Seeing the news that TikTok has just settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for $400 million, the trigger was its alleged improper collection of minors’ information—an amount so large that it took a moment to really sink in. Privacy issues are once again pushed to the forefront, and my mind naturally went to Dusk. @Dusk It’s been hovering in my watchlist—pretty restrained in its approach. It doesn’t throw around big sky-high slogans; instead, it focuses on regulated financial scenarios: how to truly keep transactions and contracts confidential when they need to be, while also minimizing direct conflicts with compliance requirements. After dinner, I flipped through the “penalties” section of the Dusk whitepaper as a quick read, and I felt a bit stifled inside. $DUSK $BTC
I originally assumed PoS discipline was basically the same across the board—when someone makes a mistake, you slash their stake, and the heavier the slash, the more obedient they become. But Dusk breaks fault into two tiers: light and severe. The light one is like the case of a candidate block that should have been broadcasted but didn’t show up—under soft constraints. No principal gets burned; it’s just temporarily removed from the right to participate, and some active stake is moved into a locked state. The money is still there, but your weight in the lottery drops. The truly malicious ones—like broadcasting an invalid block, casting contradictory votes in the same round, or including two conflicting candidate blocks in the same iteration—are punished by directly destroying the corresponding proportion of stake according to how severe the behavior is. #dusk
This tiering is pretty restrained. Negligence leaves room for correction; only malicious behavior pays the real cost. That matches its overall tone of “privacy must be usable, compliance must be actionable.” The system doesn’t need to use the heaviest hammer to hit every nail. But if someone keeps skirting the edge of soft constraints for a long time, whether it’s still worthwhile for the network—since the details about the incentives weren’t laid out clearly, I also haven’t fully calculated it myself—remains to be seen. This kind of distinction is at least closer to how things might be handled in reality than a one-size-fits-all approach. As for whether soft “fishing” can be naturally filtered out, we’ll have to observe more. Have you seen a chain that does something like tiered penalties? Drop the name in the comments.
I originally assumed PoS discipline was basically the same across the board—when someone makes a mistake, you slash their stake, and the heavier the slash, the more obedient they become. But Dusk breaks fault into two tiers: light and severe. The light one is like the case of a candidate block that should have been broadcasted but didn’t show up—under soft constraints. No principal gets burned; it’s just temporarily removed from the right to participate, and some active stake is moved into a locked state. The money is still there, but your weight in the lottery drops. The truly malicious ones—like broadcasting an invalid block, casting contradictory votes in the same round, or including two conflicting candidate blocks in the same iteration—are punished by directly destroying the corresponding proportion of stake according to how severe the behavior is. #dusk
This tiering is pretty restrained. Negligence leaves room for correction; only malicious behavior pays the real cost. That matches its overall tone of “privacy must be usable, compliance must be actionable.” The system doesn’t need to use the heaviest hammer to hit every nail. But if someone keeps skirting the edge of soft constraints for a long time, whether it’s still worthwhile for the network—since the details about the incentives weren’t laid out clearly, I also haven’t fully calculated it myself—remains to be seen. This kind of distinction is at least closer to how things might be handled in reality than a one-size-fits-all approach. As for whether soft “fishing” can be naturally filtered out, we’ll have to observe more. Have you seen a chain that does something like tiered penalties? Drop the name in the comments.
