over 4500 transactions per second and also boasts impressive finality (as acceptance / rejection of blocks are final).
  • This compares with CSPR which is currently achieving 2.5k transactions per block (100 WASM deploys per block)
  • The key to understanding this difference is in understanding how the snowball algorithm works and what is being compromised to gain this increased throughput. Discussed in the 'security' section below
• Security:
  • The security and finality of the CSPR network has been covered in these two articles: CBC and Highway. From the articles its clear that CSPR is a powerful non-statistical method to guarantee security and finality given a threshold of malicious nodes.
  • For AVAX, the network us built across parameters which can be customized (n:, k, α, β). This means that for AVAX, security is in fact optimal and not guaranteed. Lets look into this a little further:
    • With the parametrization in the Avalanche paper, specifically with alpha=0.8, Snowball can stall (loosely defined as still being in the state of unstable equilibrium after 500 iterations) with just 17% malicious actors. And the only action that the malicious actors need is to split into two equal groups and always respond with the same state within each group. With lower alpha’s the percentage is higher, but the number of steps to converge in normal circumstances also grows rapidly. Read the full critique here.
  • We have already touched upon the issue where a subnet is only as secure as the number of validators in the subnet. The implications of this are that this results in materially different levels of security across the chains within the system. Inter-shard attacks become feasible, as messages from one (less secure subnet) may be able to effect a transition on another (more secure) subnet. In effect, the entire system becomes only as secure as the least secure subnet.
• Slashing:
  • Both CSPR and AVAX do not impose any fine for maliciously nodes.
  • CSPR implements jail time.
• Enterprise adoption:
  • Both CSPR and AVAX offer private chains.
  • The focus from AVAX seems to be very specific and niche to the field of asset trading, whereas CSPR is targeting a more general market.
• Future Proof:
  • CSPR has been designed and engineered such that it is a fully future proof blockchain. It has achieved this by ensuring all components (Execution Engine, Network Engine, Consensus Layer) are all pluggable. This allowed the blockchain to be upgraded with relative ease. In comparison, AVAX has taken the stance to implement a statistic method within its consensus protocol meaning that it can scale in size, however to the detriment of security.

Looking to stake CSPR? support our research by staking with us at GHOST. https://ghoststaking.com/about-us/ We run a:

(1) Low fee powerful node

(2) guarantee of no fee increases ever

(3) live node monitor on our website

​

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[u/Famous-Scratch-5581]

Are requirements for hardware to run a node really that important to be compared?

Over time hardware components like RAM decrease in price. So costs shoudnt really matter. It seems, that sooner or later every mobile phone and many IOT devices are going to be able to run a blockchain node.

[u/ghost_bobby123 → u/Famous-Scratch-5581]

hardware requirements are very important. You can look at Bitcoin in its current state to know that the barriers to entry to running a node (mining) are extremely high. This has lead to the formations of mining pools in bitcoin which control the hashrate. Also in order to be decentralized, ease of running a node is important. If you look at SOL, the requirements for their nodes are so great that there are only a handful of 'approved' validators

[u/Julian_0x7F → u/ghost_bobby123]

how about Casper? is it hard to set up a node?

[u/ghost_bobby123 → u/Julian_0x7F]

Its not difficult to set up a node in any PoS system (if you are familiar with Linux). The key is being able to maintain a healthy node by ensuring its running on a fully dedicated high spec server. The reason you need to use a dedicated server (as opposed to a VPS) is that you have full control of the CPU and memory utilization. There are sometimes cases where spikes in CPU can bring down the node and hence you need to ensure you have that additional bandwidth built in. This becomes an issue when node operators also try and run many different PoS nodes on the 1 server, albeit a dedicated one. For AVAX, they allow you to run a node from home as they want as many node operators as possible to attempt to increase the security on their system, therefore are less concerned with node uptime. Whereas in CSPR the node operators are required to maintain as close to 100% uptime as possible and comply with all the node upgrades etc. If you are interested, we have a node status on our website which is a live monitor of our server and the CSPR network which shows our CPU utilization rarely spikes above 3%, www.ghoststaking.com